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 comp...