The Yellow Phone Booths

Picture a small town in India in the early 1990s. On a busy corner, between a tea stall and a cloth shop, there is a narrow booth with a glass door and a bright yellow sign. Painted on the sign are three short words: STD, ISD, PCO.

Inside sits a telephone and a little meter that counts the cost of each call. Outside, a young man waits his turn to ring his mother in a village two hundred kilometres away. Behind him, a trader waits to call a supplier in another city.

A few years earlier, neither of them could have made that call at all.

A country without phones

At the start of the 1980s, India had only a couple of million telephones for a population of around seven hundred million people. Most of them were in a few big cities. In much of the countryside there was no telephone for miles.

Getting a connection could take years. Families put their names on waiting lists and waited. When a line did arrive, it often went dead. Many people thought of the telephone as something for the rich, not something India needed when it had so many other problems to solve.

One man thought this was exactly backwards.

The carpenter's son

Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda, known to the world as Sam, was born in 1942 in Titlagarh, a small town in Odisha. His family were Gujarati, and his father was a carpenter. The house had no electricity and no telephone.

He studied physics at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, and in 1964 he went to the United States to study electrical engineering in Chicago. He stayed, and he became an inventor. He worked on the digital switches that connect telephone calls, took out many patents, and started his own company, which he sold for a large sum.

By his late thirties he was wealthy and settled in America. But, as he tells it in his memoir, a visit to Delhi around 1980 changed everything. He tried to telephone his wife and family in Chicago from his hotel, and he could not get through. It made him ask what the telephone could do for India, and why so few Indians had one.

Building it at home

Pitroda believed that India should not simply buy expensive equipment from abroad. It should design its own, built for Indian conditions: heat, dust, unsteady electricity and small towns far from any repair shop.

He took his ideas to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and later worked closely with her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi. In 1984 the government set up the Centre for Development of Telematics, known as C-DOT, to build Indian telephone exchanges. Pitroda led it. He is widely reported to have taken a salary of just one rupee a year.

He gathered a team of young Indian engineers, many of them fresh from college, and gave them a deadline and a fixed budget. They worked long hours in borrowed offices. Within a few years they had designed small digital exchanges that could run in a village without air-conditioning, and larger ones for towns and cities. The designs were then made by Indian manufacturers and spread across the country.

The yellow sign

Exchanges alone were not enough. Most families still could not afford a phone of their own.

So the idea of the public call office, or PCO, was opened up. Instead of a government counter, anyone with a little shop space could apply to run a telephone booth, with a meter on the phone. Callers paid only for the calls they made. STD meant long-distance calls within India, and ISD meant calls abroad.

Many of the first booths were given to people who needed the work: young people without jobs and people with disabilities. The booths spread through the late 1980s and 1990s, along highways, in market squares, at railway stations and in small towns, until there were hundreds of thousands of them. The yellow sign became part of the Indian street.

For millions of families, the booth was their first telephone. A soldier's wife could hear his voice. A student far from home could ring on results day. A farmer could ask the price of his crop in the town market before he loaded his cart.

After the booths

Pitroda went on to advise Rajiv Gandhi on a set of national missions for drinking water, literacy, immunisation and telecommunications, and to lead the government's Telecom Commission. Years later he chaired India's National Knowledge Commission.

Today the yellow booths have almost disappeared. Most Indians now carry a phone in their pocket, and many young people have never seen a PCO.

But the booths did their work. They taught a country of villages that the telephone belonged to everyone, and they helped build the network on which the mobile age arrived.

Want to read more?

Sam Pitroda's memoir Dreaming Big tells his own story, from Titlagarh to Chicago and back to Delhi. The website of C-DOT, which still works on Indian telecom technology, describes its history.