Working for the government can be sexy sometimes. An access card stamped with the logo of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Finance Ministry or the Bank of Thailand would make many a 22-year-old swoon.
The Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute, alas, is not one of those places. Few in the general public have heard of this royal-led organisation tucked inside a white nondescript building down Rang Nam Alley. The building, however, boasts one of the largest ratios of PhDs to employees of any governmental organisation, and many of its young recruits choose to get their education in-house, rather than moving on to a master's programme.
Talking with Royol Chitradon, a former director of the institute who is now an adviser, it's hard not to be converted to the idea that this might be one of the most pivotal bodies in the government.
Mr Royol, 64, has grand plans for the country. All are in some sense connected to the idea that pushing Thailand towards developed-nation status involves "bottom-up change" from the farmers and villages that are the spine of the country and the root of its competitive advantage.
Mr Royol lists 11 other current positions (each more than a mouthful), including "counsellor of the subcommittee board for irrigation, water resources and agriculture area under the Senate, Kingdom of Thailand".
"Even Americans have come to see me many times wanting to learn about the water situation in this region," he says. "You would be surprised, even if in a formal way they may say 'You are in a dictatorship, we don't like to communicate with you', in reality they like to collaborate, and USAID supports us in a lot of projects."
Outside of the public eye, Mr Royol has been quietly waging a war to improve the living standards of villages across the country. Farmers with whom he works have seen an average increase of 300% in income. "The top earners can now make 200,000 baht a month," he says.
Mr Royol in 2005 started working with what he calls a macro-micro approach, which applied technical and policy knowledge to develop one village at a time, under the leadership of the late King Bhumibol.
The project was a response to the water crisis in rural parts of the country and involved teaching farmers management skills to solve the problem. "With these skills they started to do their own farm planning, to manage their own selling, and after seeing the benefit, managing their own funding," Mr Royol says.
Moving forward, the idea is for these villages to grow into a network that can expand organically: "It's like Amway, the best village will be a mentor of another two or three, and we will go from there. Then we can have exponential growth."
But progress takes time, he warns, and "that is why the late King was so patient, not like politicians who think everything should be completed in one year. It's not only about construction, it's about building a team that can operate and manage the project".
Mr Royol was blessed with the gift of gab. He also has the ability to portray a disarmingly sincere passion. To the casual onlooker, he is a man incapable of lying, which is perhaps part of the reason why parties across the spectrum have asked them to join their ranks.
"I don't like that; I work for the King, so I shouldn't be involved in politics," he says. "I talk about change, but my change is not like [Barack] Obama's top-down approach; my change is bottom-up. That is the only way to take the country to developed status.
"I like farmers, and contrary to many in this country, I don't think they should be poor," he whispers, interlocking his fingers and leaning forward as if conveying an important secret.
This renewed focus on agriculture is the path to developed status, he says. "And why not, why not. Thailand is the food and water security of the world. It is home to three major rivers. Over 95% of gem jewellery is done in Thailand.
"Most think that if we want to be a developed country we have to be industrialised, but we are very good in agriculture. The country has many strengths that we often forget."
The high corruption index in the country may be an underlying cause for the country's stagnation, he says. "But tackling corruption first may not be the right way. If you look at what Indonesia is doing, they don't try to tackle corruption first. They try to solve the efficiency first, and then they start thinking about the corruption."
He has high-minded and well-thought-out ideas for the country, but Mr Royol says he doesn't think he could be of better service in another position. Not in this context of instability. "The late King told me, be happy in your work and you will be good. I am happy working in the villages, where I can see progress. You can criticise policies, but not concrete results."
Mr Royol's schedule is packed with meetings, and for good reason. He is one of the world's leading experts in the abstruse field of hydroinformatics: the use of information and communication technology to ensure an equitable and efficient distribution of water.
That he ended up dedicating his life to studying water is not precisely a coincidence.
A mathematician and computer scientist by training, Mr Royol started his career as a lecturer at Kasetsart University, then packed for Austria when he was 30 to pursue a doctorate in informatics at Innsbruck University. His thesis: "Parallelisation and Vectorisation of a Finite Element Unsymmetric Equation Solver."
"It's what Europeans call computer science," he says.
With his educational background, why did he decide, of all things, to study water? Couldn't he have gone into finance and made good money, for example?
"Yes, but that is not what the country needs. I like to do things that can be utilised by the people," Mr Royol says sternly, any resemblance of lightheartedness wiped from his expression.
Some 40 years ago, Mr Royol was awarded funds to convert an internal combustion engine into a gas engine. "The project was successful, but back then there was no market for it. I toyed with it for a while after, and there were some things I could've optimised, but I left it a long time ago."
Instead, Mr Royol started his post-PhD career as director of the research and development department (high-performance computing) at the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center.
"Back then His Majesty, the late King, had an initiative to absorb technology to solve the water crisis that Thailand faced in 1995-96," Mr Royol recalls. "Developing a water resource management system had been a priority of the late King since he started his reign. I was given an opportunity to participate in this project."
Twenty years later, Mr Royol says his only regret is "that I didn't have 30 years to work on it. That the King did not call me to serve him earlier".
Soon after the project launched in 1997, Mr Royol's group found itself collaborating with an international research group with a slew of MIT academics. "We first developed something that was almost like Line chat, in order to distribute the work we needed to develop the infrastructure system," he says.
The physical infrastructure of the project followed, and Mr Royol found that "the cheapest but most important part was the water management system itself. The intellectual infrastructure, so to speak, without which the physical infrastructure would not work".
His penchant for studying water and promoting an idealistic emphasis on agriculture may have deeper roots, however.
"My dad was a soldier and my grandparents were farmers. Me myself, my dream is to have some farmland in the outskirts of Bangkok. Not too far from here, so I'll be able to visit three times a week or so."
Mr Royol learned leadership from his dad, who was a guerrilla officer in the army and used to wake his son early in the morning and take him to see how soldiers trained. "Why do you have to train them so hard, I asked him. Because it's the only way to survive, he said."
Mr Royol looks like a career bureaucrat, conservative in speech and modest in dress, but he is far from a traditional "inside the box" government functionary. "My dad taught me that in order to lead you need to be a mentor," he says.
Guerrilla warfare requires trusting your team and learning together, and that's the approach Mr Royol took to managing his organisation. Under his guidance, the Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute's staff grew from six in 1997 to 123 at present.
"I have a lot of things that I am passionate about," he says. "I think you always need to have something that makes you energetic. What I am most passionate about, however, is the next generation."
Mr Royol has a thing or two to say about PhD programmes in this country, lamenting that they spend an inordinate amount of time in classes and not enough time letting students conduct their own research. And while changing higher education is not on his agenda, he has done his bit by establishing a research chair at his institute and placing emphasis on the education of young recruits.
"I am a supporter of doctoral programmes, and having a research chair is one of the best ways to bring in new ideas," Mr Royol says.
