About

Forty-nine years of running things that cannot be allowed to stop

Nearly five decades in electronics, radio communication and telecom operations — 21 years in the Indian Air Force, 28 in telecom and SaaS(DMS/IDP).

Salman Ahmad Siddiqui presenting to circle operations teams, 2017
Presenting to circle operations teams, 2017

Two careers, one habit

1977 — 2026 · 49 years
197719982026
Public service
1977–98 · 21 yrs
Indian Air Force — electronics and radio communication. BE earned in-service.
Telecom operations
1998–2022 · 24 yrs
Spice, Airtel, Indus Towers, Galaxias, Deltos Infra, Samko — O&M, CTO and P&L roles.
Governance
2022– · 4 yrs
SaaS(DMS/IDP) operations and independent practice.

Fig. 1 — Bands drawn to scale. The record in full is below.

I joined the Indian Air Force in 1977 and spent twenty-one years in electronics and radio communication. Specific assignments remain confidential, but the habit formed there is the whole basis of how I work: a system that has to keep running is not managed by intention. It is managed by a documented standard, a named owner, and a check that happens whether or not anyone is watching.

I left in 1998 for a sector that was being built in real time. Eight years of BSS operations and maintenance at Spice Telecom in Punjab, including the rollout and integration of more than three hundred new sites through a Motorola-to-ZTE migration. Then Head of Operation & Maintenance at Bharti Airtel for Maharashtra and Goa, and from 2008 one of the founding O&M heads at Indus Towers, where the industry was inventing shared tower infrastructure as it went. My circle was Uttar Pradesh West, and it is where I pioneered the OME/SME partner model and the idea I still call outsourcing with intelligence.

From 2012 I ran a business rather than a function — founding CEO of Galaxias, a telecom and IT infrastructure consultancy taken from inception to profit. Then six years as Chief Technology Officer of Deltos Infra, PAN-India, and the numbers on this site that people ask about most: twenty-five thousand towers, eighteen thousand kilometres of fibre, uptime up thirty per cent and OPEX down twenty-five per cent across six circles. Two years as Director of Operations & Projects at Samko Solutions followed, carrying full P&L for telecom and facility services including Jammu & Kashmir.

Since 2024 I have held a fixed-term interim mandate as Head of Operations for the DMS division of CBSL Groups Pvt Ltd — embedded and accountable for running it, not advising someone else who ran it. That is where the document-governance work on this site comes from, and it is deliberately not described as consulting, because it was not.

Career record
1977–98 Indian Air Force — Electronics & Radio Communication. BE earned in-service, CTI Bangalore, 1995–98.
1998–2006 Spice Telecom — BSS O&M, Punjab. 400+ BTS, 8 BSC, 300+ new sites integrated.
2006–08 Bharti Airtel — Head of O&M, Maharashtra & Goa. 2,000+ sites, 100 BSC, 5 MSC.
2008–12 Indus Towers — Head of O&M, UP West. Founding O&M head; OME/SME partner model.
2012–16 Galaxias (P) Ltd — CEO, founding member. Inception to profit; 95% client retention.
2016–22 Deltos Infra Pvt Ltd — Chief Technology Officer, PAN-India. 25,000 towers, 18,000 km fibre, uptime +30%, OPEX −25% across six circles.
2022–24 Samko Solutions (India) — Director of Operations & Projects. Full P&L, 50+ team, budgets over INR 10 Cr.
2024– Interim mandate — Head of Operations, DMS division of CBSL Groups Pvt Ltd, delivering court-record digitisation. 95% operational efficiency, 80% process adherence, 90% on-time on court projects with zero compliance violations, attrition under 10%.
2024– SyhaConnect Innovations — Founder. Operational excellence consulting, enterprise coaching, leadership development.
One diagnosis, in full

The leak that no amount of reviewing the MIS was ever going to find

A site in western Uttar Pradesh, on the Madhya Pradesh border, hosting three ground-based towers for major operators. Diesel consumption was abnormally high and the generators kept running dry, taking the site down with them. Every report was accurate. Consumption was recorded, outages were logged, tickets were raised and closed. The variance looked like a consumption problem, which is the sort of problem that gets absorbed into a monthly average and forgotten.

It was not a consumption problem and it was not a process gap. The installation had been physically re-rigged: two generators disconnected and their load rerouted onto a single unit which also carried the landowner’s own premises. The result was a facade of normal operation, with fuel drawn off against our run-hours. Site supervisors had been pressured into leaving it alone.

We restored each site to independent operation and dismantled the unauthorised arrangement, with uptime up five per cent and energy cost down ten per cent across the cluster. But the number is not the point of telling it.

The point is that the reporting was working perfectly. OPEX leakage of this kind is engineered to look normal, and it is invisible to every instrument that reads what a site sends rather than what a site is. No amount of MIS review would have found it. A site walk found it in an afternoon. That is why Analyse always includes going and standing in the place.

Where
Etawah cluster, UP West · Indus Towers, Head of O&M
Presented as
Consumption variance and generator run-dry
Actually was
Physical re-rigging of the installation
Found by
A site walk. Not the MIS.
+5%
uptime
−10%
energy cost
A second diagnosis, twelve years later

The equipment was not the problem with the equipment

A different sector, the same shape of problem. Scanners and UPS units across CBSL Groups’ court-record digitisation sites were burning out repeatedly, taking production down for days at a time. Replacement was routine by then, and the working assumption was equipment quality — the sort of conclusion that survives because it is plausible and nobody has to own it.

A Pareto on the failure record rather than on opinion put the whole distribution on one cause: an equipment earthing fault. Not the scanners, not the supplier, not the duty cycle. Correcting the earthing ended the burnouts, and the recurring production loss — twenty per cent per scanned image — stopped being a cost and started being margin.

The diesel story and this one are the same story. In both, the reporting was accurate, the symptom was being managed competently, and the actual cause sat one layer below where anybody was looking. Analyse is not a smarter reading of the report. It is the discipline of not stopping at it.

Where
DMS division, CBSL Groups · interim operations mandate, 2024–
Presented as
Equipment quality and replacement cost
Actually was
An equipment earthing fault
Found by
Pareto on the failure record. Not the replacement log.
Zero
burnout outages
20%
loss removed per image

Credentials

Train the Trainer Indian Leadership Academy
Corporate Trainer Indian Leadership Academy
Master Trainer Indian Leadership Academy
Soft Skills Trainer Indian Leadership Academy
ILA Certified Corporate Trainer & Enterprise Coach Composite
Education — BE Electronics & Radio Communication, CTI Bangalore 1995–98 · BA, Kakatiya University

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Board profile →

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The Analyse – Act – Adhere Checklist

The diagnostic I run in the first week of an engagement: what to freeze, what to measure, and what to fix first — in that order, because doing them in any other order is how cost programmes get reversed.

↓ Download · PDF, 4 pp
Practice
SyhaConnect Innovations
Sole proprietor · Faridabad, India
Certifications
ISO 9001:2015 · QMS26022411ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · ITMS26022409 UK International Certification Limited (Co. 12810906)
Contact
hello@salmansiddiqui.in
+91 96258 99500 · WhatsApp
Company information
syhaconnect.in — registration, certifications and software portfolio.