Who is Sam Pitroda? Education, profession, Gandhi link and controversies – Sam Pitroda’s comment angers India

May 08, 2024, 02:29:48 PM IST

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Sam Pitroda’s comment angers India

Chairman of Indian Overseas Congress Sam Pitroda has again ignited a firestorm speaking on the diversity of India referring to how people in the South “look like Africans and those in the East looks like Arabs and those in the East look like Chinese.” Speaking about how India is a shining example of democracy in the world, Pitroda said in an interview that the people of the country have “survived 75 years in a very happy environment where people could live together leaving a few fights here and there”. The comments have not really settled with a lot of Indians, who have said that the comments were extremely racist. The Congress has dissociated itself from his remarks, while the BJP has trained guns on the party with Manipur CM N Biren Singh even threatening to sue Pitroda.

Pitroda is the head of the Indian Overseas Congress, an organisation of “concerned, committed, diverse, capable, and courageous Overseas Indians and Friends of India,” which is the foreign wing of the Congress party.
He is a “globally-respected telecom entrepreneur, investor, development thinker, and policy maker,” according to his personal website. The website states that he has worked in the IT industry for fifty years.

Sam Pitroda was born in Odisha to Gujarati parents. He graduated from Vallabh Vidyanagar in Gujarat for his elementary education, and Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara is where he earned his master’s degree in physics and electronics. In 1964, having completed his master’s degree in physics, he travelled to the United States to attend the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering. According to his website, Pitroda holds around 20 honourary PhDs, close to 100 worldwide patents, and has published five books and numerous papers and lectured widely all over the world.

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Profession and Gandhi link

Pitroda currently serves as the chairman of Indian Overseas Congress, He is credited with having laid the foundation for India’s telecommunications and technology revolution of the 1980s. He was an advisor to former PM Rajiv Gandhi and led six technology missions related to telecommunications, water, literacy, immunisation, dairy production, and oil seeds. Pitroda returned to India a second time in 2004 to focus on building knowledge institutions and infrastructure. He worked with three PMs of India, including Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. He is often called Rahul Gandhi’s mentor, and works closely with him.

Pitroda sparked a controversy in May 2019 during the previous Lok Sabha elections when he casually dismissed the 1984 riots. “Ab kya hai ’84 ka? Aapne kya kiya 5 saal mein, uski baat kariye. ’84 mein hua to hua. Aapne kya kiya? (Is there anything to say about 1984 now? Talk about what you did in the last 5 years. What happened in 1984 happened. But what have you achieved?),” he had said. More recently, he was in the middle of another controversy while speaking about the concept of inheritance tax prevailing in America and said these are issued that will need to be discussed. After the comments snowballed into a controversy Pitroda sought to downplay the issue saying he had only cited inheritance tax in the US as an example.

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Who is Sam Pitroda? Education, profession, Gandhi link and controversies – Sam Pitroda’s comment angers India

Sam Pitroda’s comment angers India

Profession and Gandhi link

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