MS Sparsha
There are pioneers whom history remembers. And then there are pioneers whose contributions quietly become part of somebody else’s larger legacy.
In the story of Indian information technology, F.C. Kohli is rightly remembered as the “father of Indian IT”. He took charge of Tata Consultancy Services in 1969 and went on to lead it for 27 years, transforming a modest data-processing operation into one of the country’s defining technology companies.
But several years before Kohli took the helm, another Tata engineer had already imagined something that was extraordinary for its time: a dedicated computer centre for the Tata group.
His name was Lalit Surajmal Kanodia.
Today, his name is far less familiar to the general public than Kohli’s. Yet Kanodia was among the remarkable Indians who found themselves close to the frontier of computing at a time when computers were still enormous, expensive and largely inaccessible in India.
An IIT Bombay-trained mechanical engineer, Kanodia went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1960s for a master’s degree and doctorate in management. At MIT, he worked as a research assistant to Professor Donald Carroll and had an office close to Project MAC, the pioneering research environment associated with some of the most important developments in early computer science, including CTSS and Multics.
It was a remarkable place to be—and a remarkable time to be there.
In the summer of 1965, while working for the Tata group, Kanodia prepared a proposal for establishing a computer centre for Tata companies. The idea was ambitious for an India that was still taking its first tentative steps into the computer age.
When he returned to India after completing his doctorate, Kanodia, along with fellow MIT-trained Indians Nitin Patel and Ashok Malhotra, and Yashpal Sahni of the Indian Statistical Institute, helped turn that proposal into reality.
In 1967, the Tata Computer Centre began operations from Nirmal Building in Mumbai, using IBM 1401 computers.
That small operation would eventually become the foundation for what was formally established as Tata Consultancy Services in 1968.
And then came F.C. Kohli.
In late 1969, J.R.D. Tata brought Kohli across from Tata Electric to take charge of the young organisation. What Kohli reportedly believed would initially be a one-year assignment became a 27-year mission.
The rest is history.
Kohli built TCS with extraordinary vision and determination, taking it from a relatively small internal data-processing operation seeking external clients to a global technology powerhouse. His contribution is immense and rightly celebrated.
But that should not cause the earlier chapter to disappear.
Kanodia had helped conceive the Tata computer centre and had been involved in establishing the operation that became the starting point of TCS. Around the same period, he moved on to pursue another entrepreneurial journey.
In 1975, he founded Datamatics, beginning with a team of just about ten people.
The company survived, evolved and continues to operate decades later. More importantly, Kanodia remained at the forefront of the emerging Indian technology and offshore-services revolution. Datamatics undertook early offshore work for Wang Laboratories in the late 1970s and later experimented with dedicated satellite connectivity for overseas technology clients, including AT&T/Bell Labs.
These were not merely business ventures. They reflected the thinking of an entrepreneur who understood remarkably early that India’s greatest technological opportunity might not lie in manufacturing computers, but in using Indian talent to deliver computing and technology services to the world.
That is why Lalit Surajmal Kanodia deserves a larger place in the story of Indian IT.
F.C. Kohli built the institution into a global giant. There is no question about that.
But before there was the giant, there was an idea.
And before that idea became an institution, there was a young engineer who had seen the future taking shape at MIT and returned to India determined to make computing part of the Tata group’s future.
Lalit Kanodia may not be the name most people associate with the birth of Indian IT. But he was one of the men who helped make that birth possible.
Sometimes, the unsung hero is not the person who built the monument.
It is the person who first imagined that it could exist.
