‘Creating India’s digital infra is exciting’

““I am excited about the opportunity to make a contribution to laying India’s next-generation digital infrastructure,” says Aruna Sundararajan, who will soon take over as administrator of the Universal Service Obligation Fund. The fund has been tasked with expanding the telecom penetration in the countryside.

One of her tasks as administrator will be to oversee the implementation of the ₹25,000-crore Bharat Broadband scheme. “Perhaps this will be my biggest challenge in my career,” Sundararajan, currently managing director of the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation and additional chief secretary in the Kerala Government, told BusinessLine.

Sundararajan, as a Kerala cadre IAS officer, leaves with the satisfaction that a number of innovative projects she had conceived and implemented have come to fruition. Just over the weekend, as MD of the industrial corporation, she organised the Young Entrepreneurs Summit, the first of its kind in the country, to encourage young people to set up their own businesses.

Her innovative ideas, un-bureaucratic approach and businesslike attitude made Forbes India magazine to call her ‘an IAS officer who thinks like a businesswoman’. She had conceived and implemented the ‘Akshaya’ mass e-literacy programme which helped the Malappuram district become the first e-literate district in the country.

The region later become a model for a national programme. Her initiatives as IT secretary contributed to the growth of e-governance in the State.

The ‘Friends’ network, where people can pay all utility bills as well as make a large number of payments to government organisations, reduced the tedious task of lining up outside Government offices.

Her initiative in granting right of way to companies Reliance and Tatas to set up mobile towers and other infrastructure helped Kerala become a topper in mobile telephony and internet access.

As the head of the Kudumbashree project, which is now considered an international model for women’s empowerment, she steered the female working class labour force from conventional work habits to projects like She Taxi, organic farming and green technology.

“But my work at Akshaya was the most satisfying, as it had a lot of impact on the masses,” she recalls. It was a grassroots-level PPP model where the Government provided internet connectivity while the cost of setting up computers and the kiosk was met by small entrepreneurs. “Over 600 Akshaya kiosks, which trained ordinary village people in using desktop computers more than a decade ago were set up in the Malappuram district. There was at least one e-literate person in every family and every village had an e-training centre.”

Sundararajan, born at Palakkad in Kerala to Tamil-speaking parents, hopes her long experience in Kerala as IT Secretary and her stint as the CEO of the National Common Service Centre in Delhi would be a great asset in her new role as administrator of the USO Fund.

(The Telegraph Act defines Universal Service Obligation as ‘access to service to people in rural and remote areas at affordable and reasonable prices.’)

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