Dayanidhi Maran

Dayanidhi Maran is another Union Minister I admire ... He is the son of the late Murasoli Maran and grand-nephew of M.Karunanidhi. Before his entry into politics, he ran SCV, a popular cable channel in Tamil Nadu. Of course, his brother Kalanidhi runs SUN TV.

He is the MP for Chennai Central, the smallest of the three constituencies in Chennai. There has been a lot of press about his having a Harvard education .. However, in reality, he is a graduate of Loyola College, Chennai. He has however done a three month course at Harvard.

He is the Union Minister for Communications currently ... And this is his well-thought out 8 Point Agenda ...

• Higher PC penetration
• Broadband for everyone
• e-governance all over
• NIXI - An Internet Exchange
• Indian domain names
• Migration to IPv6
• Security of networks
• Vernacular Language computing

Two things related to him caught my eye ...

He has succeeded (along with arch-nemesis J.Jayalalitha) in convincing Nokia to set up a huge manufacturing facility in India ... $150 Million in investment, 7200 jobs, built-up capacity to produce 24 Million handsets ... This is a big coup for India as we went head to head with China on this one.

In addition, in a recent interview he talked about "One India" - He said that very soon telecom subscribers in India would soon have uniform rates across the country - Essentially doing away with the concept of STD - Local calls all over the country. I think this would be phenomenal thing if he can get it implemented ...

An interesting anecdote ....

Shocked by the plight of a large number of passengers, who were put to hardship because of lack of adequate baggage scanners at the International Terminal of the Meenambakkam airport in Chennai, Dayanidhi Maran swung into action and arranged for another scanner to clear the rush.

And this was how he did it - Maran immediately contacted Patel on phone, who in turn instructed the airport officials to release a standby AAI scanner.

I know what you guys are thinking - Typical Indian disaster, lack of systems, no back up plans ... True, but what caught my eye was the fact that the Union minister also went around personally apologizing to the passengers for the inconvenience.