The Sona Story: The Textile to Tech Journey of Chettiar Industrialist C Valliappa

Extract published from The Sona Story: The Textile to Tech Journey of Chettiar Industrialist C Valliappa by Chitra Narayanan, published by Bloomsbury

On the leafy, tree-lined Millers Road, barely a kilometre from the majestic Vidhana Soudha in Bengaluru, stands a tall, white building without a nameplate. Its beautiful jaali facade has an old-world charm to it. A large banyan tree stands guard near the gate. Elegant yet unassuming, this is Sona Towers, which houses the corporate office of the Valliappa Group, a textiles-to[1]education-to-technology conglomerate. It holds a special place in India’s glorious information technology (IT) story. It is here that India’s software, telecom and consumer revolution story took off.

The reception area has elements of a Chettinad home. The flooring — made with vibrant and exquisite Athangudi tiles — stands out. Lending great character to the ceiling is an ancient wooden door that once graced the Valliappas’ 140-year-old ancestral Chettinad home in Poolankurichi, now repurposed as an artefact. Behind the reception desk is a stunning tree-of-life sculpture in silver. The museum vibes continue into the conference room, where the legs of the table are wooden pillars transplanted from Chettinad. But the centrepiece is a framed photograph circa 1985 of a bullock cart bringing a satellite dish to the door of Sona Towers hanging on the wall. Nobody remembers why a bullock cart, rather than a truck, was used to tow the satellite, but the picture is symbolic of India’s leapfrogging from the bullock cart age to the information age.

At that time Sona Towers had just been set up, a futuristic building for that era, the development of which was painstakingly overseen by C Valliappa, a textile magnate, who was venturing into commercial real estate for the first time. The only construction experience he had was of building two state-of-the-art textile mills in Ramanagara, on the outskirts of Bengaluru, with some unique features like pillarless halls with a concrete roof, designed by a French architect.

Early milestones

Among the early milestones in India’s IT story is the entry of the US multinational company (MNC) Texas Instruments (TI) into the country. And it was in Sona Towers that TI set up its software design centre. Sona Towers was the first private building in Bengaluru to install and use a satellite dish with uplinking facilities for all the IT companies there, with the organisation tasked with providing international communication services — Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited or VSNL (then called Overseas Communication Services) — setting up an earth station here. Several black-and-white pictures of the executives of TI, along with then Karnataka chief minister Ramakrishna Hegde, then US Ambassador John Gunther Dean, TI India’s first head, Charlie Simon, and Valliappa grace the walls.

Sona Towers went on to become the incubation hub for a host of multinationals such as Verifone, Oracle, Cisco and ANZ IT, igniting the IT boom in Bengaluru. The Centre for Development of Telematics, popularly known as C-DOT, had chosen Sona Towers as its corporate office. And it was from here that the C-DOT exchanges transformed the telecom landscape. Thus, in a sense, Sona Towers also catalysed telephony in India. The likes of APJ Abdul Kalam, N Vittal and Sam Pitroda, all passed through the doors of the building as India’s IT revolution and telecom boom took place.

Valliappa’s eldest son, Chocko, remembers an event at Delhi’s Taj Palace where Infosys co-founder and technocrat Nandan Nilekani was onstage delivering a keynote. Pointing to Chocko in the audience, Nilekani said, ‘There is the man whose dad was the father of the IT revolution.’

Recalling those heady days, Nilekani says, ‘The achievement of Mr Valliappa was he was the first entrepreneur to work with a global multinational like Texas Instruments to put up India’s first remote software development centre using satellites.’

Pioneering new tech

Nilekani describes how, in the 1980s, Bengaluru, which had a long tradition of pioneering new technology (it was here that India’s first electric pole was set up in 1905), had just begun to embrace software development. The IT hardware story had already taken off, with companies like DCM Data Products, ECIL and Patni Computers, among others. The new buzz was around software. Nilekani says, ‘It was the latest cycle of technology in Bengaluru. And we led the cycle as Infosys had just moved to Bengaluru in 1983. The arrival of TI, the first multinational software development company in India, had its own impact. The fact that an American company from Texas was willing to come here gave a psychological boost to software development in the city. TI was a pioneer in remote development of software. The notion that sitting in an office in Sona Towers on Millers Road you could write software for a company in Dallas was a leap forward. There was an executive called V Mohan Rao in TI who was involved in the move.”

The IT czar says the earth station in Sona Towers helped unlock a government programme called Software Technology Parks of India (STPI). ‘STPI is one of the most successful programmes of the government as it invested in buying more earth stations. These were under the Ministry of Electronics. One came up in Electronic City in Bengaluru and further fuelled the boom in software,’ he says.

Valliappa recalls the excitement in Bengaluru those days, and how the whole ecosystem was geared towards enabling software development. In 1984, the new computer policy was laid out. Valliappa says, ‘Rajiv Gandhi arrived with the promise of taking India on to the information highway. He wrote to IT companies within the Fortune-500 list, inviting them to a breakfast with him. TI was the first to accept that invitation. The CEO of TI flew over to India and met with Rajiv, who promised a red carpet welcome and easy clearances at Customs.’

Excerpted from the book ‘The Sona Story: the Textile to Tech Journey of Chettiar Industrialist C Valliappa’ with permission from Bloomsbury

Title: The Sona Story: The Textile to Tech Journey of Chettiar Industrialist C.Valliappa

Author: Chitra Narayanan

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Price: ₹499 (paperback)