Ashok Jhunjhunwala is an oddity several times over. Trim, energetic and in open-toed sandals, he could pass off as an IAS officer as he has none of the conventional trappings of an academic like dishevelled hair or an absent-minded demeanour.

More — he is a Marwari who grew up in an extended joint family of 50 in Kolkata (Ballygunge Phari), went to St Lawrence School (usually the target of career-oriented middle class Bengali families), existed in its portals successfully (many in his extended family entered them but none other went on to shine in academics) and thence to that prince among IITs, the electrical engineering department at Kanpur.

Today, as professor of electrical engineering at IIT, Madras, he is at the forefront of academia-industry cooperation in research, something many Indian academics have so far shied away from.

What has finally set Jhunjhunwala apart from others, taking his name well beyond the boundaries of academia, is the success of TeNet, an informal group of Madras IIT teachers led by him, set up in the early nineties, to develop low-cost technology to take telephone connectivity and the Internet to rural India.

The success is the result of an equal understanding of technology and business. The IIT researchers first conceived the low-cost technology that would slash the cost of a telephone line from Rs 40,000 in the mid-nineties to Rs 10,000 and then devised entrepreneurial models to take this technology entirely on a commercial basis to the villages through Internet kiosks.

These are now delivering a range of services — distance learning, telemedicine and better governance to the villagers — even while raising rural incomes.

Most significantly, this technology — delivered mainly through the corDECT telephone infrastructure equipment — is being installed by Indian leading telecom service providers and exported to countries round the world from Asia to Latin America, making Jhunjhunwala a symbol of the effort to take India forward by using its own technological prowess.

Jhunjhunwala greets me in Bengali, obviously proud of his spoken prowess in the language, and we settle down to taste the famed food of WelcomGroup's Bukhara chain, called Peshawri in Chennai's Chola Sheraton.

He is vegetarian but insists I order non-veg as he is thoroughly familiar with common Bengali addictions.

The maitre d' briefed about his special guest, personally helps us with the menu and we go first for a round of guava juice, fresh and fragrant, and then settle down for a range of kebabs — jackfruit, corn and chicken for me — the famous Bukhara dal and assorted tasty rotis.

We groan about post-lunch appointments and proceed to do justice to both the food and the conversation.

The most fascinating journey Jhunjhunwala has made is in his attitude to business. Being from a Marawari family, he grew up amidst assorted business like trading and finance being done straight out of home.

The Sino-Indian war of 1962 when he was not quite 10, the ethics the fathers drilled into him in school, all gave his growing psyche an additional dimension beyond family and business and he couldn't help but question why people around him dodged paying taxes.

Jhunjhunwala's non-conventional mental journey was helped by what he picked up from his maternal grandfather who ran a shop in Bihar's Lakkhisarai and with whom the growing lad spent around two months of vacation every year.

The grandparent was a businessman all right, but was also a follower of Gandhi and Vinobaji. Naturally, a strong social consciousness was instilled deep and early.

Then came a definitive family incident, a cousin was being married, the bridegroom's family was asking for more dowry than his uncle could put together, his cousin was in tears.

All this made Jhunjhunwala disillusioned about business and he decide to steer clear of it. His formative years were also market by the rise of the naxalite movement first and then the JP movement.

"They were raising similar questions," he recalls. So a good way not to have to get into the family business was to go to the US for further studies, which he did even as the emergency was being declared in India.

The US sojourn turned out a period of discovery. Very quickly, he came to realise that Indians were second to none in terms of their personal acumen.

It was also a period of getting to know India better "statistically", holistically, with the perspective that distance lends. He also joined the US peace movement.

"Those were very rich five to six years when I didn't learn any technology — except that we were as good as anybody — and came back confident that one could change India."

The story of his life from then to now is really one of teaching and learning at the same time, and, of course, a long journey in search of technology, for the nation and the sort that the nation can use.

He recalls something his maternal grandfather told him about a public debate in India when the IIT's were being contemplated.

Would they not become elitist? Eventually, it was agreed that they would be like "Nalanda, a place isolated from the environment where the best could be nurtured so that they could lead society."

Nalanda was the repository of all wisdom. Society could turn to it for all answers and its denizens could not turn around and say, "We don't know."

He then makes a major confession, "It is when I started teaching that I began learning technology, along with my students."

Soon he wanted to contribute to industry but realised "we had hardly any technology. So it was pointless to give radical solutions. One could only do retrofitting."

Fascinatingly, in any interaction with industry, "Initially, I didn't contribute much but learnt." This learning is an ongoing process, from students, from industry.

He also specifically wants to acknowledge the contribution made by two of his younger colleagues, Bhaskar Ramamurthy and Timothy Gonsalves.

"They helped develop my larger vision which I started to articulate from 1987-88 onwards."

The learning came from building products, alongwith students, "which also builds attachments, so that later (when TeNet was formulating its vision) the former students came back."

Describing the change that has come over him, Jhunjhunwala admits that he has "come full circle in the attitude to industry and now I work very closely with it."

The new economic policies made a great difference to both academia and industry. The "funding dried up for the IITs and they needed to push."

Some of those government grants have been restored today but he believes "government grants without accountability have to be reduced." The change in attitude to industry has also been helped by what Jhunhunwala discovered while talking to industry brass.

"If you talk to the top man in an industry and put forward a vision then he will respond, perhaps sceptically at first. But you will not get this response from the same unit's R&D team. They cannot respond to the vision."

There is also a change in his method of teaching. "Today, I tailor my teaching to technology and not theory and tell fellow teachers to work with industry to change your teaching."

The aim of his teaching is to "build systems and technologies" and on "optimisation". "Where you focus is an essential part of teaching."

Designing involves optimising multiple things so as to cope with "the real life where problems are not well-defined."

Thus, teaching students how to design is different from the historical approach which emphasised analysis. Designing is more than "pattern matching".

In India, there is a need to teach students how to design as here processes have not been worked out as in the US where you have to do only a small part of an entire worked out process.

Jhunjhunwala's latest vision is to double rural India's per capita GDP in 10 years. The TeNet group went ahead with connectivity as it believed "the Internet and communications will bring in huge efficiencies."

The success achieved in this "has given us the initial confidence to take up the new vision which should really become a national goal."