Date of Birth June 22, 1953

(f) Contributions on Policy matters

Over the last five years, Dr.Jhunjhunwala has put forward a vision that India should have 200 million telephones and Internet connections at the earliest to enable its people on a large scale. He has examined the bottlenecks and pushed for policy changes that can make this possible. He works closely with Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Information Technology, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and Department of Science and Technology towards this. He was a committee member for the working group on “IT for Masses” set up by Ministry of Information Technology and was earlier a member of various task forces contributing to Vision 2020 document. He is a member of number of committees at MIT and DST.

Dr. Jhunjhunwala works closely with groups at IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Lucknow in evolving telecom policies, which would benefit the country. He is a advisory committee member of “KnowNet-Grin“ (Knowledge Network for Augumenting Grassroots Innovations) at IIM Ahmedabad and also various institutes like Centre for Telecom Policy Studies (CTPS), Patriotic & People Oriented Science & Technology, and Center for Policy Initiatives. He is also an advisor to CII and a number of other organisations.

Dr. Jhunjhunwala has recently taken initiative titled “Sustainable Access in Rural Area (SARI), which is a joint project involving Jeffery Sach’s “Center for International Development at Harvard , MIT Media Lab, McKinsey and TeNeT group at IITM. The project intends to provide Internet Access in every village in two dishnets of India and build a commercial model which could be replicated to provide Internet to every village in India.