In August’01, IIT Kharagpur began its golden jubilee celebrations with its motto Yoga Karmasu Koushalam, ie, endeavour and purposeful action lead to prosperity and well being. And behind this celebration lies a unique story.

In ’30, India witnessed huge agitations everywhere against the Simon Commission Report. Numerous educated revolutionaries were being arrested. To house these “ordinary, official class” civil prisoners, a detention camp was set up in Kharapur, a place referred to by that name as early as the sixteenth century in Ain-I-Akbari of Abul Fazal. Robert Douglas, district magistrate of Midnapore in the ‘30s described the camp in these terms: “The jail compound measured 140 x 40 yards….. with a lone tower in the centre, 140 feet high…. Surrounded by a 10-foot high wall and barbed wire fencing… all of which made it a veritable fortress. Escape was impossible…..”

On September 15, 31, at the Round table conference in London, Mahatma Gandhi argued that if any settlement between Britain and India was reached, it could only be on the basis of a partnership that existed between two absolute peoples. On that same day, three detenus dramatically escaped from the fortress-like camp at Hijli, Kharagpur. The next day, September 16, ’31, at 9.30 p.m. guards attacked the Hijli inmates and shot dead Tarakeshwar Sengupta and Santosh Mitra. Netaji himself came to Hijli to collect the bodies. There was a big funeral procession at Kolkata. Rabindranath Tagore presided at the condolence meeting, pained enough by the incident to subsequently compose the poem Prashno, question to God. The land of Hijli was blessed with the blood of martyrs.

Post-Independence First
Twenty years later, on August 18, ’51, resurgent India’s first greenfield temple of technology, IIT, Kharagpur, was inaugurated at the same site at Hijli with 224 freshmen and 42 teachers. The Nalini Ranjan Sarkar Committee had recommended ‘not less than 4 Higher Technical Institutions…where the standard for graduation should not be lower than that at a first class institution abroad, for example, BSc (Tech) of Manchester or BS of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology….. “ Unlike many of the country’s older institutions, this institute had no heritage. It was free, India’s first indigenously conceived institute of higher technological education, set up with hope in the heart and dreams in the mind. To a great extent, these hopes have been fulfilled.

IIT Kharagpur is the mother of the other IITs, and was the test bed for them. These institutes must be considered successful, since today, even China wants to collaborate with India to set up such institutions. Further evidence of this success is that these IITs are by far the best known Indian professional institutions in the world. Our IIMs too have become well known, and interestingly, the IITs have provided the single largest feedback to the IIMs. Lastly, of course, is the meeting of the benchmark which was articulated as “not less than a BSc Tech from Manchester or a B.S. from MIT.” Certainly, one of those benchmarks has been unarguably met, the other one, may be arguably.

Why have these institutions been so successful? First, because the standards of entry were high, professional and kept undiluted. Second, due to superior standards of teaching and all-round development. Third, the focus was not on producing nerds, so students who graduated sought out either research or broader managerial careers, depending on their strengths. All these are valid lessons to heed as debates in future decades focus on globalisation and world class. Here is a live example, where in post-independence India, we have created a successful world-class and globally competitive model of technological education, which has produced broad leaders and technocrats just as well as scientific innovators.This has helped to create wealth out of science.

Science and Wealth
Many ancient cultures possessed technological knowledge which they could not convert into wealth. Ancient cultures have had a very evolutionary development in technology. Chinese metalworkers mastered the technique of raising furnace temperature sufficiently to produce cast iron long before this was done in the West. So also with the development of printing, paper, gunpower, the compass, etc. Arab cultures, in their time, knew more about mathematics, ship building and navigation that their western counterparts. In India, too, considerable progress in metallurgy, the chemistry of ceramics and colours, physiology and medicine had been made ahead of the West.Yet, the West overtook all these cultures by rapidly adapting in a discontinuous way some commercially-viable technologies to create wealth for her people. This confirms the view that possession of knowledge does not produce wealth.Management is required to convert that knowledge into wealth.

There are three items, for example, which we take for granted pens, telephones and automobiles. It was only at the end of the last century that inventors perfected an early version of a writing instrument in the form of the fountain pen with an ink reservoir and capillary feed. Although a ball pen patent had been established earlier, it was World War II which threw up the need for writing instruments at high altitudes. In 1881, the American Bell Telephone Company opened the first commercial long distance line over a stretch of 72 kms between Boston and Providence. Dial telephones went into commercial operation in 1896. As for automobiles, around 1880, German inventors build the gasoline engine and French engineers built the first gasoline-powered vehicle with automobile bodies. But, it took a Henry Ford to make the automobile a mass-market product. This illustrates that while technology’s gains are easy to acknowledge, it takes specific mechanisms and management to convert technology knowledge into wealth.

I would like to conclude with a personal anecdote.When I chose a job in ’67 in Hindustan Lever’s computer department, my head of department was Professor G S Sanyal. He went on to become director of the institute. He expressed his disapproval of my career choice in the following words: “You should do research and teach.,Why should you join HLL? One of these days, you will find yourself visiting the Hijli market, selling soap from shop to shop. These commercial companies will next visit medical colleges to recruit our doctors to sell soap.” By jove, was he angry. Several years after my graduation, I did visit Hijli shops, selling Dalda.

In ’98, I met Prof. Sanyal, now over 75. There was a warm embrace between guru and chela, misty-eyed conversations about the years gone by. I reminded him of his admonishment. He placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Yes, I do recall. I was a frog in the well at that time. I admit I was wrong. What is the use of science and technology if you cannot sell its benefits to someone? What a wonderful man, he could admit that he might have been wrong. Thank god for the Sanyals and the IITs.