P 67 Start of New career!

P  67

Start of New career in GIS

When he categorically stated Tele-communication, I queried asking him that I am not even aware of the spelling for telecommunication, how come you are asking me to come! His reactive response was: Ramu, you are an Instrument engineer and I am a Chemical engineer and we two have jointly executed several challenging projects; come&join we can do this also.That stopped our further exchanges and on 18th May  morning I was in Makers!

On reaching there, Sh Manoj Modi asked me to participate in video conference with M/S LHMT and Telecordia. (LHMT- Lock Heed Martin Technology and Telecordia- former Bell company). I was fish out of  water and spent days not knowing anything! After 3 days, when I contacted SM for my job assignment, he directed me to contact MDA directly;when I approached him (MDA), he said that you handle GIS. As I was not even aware nor heard about that, I asked him what is GIS? He responded saying -go to Net and find out!Then myself and Sharad Dhoke went into some computer and started searching for the term GIS. There we found that 'it is an upcoming Technology' and in India,a company by name M/S Infotech at Hyderabad are doing something related to that subject. Without wasting any further time, we two flew to Hyderabad  and called on Mr Mohan Reddy, chairman Infotech. That is the day I came to understand that GIS is about digitisation of land maps with various attributes attached to the same.(Geographical Information System). When Infotech engineers (led by Sh CR Rao)displayed some of their outputs we got an idea about that subject. We returned and I started thinking the methodology to go about .

In my typical way of operations, I thought that if I gather a group of Instrument engineers from inside Reliance , things can be developed. To my luck I bumped on Mr Milind Deshpande, an electrical engineer who has been with Reliance since Hazira project days worked under Mr SC Gupta, my close friend and colleague &later under Sh CW Joshi in material planning at Jamnagar. As I knew him from my Tulsiani days (1987) , our working relationship and understanding started with big bang. With his help we identified the team (all Instrument engineers)from various manufacturing sites of Reliance- Viz:- M/S Jaydip Gohel, Dinakar, TG Manoharan, Nilay Desai+ Mohit Jain, my confident buddy from Jamnagar. Mohit was my able assistant in OSBL Projects at Jamnagar DTA execution.He is a post graduate structural engineer by qualification ,exposed to project planning and execution.

When it came for budget estimate for the set-up, as we did not have any idea or target set point or quantum of scope, I came with a number of Rs 10 crores only! SCG only advised me to update it to Rs 25 crores(in 2000-01)and put up to management, which I did. Without any question that was cleared and we started looking forward. As none of my team members had any idea or knowledge on the job, it was lame leading the blind! But the core team (AR,MMD, JG and MJ) bonded like a well oiled  machine  and drafted an initial work plan , later Project Execution Plan.  At that stage we considered only using  Ready made Printed map for city roads published by TTK or AAI etc.for digitisation.  As things turned out, I came in touch with several small scale map digitisation agencies
who were sourcing Indian satellite imagery and carrying out the tasks as house hold business. As at that time,digitisation of maps was a banned item (for national  security reasons as well as vested control by survey agencies), the business was going on in hush hush way throughout India! But nobody was thinking of using them for GIS objective!
                                                                                                               Contd.....

Key Aspects :- Communication, Faith, Human relations, Initiative, Planning, Team building, Transfer