After trying many suggestions online i stumbled on a Chinese site which suggested adding this path:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
Till now i was adding the below line and didnt work
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig
After adding this line, export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
./configure was successful
protobuf-c 1.3.0 CC: gcc CFLAGS: -g -O2 CXX: g++ CXXFLAGS: -g -O2 LDFLAGS: LIBS: prefix: /usr/local sysconfdir: $/etc libdir: $/lib includedir: $/include pkgconfigdir: $/pkgconfig bigendian: no protobuf version: libprotoc 3.4.0