Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan
How one bureaucrat's improvisations built Cyberabad, and why he now wants to do it all again in the villages
HYDERABAD
IN 1990 a government official arrived in Hyderabad with a freshly signed posting, a four-floor lease and very little else. The building he had leased, a new block called Maitrivanam in the suburb of Ameerpet, had no tenants. The state he had moved to had no software-exporting firms. The city had no internet connection of any kind. J.A. Chowdary, then a regional director for India's Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) scheme, had arrived from Bengaluru, where he had spent the previous five years wiring that city's young software industry to the rest of the world via a satellite dish, beamed in the earliest days through a relay in Colombo. He assumed, not unreasonably, that Hyderabad would need the same thing. It did not yet need anything, having no software industry to connect.
That this chicken-and-egg problem—no companies because no internet, no case for internet because no companies—eventually produced a metropolis nicknamed Cyberabad, with a skyline anchored by the glass towers of HITEC City and a roll-call of resident multinationals that includes Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook, is one of those Indian success stories that looks, with three decades of hindsight, faintly inevitable. It was nothing of the sort. Mr Chowdary's own account of the period, given recently in a lengthy Telugu-language television interview, reads less like a strategy document than a memoir of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare, conducted mostly against his own government.
A licence to fail
The Software Technology Parks scheme itself was a peculiarly Indian piece of engineering: a regulatory carve-out that gave participating firms duty-free imports, statutory clearances and shared infrastructure, on the sole condition that they exported 100% of what they produced. It was a sensible enough idea for Bengaluru, which already had software firms queuing up to export. It was a considerably less sensible one for a city that, as Mr Chowdary discovered after several quiet months in his half-empty Ameerpet building, had no software firms at all—exporting or otherwise. Pressure soon arrived from his head office in Delhi, irritated that four floors of rented space were generating rent but no tenants, and suggesting he hand the lease back.
Mr Chowdary instead set about diagnosing the problem properly, in the manner of a man who has decided that admitting defeat will be more administratively troublesome than solving it. Eligible exporters, he reasoned, were not coming because Hyderabad offered them nothing Bengaluru did not already have, and one crucial thing it lacked altogether: a working data link to the outside world. Without internet connectivity, an export-oriented software company might as well set up in a field. The fix, obviously enough to him, was the same satellite earth station that had already worked in Bengaluru. The cost, at roughly ₹80m ($2.6m at the exchange rates of the day), was not obvious to anyone holding the purse strings.
A finance-ministry official rejected the proposal outright, reasoning, on paper, that a state with no IT industry had no business buying expensive satellite infrastructure for one that did not exist. It was, on narrow accounting logic, a defensible position; it was also exactly the kind of circular reasoning Mr Chowdary had spent the previous several months trying to break. Unable to move his own department, he did what bureaucrats are not supposed to do and went around it, taking his case directly to the Andhra Pradesh state government. There he found a more receptive audience in the industries secretary, J. Harinarayana, who grasped the commercial logic immediately and within weeks had issued an interest-free loan and a government order pledging state support for the project—a piece of paper that let Mr Chowdary go over his own ministry's head and secure central-government clearance in Delhi soon after. Mr Chowdary, with the candour of a man long past needing to be diplomatic about it, credits the state's chief minister at the time, Nedurumalli Janardhana Reddy, with having unwittingly approved the single decision that made the rest of Hyderabad's IT story possible—not because the chief minister understood software, by Mr Chowdary's account, but because his industries secretary did, and was believed.
Farmers, sticks and a flight path
Land was the next obstacle, and a more literal one. Ten acres were allotted in Madhapur for the earth station—the same plot on which Cyber Towers now stands—but when Mr Chowdary's team arrived to fence it off, local farmers met them with sticks, insisting, reasonably, that they were still cultivating the land. A district collector and a police escort eventually cleared the way, with alternative land found for the farmers; Mr Chowdary calls the episode, only half-jokingly, the true first footstep of HITEC City's construction.
Even with land secured and the satellite station sanctioned, a further obstacle appeared from an unexpected quarter: aviation authorities at Begumpet, then Hyderabad's main airport, blocked a planned transmission tower near Madhapur on the grounds that it lay under the flight path and could interfere with landings. The fix, as Mr Chowdary tells it, involved less paperwork than topography. He spent several afternoons touring Hyderabad's hills with a pair of binoculars and a government car, looking for any building with an unobstructed line of sight back to the earth station. Secunderabad's hills offered nothing; Banjara Hills offered nothing. A government training institute in Jubilee Hills, perched usefully above the surrounding skyline, finally did. He secured an adjoining acre and a half of land within weeks, built a tower there, and beamed a signal across the city into the empty floors of Maitrivanam. It worked. Hyderabad had its internet connection.
The accidental incubator
What happened next at Maitrivanam is, in Mr Chowdary's telling, the part of the story that actually built the city. Companies arrived within months—not the domestic software shops that had filled Hyderabad's earlier, internet-less attempts at an IT park, but firms founded by Indians returning from America, who recognised the combination of working connectivity, cheap and predictable rent (around ₹4 a square foot, maintenance included) and an available pool of engineers as something worth betting a company on. Sriven Computers, DataTree, SmartPro and Crosscheck Technologies were among the early tenants; most of their founders were non-resident Indians rather than locals, with one notable exception in B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, who built what became Cyient. Several of the building's tenants went on to list on NASDAQ or the Bombay Stock Exchange, or to be acquired outright by larger American and European firms.
Mr Chowdary describes Maitrivanam, without obvious modesty but with some justification, as India's first functioning technology incubator—a forerunner, conceptually, of institutions such as T-Hub that Hyderabad built decades later on purpose. A second connectivity bottleneck soon appeared in Tarnaka, where prospective tenants wanted office space but had no line of sight to the original earth station; Mr Chowdary's engineers solved it with a relay tower placed, with the university's permission, on the roof of an Osmania University library, bouncing the signal onward. Among the firms this brought in was Sonics Technologies, founded by Sai and Veena Gundavalli, a husband-and-wife pair of former Cisco engineers whom Mr Chowdary recalls personally talking into quitting secure corporate jobs to start a company of their own—an act of unsolicited career advice that, by his account, worked out rather well for everyone involved.
By his own reckoning, this period of the late 1980s and early 1990s—building satellite links, fencing disputed land, scanning hilltops for line of sight—amounted to little more than planting seeds whose scale he did not fully anticipate. Hyderabad's subsequent emergence as a serious rival to Bengaluru, its "Vision 2020" blueprint for technology-led development, and its eventual roster of resident multinationals all followed from infrastructure decisions made, in essence, by one official with a satellite proposal nobody else wanted to fund.
An ordinary second act, and a less ordinary third one
None of this made Mr Chowdary a household name beyond India's software circles, where careers like his—technocrat builds infrastructure, technocrat becomes corporate executive, technocrat becomes startup mentor—are common enough to be a genre. He went on to serve as managing director of NVIDIA's Indian operations and to mentor a clutch of technology and education startups, the standard second act for a successful builder of other people's industries.
The third act arrived less conventionally, by way of a diagnosis nobody had asked for. A routine test—taken, he says, without any symptoms prompting it—turned up stage-three prostate cancer. Surgery removed the prostate; a PET scan six months later found the cancer had returned and was spreading. Doctors recommended proton-beam radiation over the more commonly available photon therapy, citing fewer side-effects in the pelvic region, but proton therapy did not then exist in India. A personal contact at Apollo Cancer Hospital in Chennai, which had recently imported the equipment, made treatment there possible without a trip abroad. His radiation oncologist, by Mr Chowdary's account, told him afterwards that some of his sickest patients had recovered through what the doctor called sheer force of mindset, and suggested Mr Chowdary's own apparent recovery might owe something to the same effect. Whatever the precise medical mechanism, Mr Chowdary now describes himself as cancer-free, and treats the illness as the moment that reset his priorities: an unplanned "extra innings," in his words, to be spent on something more durable than another funding round.
From satellites to moringa leaves
What he chose to spend it on is JUNICORN, a programme—now operating under the banner of ISF JUNICORN—that recruits teenagers from rural India and asks them to solve a problem visible from their own front door, rather than build whatever happens to be fashionable in venture-capital circles that year. The model owes something to two encounters Mr Chowdary cites directly: a village "No Drugs" campaign in Battalapalli, in Anantapur district, that alerted him to how quickly addiction was spreading among rural youth with unsupervised internet access, and a still more unlikely sight in a remote Odisha village called Soro, where schoolchildren with no engineering background had built and launched a working micro-satellite using nothing but YouTube tutorials and occasional remote mentoring from a visiting non-resident Indian. If teenagers with no formal training could do that from a village with limited internet access, Mr Chowdary reasoned, the constraint on rural entrepreneurship was never ability; it was exposure, mentorship and capital—precisely the three things his earlier career had spent decades supplying to Hyderabad's software firms.
The programme's two best-known graduates illustrate the formula reasonably well. A schoolboy from a village near Gannavaram, whose grandfather worked as a mason, identified indiscriminate plastic dumping as a problem he could see around his own school, worked out through online research a safe temperature at which plastic waste could be compressed without releasing toxic fumes, encased the compressed material in brick-shaped moulds, had the resulting bricks tested for strength and insulation at a local engineering college, and presented the idea—plastic brick in hand—to a room of American investors at a JUNICORN cohort event in Austin, Texas, where he received a standing ovation and a manufacturing partnership from a Bengaluru construction entrepreneur. A schoolgirl from the same school, troubled by the cost and hygiene risks of commercial sanitary pads in her largely poor village, experimented with making a low-cost alternative from moringa (drumstick) leaves, tested it on herself, then taught the method to women across neighbouring villages before flying to the same Austin event, securing roughly $50,000 in funding and several mentors of her own.
Each, in Mr Chowdary's telling, validates a three-part formula he repeats to every cohort: find a good mentor, find some money, find a market—precisely the package Maitrivanam's tenants once needed and that he, more or less by accident, had once known how to supply.
The pitch, and the case behind it
The programme's ambitions have grown briskly since its first cohort, which drew applicants from four states—Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha—to a second cohort now run across ten, with Mr Chowdary hoping to bring at least 70 rural participants to the next international showcase, planned for Dubai, with further events pencilled in for South Korea, California and Uganda. His ask of volunteers is correspondingly modest: one hour a week, mostly spent identifying promising teenagers in their own communities and connecting them to JUNICORN's network, rather than donating money or quitting jobs.
The argument underneath the ask is less modest. Roughly 65% of Indians, Mr Chowdary points out, still live in rural areas that have received a fraction of the policy attention lavished on the cities his earlier career helped build. Automation, in his reading, is now shrinking the pool of jobs available even to the well-credentialled, at the same time as India's education system continues to produce graduates for occupations—domain-specific engineering trades among them—that fewer employers still want. The country, he argues, needs creators of jobs considerably more than it needs additional seekers of them, and the countryside, stocked with unsolved problems and idle ambition in roughly equal measure, is where he expects to find the next generation of creators. He points, as a cautionary counter-example, to recent unrest among unemployed young people in Bangladesh and Nepal, and suggests India's own rural-urban imbalance—wealth concentrated in cities such as Hyderabad alongside continued neglect of the villages around them—risks the same outcome if left to widen unaddressed.
A modest base, on a familiar pattern
It is a long way from satellite earth stations to moringa-leaf sanitary pads, and sceptics of Mr Chowdary's second crusade might reasonably note that one retired technocrat's conviction, however sincerely held, is not industrial policy: JUNICORN today consists of a few hundred teenagers, a roster of volunteer mentors and a handful of viral pitch-deck successes, a rounding error against a rural population of nearly a billion. But precisely the same could once have been said, with greater justification, of four empty floors in a half-built office block in Ameerpet, leased by a man with a satellite proposal nobody in Delhi wanted to fund. Mr Chowdary has built one improbable, large thing from nothing before. He appears to be betting what remains of his career on the proposition that he can do it again—this time from villages rather than from cities, and with moringa leaves rather than satellite dishes as the unglamorous, overlooked piece of infrastructure that, in his telling, made all the difference.
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