Connecting With India

It took very little persuasion for Rajan S. Mathews, the new director-general of COAI, to accept the job offer and the chance to return to India. The combination of being back in India with the chance to work in the fastest growing mobile market in the world was irresistible.

"It's a great opportunity to contribute to a market that is looked up to by developing countries. We've just had an Ethiopian delegation here to look at our experience because we offer a closer paradigm on operating issues, regulatory matters and rural-urban issues than the developed world," he says.

He finds all the changes exhilarating –­ the arrival of 3G, new entrants coming in, the rollout of broadband in a truly comprehensive way, and promoting the expansion of services in rural India where basic issues such as what documents subscribers need to provide to satisfy security concerns when they do not have electricity connections or driving licences still need sorting out.

At COAI, one of his responsibilities is to integrate the new entrants (there are about four) as they will have different needs from the more mature players. Externally, he would like to improve the image of the industry. "Look at IT and the way people clap whenever an IT company announces its earnings. But when a telecom company announces its earnings, there is hardly any reaction –­ we are seen as the fat cats with high revenue growth. That's the perception. The industry generates many more jobs, supports more infrastructure, makes more investments than the IT industry and contributes more to the overall economy. And, of course, there would be no IT industry without the telecom industry providing the required infrastructure," he says.

Mathews has spent his entire working life in the US, having moved there after graduating from Sacred Heart College in Kerala. This is the second time he has come to work in India; the first time was during 1996-99, when he was based at the Pune headquarters of Birla AT&T. "That was a particularly challenging time when TRAI had just started up and DoT was the policymaker, operator and regulator, all rolled into one, and the process of getting spectrum clearance for cell sites could take up to a year," he recalls.

 Before coming to Delhi to take up the COAI post, he was based in New Jersey as CFO and COO (US operations) at Telargo, Inc., a joint venture of NTT DOCOMO, Japan's largest telecom company, and Ultra, a European high-tech company.

At Telargo, then a start-up entity, he designed and implemented all the financial, accounting, HR and administrative systems and processes, and was responsible for all external and internal reporting, accounting, taxes, etc. He set up and rolled out operations in the US, Europe and Southeast Asia, and provided strategic analysis and direction in areas such as pricing, distribution and products.

This job profile may sound daunting but Mathews had earlier taken on a much more intimidating challenge in Afghanistan, which called upon not just his skills but a lot of personal courage. After 9/11, the US government was anxious to build communications in Afghanistan. For this purpose, the TSI/Afghan Wireless Communications Company was set up.

Mathews was asked to head the operation owing to his previous experience in India and his extensive experience of rolling out networks. Leaving his family behind, he worked in Kabul between 2003 and 2005 in the most difficult circumstances imaginable, trying to build a network in a country devastated by 30 years of war.

But he saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to make a real contribution to the development of a country. One of the greatest moments of his time in Kabul was seeing a mother or brother, who hitherto had had to walk for five days to call their loved ones abroad, holding a mobile to their ear and smiling with joy at being connected. "The look on their faces, I will never forget it," he says.

But it took a long time to reach the point where mobile phones were working and connecting people. War had pushed Kabul and the surrounding countryside back several centuries. With large parts of the city having no electricity, the TSI/Afghan Wireless Communications Company, with its huge generators, turned out to be the biggest electricity generator in Kabul.

His team had to put up towers in terrain dotted with landmines. Few of the big international cellular equipment companies were prepared to export their equipment to such a dangerous and unstable city and, in any case, most of them had no office or teams in Kabul. Nor were banks willing to finance such an enterprise.

The men who worked with him were like a mini-UN with umpteen different nationalities and it was Mathews' job to mould them into a cohesive force, both among themselves and with the local Afghan workers. These local workers barely had any skills or education. In terms of security, the government was semi-existent in Kabul and almost nonexistent outside the capital.

On one occasion, Mathews and his team had to build a road up a mountain in order to reach the top and install a cell site. One day, as they were about to reach the top, dusk fell and in the fading light, they saw a group of bearded, turbaned and armed men in traditional clothes coming up the mountain towards them.

Mathews, whose big booming laugh is infectious, laughs when he recalls how he felt. "It was unnerving. One wrong word and we could have been shot on the spot. The men were representatives of the local warlords and wanted to know what we were doing. The Afghan with us was a former mujahideen who explained that we were trying to establish a network. They believed him and started going back down the mountain," he says.

Despite the hardships, the company rolled out the network to 17 cities and built a microwave backbone. As an Indian, he enjoyed much affection from the Afghans who have always treated India as a friend and are Bollywood addicts. "I got into a taxi one day and the driver asked me my nationality. When I told him mine, he cried, `For you, sir, this is a free taxi ride!'"

Mathews was able to create a motivated, focused and a high performing team that delivered on a very challenging business plan. In the process, he established the company as one of the premier communications brands in the country, which commanded a premium price for its services with annual revenues of approximately $40 million.

Prior to Afghanistan, from 2000 to 2003, Mathews had been CFO and COO of European operations with Call Sciences, a private equity fund company of the Soros/ Chatterjee Group and a leading provider of software and systems for the advanced unified communications industry.

Over the course of his career, Mathews has gained extensive experience of organisational leadership and change management, mergers, acquisitions, turnarounds and spin-offs, financial operations and controllership, sales and marketing, strategic planning, forecasting and budgeting, business development, human resources, equity, debt and IPOs.

He has even had a stint at Tristar Columbia, the first new Hollywood film studio to be set up in 50 years, the product of HBO, CBS and Columbia Pictures merging to provide content for the nascent cable industry in the early 1980s.

He had been working with PricewaterhouseCoopers when his manager left the company to join Tristar Columbia.Once there, he asked Mathews to join him. "It was great fun. I'd run into Paul Newman, Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman in the lift. Film premieres were always glamorous affairs."

Born in Mavelikara in Kerala, his father was in the Indian Navy. Not wishing to disrupt his education, Mathews' father put him into Baldwin Boys' High School, a boarding school in Bangalore, at the tender age of four. This was, he says (again with a big laugh), rather too young an age for a boy to be separated from his family, but he nevertheless enjoyed his time there, made lifelong friends, interacted with students from all over India, and enjoyed the idyllically beautiful city that Bangalore used to be then.

"The experience of boarding school makes you self-reliant because you don't have the support of your family; it makes you mature quicker, think on your own and be independent," he says.

After studying economics at Sacred Heart College in Ernakulam, he left for the US at the urging of an aunt based there, who thought that if he did his graduate studies in America, he would be able to enjoy better career opportunities than in India.

While he was studying –­ doing his MBA and an MA at Rutgers University –­ he met his wife Grace, also from Kerala, at their local church in New Jersey. Now that their two daughters are grown up and working in the US, he and Grace are looking forward to reconnecting with a country they both loved but left when they were very young.

He will have to travel extensively for COAI and hopes to travel for leisure too, in particular to see the beautiful, picturesque Northeast and the Himalayas. First, though, they have to find a home.He is shocked at real estate prices in Delhi. "When I was here in 1996, my counterpart at Lucent hit the headlines for renting a house for one lakh a month. Now that's nothing."

Mathews has always been active in the church and says his religion is a very important part of his life and thinking. He is actively involved with teaching the Bible, running Sunday School and working with Christian youths.

As the son of a navy man, he learnt sailing as a young boy and has kept it up as a hobby. But he prefers to rent a yacht rather than to buy one. "You know what they say about yachts; they are black holes to throw your money into!"

Working with NGOs has also been a consistent feature of his life. When he was in Pune, he and friends worked with a local group helping ragpickers with homes, free meals and education for their children. "This time too, I hope to be able to give something back. One has enjoyed so many benefits from this great country that it would be sad if one were not able to help those who haven't been so lucky."