Fifty Years After

It was a mildly hot day in July of 1957, when 350 young students from all over India made their way from the railway station in Kharagpur to the site of the Hijli jail. Hijli jail had been a prison for political workers only a few years ago but was now was the site of the one of the most exhilarating experiments in modern India. Pandit Nehru had constituted a committee to help design and set up a new Institute of Technology modeled on the world famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge U.S. Incidentally two of the committee that designed the college courses were among the first graduates of MIT. This new engineering college, set at the site of the old Hijli jail, was to train the best and brightest in the country to build the “modern temples of India- the dams, power stations, bridges”.

The selection process for the 350 places in the prestigious new college was brutal and almost everyone one who made it to the final list had a stellar record from whichever school he came from. All that of course would soon lead to crushing disappointment for many, as every student was brighter than the next. In this batch of 350, there were no females and so the competition was even fiercer for the top positions. The rigorous four-year schedule led to a graduation rate of almost 100% and all of us earned our bachelor degrees in 1961. Now it was time to celebrate our golden jubilee and to look back on how far we had come.

I had volunteered to design and edit the Reunion book and as I looked at a sample of my classmates from 1961 some fifty years later, some startling facts emerged. While all my classmates earned their bachelor of technology degrees, only 16% went on get a master’s degree and 10 % a doctoral degree. On average this class held only 3.4 jobs from the time of graduation till their retirement. Thus they shifted employers only once in a decade. They led stable and secure lives yet only one third of these jobs were in the public sector. While many of them started workshops and small manufacturing installations, most tended to work in established institutions whether in the public or the private sector. This was not a very entrepreneurial class and its achievements tended to be in building the infrastructure of modern India rather than in developing computer software. These entrepreneurial classes from IIT would come a few decades later.

Socially, too, this group was rather conservative. Most married only once and there were no divorces. But the women they married were not all housewives. Fully half of the wives were professionals in their own rights – doctors, teacher, editors, and consultants. They had an average of 2 children per family – following the precept of “ ham do hamare do” of the day. And only one third of these children followed in their father’s footsteps and became engineers and scientists. Others followed rather diverse trajectories from law to design, from banking to art.

Almost this entire batch had successful careers ending up as chief executives of various companies, big and small. They all travelled widely but when time came to retire, most returned home. Only a third of this batch settled abroad in places as diverse as U.S, UK, France, Australia and Brazil. In their retirement, many have started NGO’s while others travel the ends of the earth photographing the remotest of sites. Some have taken to writing while others spend their time teaching and consulting or playing golf.

Yet this group has also produced pioneers. Two became advisers to the leaders of two different countries – the U.S and India- one advised President Reagan on superconductivity while the other was science and technology adviser to Mrs Gandhi. There were a few who led technological revolutions in the country– which was one of the objectives in the setting up of the IIT in the first place- in esoteric areas like superconductivity, offshore technology, data and Internet, rural electrification, and development of a totally artificial heart. The last deserves some extra explanation- one of my class fellows after obtaining an degree in electrical engineering went on do his doctorate in engineering and followed it up with a doctorate in medicine. He combined the two to pioneer research in development of an artificial heart based on a cockroach and also reproductive system. Realizing the problems he faced, he made sure his two sons followed distinct paths – one became a doctor and the other an engineer.

Every year the IIT Kharagpur selects a few of its alumni who have made outstanding contributions to society and for their achievements. From the batch of 350 that had entered the portals of the institute some five decades earlier, the institute had selected four and honored them with their most prestigious award as Distinguished Alumnus. Since as of 2010, only fifty had been selected from the time the institute started in 1952, our contribution of four was nothing to be sneezed at.

All in all not a bad performance at all!