Alumni Association

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

IITK @50honoring alumni achievements in the last 50 years

Summary of the profiles of theIITK@50 awardees

2009-2010on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee Celebrations

of IIT Kanpur

Introduction To celebrate 50 years of IIT Kanpur the Alumni Association wishes to honor top 50 Alumni who have excelled and had visible and lasting impact in their areas of work. Number of mails, were sent to alumni at large inviting nominations and detailed information about the nominee for the award. Distinguished Alumnus Award and Satyendra K Dubey recipients and alumni who have received high honors were nominated by the IITK Alumni Association Board The final list of nominations was put forth for voting to the alumni to select the final 50 by a secure, online, world-wide voting process. The chosen 52 (the last four had a tie) were honored at the Golden Jubilee Alumni convention at IIT Kanpur, January 2-4, 2010, June 2010 in Bangalore, July 9-10, 2010 in Washington DC and July 16-18 in Santa Clara, California.

Mr N R Narayanmurthy is the Chairman and Managing Director of Infosys Technologies Limited, Bangalore. He was born on August 20, 1946 and obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Mysore in 1967. He completed his M Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1969. In his career spanning over a period of 27 years, he has been associated

with various organizations. He joined IIM Ahmedabad as a Chief Systems Programmer in 1969. Thereafter he worked with SESA (Paris), Systems Research Institute (Pune) and Patni Computer Systems. Then in 1981, he along with six other professionals formed the India's first software company that was for, by and of professionals - INFOSYS. They had an equity base of Rs 10,000 in the beginning and today Infosys is a Rs 93 Crore company with market capitalization of Rs 600 Crore.

Mr Murthy is a proven professional who commands tremendous respect in the industry. As a result of his efforts, today Infosys has top quality of Technology, clients and services.

Mr Murthy is nominated for Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for creating and building an outstanding entrepreneurial venture putting India on the international software map.

Mr Murthy is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

N R Narayana Murthy (MT/EE/69)

Dr. Purushottam Kashinath Kelkar (1909–1990) was the founding director of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and the Director of IIT Bombay. Dr. Kelkar was instrumental in securing USA's technical collaboration in the establishment of IIT Kanpur, by persuading the then USA ambassador, John Kenneth Galbraith to locate the fledgeling institution on the outskirts of Kanpur.

Born on 1 June 1909, at Dharwar in Karnataka, P.K. Kelkar graduated with a B Sc in Physics from the Royal Institute of Science, Bombay, in 1933, and went on to gain a diploma in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. In 1937, he completed his PhD from the University of Liverpool, and returned that year to IISc to serve as a lecturer, before moving to the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute (VJTI), Bombay in 1943. In 1981 he was conferred with Honorary Degree, Doctor of Science by IIT Kanpur.

At VJTI, then the region’s leading engineering institute, Kelkar was Head of Electrical Engineering and Vice- Principal; his involvement with the IIT rubric began in mid-1955 with the nation’s second IIT, shortly after it had been decided to be set up in Bombay. IIT Bombay was to be set up with financial and academic assistance from the USSR, mediated by the UNESCO.

When Kelkar moved to IIT Kanpur in 1959 as its first Director, he set about infusing that Institute with the same characteristics: accomplished faculty from diverse schools of thought, and a healthy curricular presence for the sciences and the humanities. Dr P K Kelkar was a great visionary, had the will to achieve his dreams and knew how to make dreams happen in reality. It is this combination of a dreamer, missionary and doer in him that led him to successfully plan for the kind of technical education that matured into IIT Kanpur.

Dr Kelkar started IIT Kanpur in December 1959 in a borrowed room in the Canteen Building of the Harcourt Butler Technological Institute at Agricultural Gardens in Kanpur. The beginning of the Institute was thus like a small stream

which has now grown into a full river that is irrigating the whole world. This would not have been possible without the visionary leadership of Dr Kelkar. By the mid-1960s, just a few years into its operations, as much as 40% of the B Tech curriculum at IIT Kanpur was given over to these foundations. ‘Breaking out from the dark clouds of traditional systems in technical education,’ cites the book on IIT Kanpur’s history.

Dr. Kelkar died in October, 1990. IIT Kanpur, in 2001 renamed its central library as the P. K. Kelkar Library. The Kelkar Alumni Lecture was also instituted in recognition to a person who had made distinct contribution to the technical education in India through building and developing IIT Kanpur.

Alumni of IIT Kanpur have voted Dr. Kelkar as amongst the top 50 IITK alumni by e-voting. Alumni Association, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur honours Dr. P K Kelkar during the Golden Jubilee Alumni Convocation in Washington.

P K Kelkar Founder Director, IIT Kanpur and

Doctor of Science/1981

Late Anil Agrawal (BT/ME/1970)

Shri Anil Agarwal was Director, Centre for Environment, New Delhi is an eminent environmentalist. Born on November 23, 1947 in a business family of Kanpur, he graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1970. After graduation, for a few years, he worked towards organizing a small group FORUM FOR THOUGHTS where intellectuals gathered to discuss various burning problems of Indian Society such as hunger, pollution, water management, ecology, etc. Charged with the zeal to turn his ideas into reality, he decided to move to Delhi. He used his analytical training developed at IITK to tackle several problems, of environment with complete success. In order to reach a wide audience, he served as a Science correspondent to the Hindustan Times and The Indian Express and during the period authored and edited several publications.

Shri Anil Agarwal has spent most of his time and energy towards developing the awareness of environmental issues among the people and has set up the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. This is a voluntary organization engaged in creating public opinion about the problems of environment. Mr Agarwal is currently serving as its Director. One of the most significant achievements of this Centre has been the publication of The State of Environment: A Citizens Report in 1982 and 1985, which was a landmark in environmental studies in India.

Our country has recognized his unique contributions by giving him Padma Shri at a young age of thirty eight years. Shri Anil Agarwal has made an impact on International scene and has worked with several environmental group abroad. He has interacted with them on issues like afforetation, environmental impact of dams, pollution, renewable energy and natural resource management. For his journalistic work aimed at focusing world attention on problems of hunger and poverty, he received the first A H Boerma award by Food and Agricultural Organization. He continues to work in these areas with paramount concern to the country and the world as evidenced by several of his recent publications.

The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is proud of the achievements of Shri Agarwal. In recognition of his outstanding achievements, the institute confers upon Shri Anil Agarwal its Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala is presently a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He received his Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1975 and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maine, USA in 1977and 1979 respectively.From 1979 to 1981, he was with Washington State University as Assistant Professor. Since 1981 he has been teaching at IIT Madras. He leads the Telematics and Computer Network Group (TeNet) at IIT Madras. This group works closely working with the industry in the development of number of Telecommunications and Computer network systems. It has encouraged IIT alumni to set up R&D companies and work in partnership with the Tenet group to develop world class technologies. The product includes cor DECT wireless in local loop technology system, Fibre Access Network. Remote Access Switches, Ethernet switches, IP Switches, V5.2 Stack and Network Management Stack. Dr Jhunjhnwala is an academician who has established almost a personal research and development centre at IIT Madras with dozens of engineers working with him on many sponsored projects from industries simultaneously. He has developed Wireless Local Loop Technology in Indian, which is now approved by the DoT and chip set is brought by Analog Devices USA. He has also nurtured two Hi-Tech industries based on these technologies.

Dr Jhunjhunwala is a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Indian National Science Academy, and National academy of Science and a Governor of International Council for Computer Communications (ICCC). He has received the Hari Om Ashram Prerit Dr Vikram Sarabhai Research Award (1997) and the Millenium Medal at Indian Science Congress (2000). He has been awarded Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for his outstanding contributions in the field of Engineering Sciences in 1999. Dr Jhunjhunwala nominated for the Distinguished Alumnus Award of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for his outstanding contributions in the area of Communications Engineering.

Ashok Jhunjhunwala (BT/EE/75)

He used to ride his bicycle to the quarry to inspect the quality of stone and other equipment to ensure the commitment of the contractor. He never compromised on the quality and once forced a contractor to reconstruct a 6 km stretch of highway after discovering inferior quality of work. Mr Dubey invariably visited work sites several times a week, instead of the usual practice of once in months. While posted at Gaya on a project, he once got three engineers suspended for mishandling of funds. Mr Dubey was recently selected as the Deputy General Manager/Project Director of the Koderma Project Implementation Unit to handle 5,200 km stretch in the Golden Quadrilateral Corridor Project. Fate, however, had another destiny for this courageous and upright young man. Mr Dubey, while travelling by rickshaw to his house from railway station on the morning of November 27, 2003, was found lying dead near A P colony in Gaya. The young engineer, who stood up against corruption, was shot dead by a highly sophisticated weapon. It appears that some people who found it inconvenient to have Mr Dubey as the Project Director eliminated him. Mr Dubey did what he must in spite of personal consequences, obstacles, dangers and pressures. In recognition of his honesty, integrity, dedicated service and upright behavior in public life, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur confers upon him the Distinguished Alumnus Award for the year 2003-04.

Born in a small village in Sewan (Bihar), Mr Satyendra Kumar Dubey obtained High School from a village school. He graduated from IIT Kanpur with a B Tech degree in Civil Engineering in 1994 with second position in the class. Fuelled by his desire of contributing to public welfare, Mr Dubey chose to join the Indian Engineering Services as opposed to pursuing a glittering corporate career or greener pastures abroad. In July 2002, he was posted as an Assistant Project Manager at the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI). Honest and dedicated, Mr Dubey made his mark in the Rs 450 crore worth highway stretch.

Late Satyendra Kumar Dubey (BT/CE/94)

Dr Ashoke Sen is presently Professor in Mehta Research Institute, Allahabad. He is rated one of the most outstanding theoretical physicists in the world today. Dr Sen was born on July 15, 1956 and obtained his Bachelors degree in Physics from Calcutta University in 1975. He completed his MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1978. He was awarded PhD by SUNY at Stony Brook in 1982. He obtained his Post-doctoral Fellowship from Fermilab and SLA in USA. Dr Sen was also associated with Tata Institute of Fundamental Research from 1988-95. In recognition of his achievements, Dr Sen has been awarded the ICTP prize in 1989, S S Bhatnagar Award in 1994 and G D Birla Award in 1996. He has been elected as a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1991 and of the Indian National Science Academy in 1995. Professor Sen has made valuable contributions to the Superstring Theory, a theory that attempts to unify all the fundamental interactions of nature in a single framework. He has made important contributions to the field of classical solutions in string theories, string dualities, black hole solution in string theories and several other aspects of unified theories.

Ashoke Sen (MSC2/PHY/78)

Professor Sen is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Hailing from a middle class family with no business background, Shri Satish Kumar Kaura today represents the dominant force in the Indian picture tube manufacturing industry. His contributions have formed a vital input to the growth of the consumer electronics industry in the country. His products are also finding wide acceptance in the export market against stiff international competition. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is proud of the achievements of Shri Kaura. In recognitions of his outstanding achievements the institute here by confers upon Shri Satish Kaura its Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Satish Kumar Kaura (BT/EE/66)

Shri Satish Kumar Kaura, Managing Director, Samtel (India) Limited is an eminent industrialist. Born on 18 December 1944, he obtained his Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1966. Combining Technical expertise with entrepreneurial spirit, he founded Teletubes Electronics Limited in 1974 for the manufacture of picture tubes with a modest investment Following the success of this venture, Shri Kaura founded two more companies, namely, Samtel (India) Limited and Samtel Color Limited. This group of companies now controls over fifty percent of the domestic market in picture tubes and has a turn over well in excess of one hundred crore rupees.

Professor Padmanabhan Balram is a leading, internationally renowed bio-organic chemist of India. Born in 1949, he received his Master’s degree in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1969. He went on to obtain PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA, and did a year’s post-doctoral work with Nobel Laureate Professor R B Woodward at Harvard University. He returned to India in 1973, and joined as lecturer in Indian Institute of Sciences Bangalore, where he has remained since. He became a Professor in 1986 and is presently Chairman of the Molecular Biophysics Unit in IISc. Professor Balram is a prolific researcher, having published about 270 research papers in the area of bio-organic chemistry. His main interest has been the synthesis of polypeptides, their characterization using NMR and other techniques, and study of their interactions with ions and various molecules. He has been able to combine theory with experiment very remarkably and has reached great heights in research. Professor Balram’s work has been widely hailed, and he has received many laurels from peer bodies. To mention a few, the Young Scientist Medal of Indian National Science Academy in 1977, the S S Bhatnagar prize in 1986 and the G D Birla Award in 1994. He is fellow of several societies including the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, and the Third World Academy of Sciences, Trieste.

In addition to carrying out his own research, Professor Balram has guided several PhD and post-doctoral students, some of whom have already established themselves as outstanding scientists in India and abroad. He is member of several Editorial Boards, and has been Editor of the Current Science Journal. He has rendered singular service to the scientific community in this capacity. Besides, he is an acclaimed speaker in research for a, much sought after for his lucid and scholarly lectures. He is also an ardent spokesman for science in this country. IIT Kanpur takes pride in the achievements of its alumnus, Dr Balram. In recognition of his exemplary zeal and dedication to science, in general, and to his field of research, in particular, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur,Dr Balram is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Balaram Padmanabhan (MSC2/CHM/69)

Rajeev Motwani research spans a diverse set of areas in Computer Science, including databases, data mining & data privacy, web search & information retrieval, robotics, computational drug design, and theoretical computer science. He has authored two books and a large number of papers. He serves on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Computing, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

Prof. Motwani serves on numerous industry boards and advisory boards, Adchemy, DotEdu Ventures, Flarion, Google, Kaboodle, and Neopath Networks to name a few. He is a charter member of TIE (The IndUS Entrepreneurs) and is on the board of BASES (Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students). Some of his students helped create the GOOGLE search engine at Stanford and he was involved in its creation from the early days. He has received the Godel Prize, the Okawa Foundation Research Award, the Arthur Sloan Research Fellowship and the National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the Bergmann Memorial Award from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, and an IBM Faculty Award. Prof. Rajeev Motwani has been conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding contributions to research in Computer Science and Engineering.

Rajeev Motwani (BT/CSE/83)

P.D. Rai(Honorable MP - Lok Sabha) is the FIRST and ONLY graduate of ANY IIT (or IIM) to be popularly elected to parliament by a direct vote of the people. Shri Rai represents the Sikkim Parliamentary Constituency in the 15th (Current) Lok Sabha. Earlier he has had a long distinguished career as an entrepreneur, and in public service, most recently as Chairman of the Sikkim Industrial Development Corporation. Mr. Prem Das Rai was educated at IIT Kanpur (B. Tech, Chemical Engineering) and at IIM Ahmedabad (MBA). In 2002, he was awarded the prestigious and selective Eisenhower Fellowship (USA) for his contribution to Sikkim’s economic and industrial growth. Mr. PD Rai joined the SDF in its formative years. He served as the party’s General Secretary and has worked at all its various structural levels. He has helped with SDF’s manifesto and vision, and continues to work for the party and for the prosperity of the Sikkimese people. Most recently, he served as the Deputy Chairman of the State Planning Commission of the Government of Sikkim. Mr. PD Rai’s professional background includes: Senior Executive at Bank of America (Kolkata), Managing Director of Sikkim Milk Union, establishing Sikkim Flour Mills, Chairman of Sikkim Industrial Development and Investment Corporation (SIDICO) and Sikkim Scheduled Tribes and All Other Backward Classes Financial Development Corporation (SABCO),

P D Rai (BT/CHE/76)

founding Chairman of the Ecotourism and Conservation Society of Sikkim (ECOSS), and CEO (Northeast) of BASIX. At BASIX, one of India’s largest microfinance and livelihood promotion institutions, he implemented microfinance initiatives for Sikkim and other NE states by working with farmers, villagers, and non-governmental organizations. Mr. PD Rai is widely recognized as the man to have introduced Information Technology (IT) and sustainable ecotourism to Sikkim. Furthermore, he has contributed immensely to the building of NGO’s and to a proactive Sikkimese civil society.

He obtained his B. Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, in 1965. He obtained both his Masters in EE and Masters in Management degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been the mentor of a host of start-up ventures in USA. He was a major contributor to the development of the Internet TCP/IP architecture, and was the author of FTP and the early versions of email protocols. He is co-holder of 12 US patents on semiconductor drying and cleaning technologies.

Mr. Bhushan initiated and managed the Environmental Leadership Program at Xerox and authored the widely acclaimed ‘Business Guide to Waste Reduction and Recycling'. He was co-founder of YieldUP International, which went public on NASDAQ in 1995, and of Portola Communications, which was acquired by Netscape in 1997. In 1978-79 he worked on Rural Development in Allahabad, India, and was President of Indians for Collective Action, supporting grassroots development projects in India. He received the Community Service Award from the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce. He is presently the Chief Financial Officer of the IITK Foundation, USA, founding past president of PanIIT USA, and Coordinator for the PanIIT Global Committee. Mr. Abhay K. Bhushan has been conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur, for excellence in entrepreneurship and his outstanding contributions to social activities.

Abhay K. Bhushan (BT/EE/65)

Dr Manindra Agrawal, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, was born and schooled in Allahabad, after which he joined IIT Kanpur for the B. Tech in Computer Science and Engineering. Manindra subsequently obtained his doctoral thesis in Complexity Theory in 1991 also from IIT Kanpur. He then did a three-year stint at the Chennai Mathematical Institute in Madras before bagging the prestigious Humboldt fellowship at the University of Ulm in Germany. He returned to IIT Kanpur as a member of the faculty in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 1996. Manindra Agrawal is thus a home-grown Computer Scientist who began his work on complexity theory at IIT Kanpur itself. While also interested in Computational Number Theory and Cryptography, Manindra Agarwal is known as one of the foremost researchers in Complexity Theory. His work on the p-isomorphism conjecture has rejuvenated this field, and the strongest current result in this field is due to him. A major work on a polynomial time algorithm for primality testing has recently been announced by Manindra and his two students. This solves one of the most outstanding open problems of Mathematics and Computer Science - as prime numbers play a pivotal role in all the areas of Mathematics and Computer Science. The result is now considered as the biggest advancement in a decade in computational number theory. What has astounded the scientific community is the elegance of their solution - their algorithm is only thirteen lines long, and its proof of correctness takes less than three pages.

Manindra Agrawal (BT/CSE/86)

This discovery has bought in immense prestige to India, not just to IIT Kanpur and it will certainly provide the necessary courage and impetus to the young Indian researchers to set really challenging goals, rather than work incrementally at paradigms set by the research programmes of abroad. For this work Manindra was also awarded the Clay Research Award in October, 2002. Dr Manindra Agarwal has also received several other awards and honours. He is also a system builder. He has designed and implemented a symmetric-key algorithm Trinetra and built and productionized a crypto system for the Indian Navy. He along with a few other colleagues has also defined the Indian Smart Card operating system standards. Dr Manindra Agrawal is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding contributions in Complexity Theory and by developing a Polynomial Time Algorithm for Primality Testing.

Prof. Dhande got his B.Tech degree from Mechanical Engineering, University of Poona, and his Ph.D degree, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He is presently the Director of IIT Kanpur since October 2001. His areas of interest are Engineering Design & Manufacturing, Reverse Engineering, Rapid Prototyping & Rapid Tooling, CAD/CAM, Computer Graphics & Computational Geometry, Kinematics & Dynamics of Mechanisms. His Administrative & Committee Work includes Convener, Design & Development Cell, Member, Senate Library Committee, Coordinator, Computer Usage, ME Department, Member, Games & Sports Committee, Chairman, Swimming Pool Committee, Member, Steering Committee, Cultural Affairs, 1985-86 Chairman, Senate Election Committee, Member, Academic Senate, Member, Technical Review Committee for CAD, Department of Electronics, Government of India, New Delhi.,1980-87 Member, Technical Committee on Linkages, IFToMM , Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 1995 Head, Nuclear Engineering & Technology Programme, 1992 - 97 Member, Departmental Faculty Affairs Committee, ME Department, Member, Departmental Faculty Affairs Committee, CSE Department, Chairman,

Kelkar Alumni Lecture Committee, Member, R & D Committee, Organizing Secretary, NACOMM - 97 Conference, IIT Kanpur. He is a member of American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Member, Institution of Engineers (India), Member, National Computer Graphics Association (1983-84), Reviewer, Transactions of ASME, Reviewer, Mechanism and Machine Theory, Reviewer, CSIR Journal of Science & Technology, Examiner, Union Public Service Commission, New Delhi,Member, Selection Board, Defence Research & Development Organization, New Delhi, Reviewer, Journal Of Institution of Engineers (India),Member, Selection Committee, I.I.T. Bombay,Member, Selection Committee, I.I.T. Delhi,Member, Selection Committee, I.I.T. Kanpur, Member, Selection Committee, Aeronautical Development Agency, Bangalore ,Member, Selection Committee, I.I.T. Guwahati. He has received many awards and honours, to count a few: "Best Outgoing Student of the class of '63 at Modern High School", Poona, India (63), "Mr. D.P. Joshi and Mrs. J.D. Joshi Scholarship", Poona University (1967), "Mr. A.V.H. Pearce Scholorship", Poona University (1968) "Mr. D.P. Joshi and Mrs. J.D. Joshi Scholarship", Poona University. (1968) "Kirloskar Brothers Ltd. Scholorship", Poona University. (1968) "Best Student Award", Rotary Club, Poona, (1968) "Principal G.K. Ogale Memorial Prize", Poona University. (1969) "Gold Medal Award of the Institute of Engineers (India) for the overall performance in the Bachelor of Engineering programme"(1969) "Distinguished Lecturer", Computer Society of india. (1987) "Selected as a member of the TC 5.2 Working Group on CAD and Graphics of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP)", Zurich, Switzerland (1992) "Proctor & Gamble Best Paper Award, ASME Conference, (1996) "Distinguished Teacher, IIT Kanpur)" Has received the "Distinguished Alumnus Award", College of Engineering, Poona University in the year 1997, was elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, New Delhi and Elected as a Fellow of the IETE, India.

Sanjay G. Dhande (PHD/ME/75)

Shri Umang Gupta is the President and CEO of Keynote Systems Inc., California, USA, a high technology publicly traded NASDAQ Company. He is also the Chairman of IIT Kanpur Foundation USA and Co-Char of PanIIT USA. He was Founder President and Chief Executive Officer of Gupta Corporation, one of the first Indian entrepreneurs to take his company public in USA. The impact of his work stretches far beyond the size of his organization. Shri Gupta obtained Bachelor of Technology degree in Chemical Engineering in 1971 from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and MBA from the Kent State University, in Ohio, USA. He began his career in 1973 as Systems Engineer in the data processing division of IBM Corporation, soon rising to a senior marketing management positions before leaving IBM. During his career Shri Gupta was the Director of Marketing for Magnuson Computers, a manufacturer of IBM plug-compatible mainframes, he was also a Senior Executive with Oracle Corporation, including Vice President and General Manager of the Micro-Computer products division. In 1988, he co-authored the SQL programmers guide, an introductory to tutorial to the fundamental concepts, commands and keywords of SQL. Structured query language (SQL) is the brain child of Mr Gupta and is today the de facto standard for DBMS applications.

He is a leading authority in the area of SQL database management using PC’s LANs and main frame computers. He has written numerous papers and given many speeches on the topic in the United States and around the world. Mr Gupta’a mission is to enable the development and deployment of corporate business application with PC based client/server software solutions. Gupta’s products are widely used by fortune one thousand companies and have been instrumental in the fast growth of the emerging market for PC based client/server tools and databases. Shri Gupta was conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Umang Gupta (BT/CHE/71)

Mr. Shantanu Srivastava Mr. Shantanu Srivastava is presently the Managing Director & CEO, Ishan International Pvt. Ltd. and the Chairman of Ishan Foundation. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, with a B. Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering in the year 1977. In 1982 he was attached to the Indian Embassy, Hanoi, Vietnam, as Second Secretary. Guided by his entrepreneurial instinct he started his own business in 1990, and subsequently set up Ishan International Pvt. Ltd. in India. Mr. Srivastava, with his strong patriotic leanings, and love for his second home, Vietnam, has contributed immensely to promote India-Vietnam economic relations by providing technical consultation, process technology and infrastructure development to various critical industries. He has been instrumental in the expansion of Indian presence and exports in various sectors.

Mr. Srivastava helped the Embassy of India in setting up of the office of the Consulate General of India in Ho Chi Minh City. He also mobilized the Indian business community and set up the Indian Business Chamber in Vietnam in 1998 and was its founder chairman. He played a significant role in raising the bilateral trade between India and Vietnam. He is currently working on starting a 'Vietnam Business Center' in New Delhi for promotion of bilateral trade, investment and tourism. Mr. Srivastava expanded the activities of Ishan International Pvt. Ltd. into other asian countries like Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore and Bangladesh. He has also been actively associated with social welfare and cultural activities. He has now established an NGO, Ishan Foundation, to carry forward these social activities. Mr. Srivastava is one of the most decorated foreigners in Vietnam. For his extraordinary contribution for promotion of India Vietnam friendship and business cooperation, he received the 'Friendship Order of Vietnam' from the President of Vietnam. He received the Honorary Citizenship of Ho Chi Minh City in 1992. His name figures as one of the best friends of Vietnam in a book published in 2006, by the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO), Government of Vietnam. In recognition of his outstanding entrepreneurial contributions and for promoting Indo-Vietnam relations, Mr. Shantanu Srivastava is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Shantanu Srivastava (BT/ME/77)

Dr. Duvvuri Subbarao Dr. Duvvuri Subbarao is currently the twenty-second Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He earned his B. Sc. (Hons.) degree in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and completed his M. Sc. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Dr. Subbarao has also done his M. S. in Economics from the Ohio State University, USA, and was a Humphrey Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He completed his Ph. D. assignment in Economics from Andhra University. Dr. Subbarao has been working in the Indian Administrative Services since 1972. He has distinguished himself as an administrator, especially with a wide experience in public finance, both at the national and international level. He was the Joint Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance (1988-1993) and the Finance Secretary to the Government of Andhra Pradesh (1993-98), where he was actively involved in initiating fiscal reforms at the state level. Dr. Subbarao took over as the lead economist in the World Bank (1999-2004) where he worked on issues of public finance in countries of Africa and East Asia. While in the World Bank, he also task managed a flagship study on decentralization across major East Asian countries.

He has been Secretary to the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council (2005-2007), and served as the Finance Secretary, Government of India (2007-2008). Dr. Subbarao was a topper in the All India Civil Service examination (1972) for entry into Indian Administrative Services and Indian Foreign Services. He was one of the first IITians to join the civil service. He was also the recipient of Director's Gold Medal at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. In recognition of his outstanding managerial contributions, Dr. Duvvuri Subarao is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Duvvuri Subbarao (MSC2/PHY/73)

Dr. Shreesh Jadhav now Swami Sarvottamananda, obtained his B. Tech. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in the year 1989 and 1995 respectively. Presently, he is the Dean of Research and Coordinator of the Computer Science Department of the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University in Belur Math. Dr. Jadhav was deeply attracted by teachings of Swami Vivekananda during his stay at IIT Kanpur and followed Swamiji's call for service to the society along with spiritual development with great enthusiasm and sincerity.

He was deeply involved with the Vivekananda Samiti activities on the campus and taught children of several poor families on campus besides taking up their causes with the institute administration, sometimes to the consternation of the authorities. After finishing his Ph. D. assignment, to continue his social and spiritual quest, he took sanyas and joined the Ramakrishna Mission in Belur Math, Howrah. At the math, he has helped in setting up the Computer Science Department in the Vivekananda University run by the Ramakrishna Mission and has taught computer science to several thousand students. He has also continued to help the needy by raising money for them from well-wishers and friends. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the society at large, Dr. Shreesh Jadhav is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Shreesh Jadhav (BT/PHD/CSE/89/95)

Mr Rakesh Gangwal was the President and the Chief Executive Officer of the US Airways, Inc., The main operating arm of the of the US Airways Group, Inc. Mr Gangwal was born in 1953. He received the Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Master of Business Administration degree from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining US Airways, he served as executive vice president for Air France, beginning in the November, 1994. His Association with the airline industry began in September, 1980, when as an associate of Booz Allen & Hamilton, Inc, he worked closely with United Airlines. In 1984, he joined United as Manager-strategic-planning. He held a series of positions at United. Previously, Mr Gangwal had been a financial analyst in the product development group of Ford Motor Co. and a production and planning engineer with Philips India Ltd.

Mr Gangwal has served on the Board of Advisers of the University of Colarado (Denver), the Board of Trustees of Providence-St. Mel School (Chicago), the Board of Directors of the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. and Board of Trustees of the Alexian Brothers Medical Center (Elk Grove, III, USA). Mr Gangwal was conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Rakesh Gangwal (BT/ME/75)

Dr Arvind is a Professor in Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is one of the most respected persons in the world of computer science research. He was also on the Faculty of University of California, Irvine, CA, USA and IIT Kanpur. Since 1979 he has been teaching in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Arvind was born on May 15, 1947 and graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1969 earning bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering. Subsequently, he obtained his MS (1972) and PhD (1973) from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA.

His principal fields of work of Professor Arvind have been Computer Architecture, Programming Languages and Compilers, and Operating Systems. He has an impressive consulting record for many world renowned organizations like IBM, United Nations (UNDP), Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, Kawasaki etc. He is the editor of international journals and has many research papers and books to his credit. The “Charles W and Jennifer C Johnson Chair” was conferred upon him in 1992. He also received the Charles Bobbage Outstanding Scientist Award (IEEE) in 1974. At present, he is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and is also a fellow of IEEE. He has provided commendable service to the professional societies like ACM, IEEE, and IFIPS. Dr Arvind has been very supportive to the Computer Science and Engineering Department of IIT Kanpur and was a visiting faculty here for a year. Dr Arvind is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Arvind (BT/EE/69)

Dr. Verma has made special efforts to inculcate the practice of using experimental demonstrations during Physics teaching. He has developed about 60 such experiments at Plus-2 level. Besides this, informal open-ended experimental activities have been developed where students are initiated in a direction and they conceive, assemble and perform experiments on their own. This activity is financially supported by CTDE, IIT Kanpur. He has also been instrumental in establishing an open laboratory named “ANVESHIKA” at Saraswati Gyan Mandir Inter college, Indiranagar, Kanpur and school students are using it for their creative experimental activities. He has organized several meetings/workshops of school teachers at ANVESHIKA and IIT Kanpur, and model lectures using experimental demonstrations are being conducted. He has also performed administrative duties in various capacities and has been associated with social activities from his schooldays and is presently associated with Shiksha Sopan.

Prof Verma earned his Masters and Doctoral degrees from IIT Kanpur in the year 1978 and 1980 respectively and was given the Distinguished Teacher Award for the year 2002-03 by IIT Kanpur. He has published a number of books and papers including the most popular book for the higher secondary level called as the ‘Concepts of Physics’. Dr. Harish Chandra Verma joined the Department of physics at IIT Kanpur in 1994. He obtained his doctoral degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, working under the supervision of Prof. G.N. Rao. Subsequently, he worked as Lecturer and then Reader at Patna University, India. He is an Nuclear Experimental Physicist, whose chief interest lies in Condensed Matter and Materials Applications. Currently, he is working on Nano crystalline Magnetic Materials and Alloys Systems. Dr. Verma is also interested in Earth Science problems such as meteorites and extinction boundaries. He has written a number of text books on Physics at school and intermediate level. Currently he is writing a text book on Quantum Mechanics. He has over 25 years of teaching experience and about 27 years of Research experience. He has a number of publications to his credit including 9 books. He has taught a number of professional and core courses. These include, theory as well as laboratory courses. The reaction surveys show that the courses were very effective and students were greatly benefited. In the past 9 years, he has been given the responsibility to teach a core course 7 times as the instructor-in-charge and nine times as a tutor. And in most of these, he was adjudged as the “outstanding instructor/tutor” as announced in the senate and/or received appreciation letter from the Directors. He was selected for the Distinguished Teacher Award for the year 2002-03 by IIT Kanpur. Apart from teaching courses at various levels and carrying out the research activities, he also works for the improvement in the Physics education at school and college levels in India.

H C Verma (MSc2/PhD/PHY/78/80)

Dr. Balbir Singh graduated in Metallurgical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1980 and joined Research & Development Centre for Iron and Steel (RDCIS), Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), Ranchi as Research Engineer in 1981. In pursuance of his industrial research work at RDCIS, he submitted his thesis at IIT Roorkee and obtained Ph.D. degree in 1998. During his 28 years of association with R&D Centre, he contributed significantly not only to the field of metallurgy and material science, but also to the management of R&D projects by way of placing in extremely useful systems for monitoring and evaluating R&D innovations pursued in steel plants. Based upon his experience and expertise in both the fields he authored/ co-authored 14 reports, 23 papers, 11 copyrights and a patent. In recognition of his contributions to steel industry he has been bestowed upon several awards at the SAIL, state and the national levels. While working on manufacturing technology of value added steel products, such as high strength reinforcement bars, weather resistant steel, duplex stainless steel, cold heading quality steel, line pipe steel etc, Dr Balbir Singh provided metallurgical inputs to R&D projects in the form of alloy design, processing schedules, heat treatment, failure analysis and formulation of mathematical models. His significant contribution to 14 R&D projects/ assignments helped in improving product mix of SAIL, thereby leading to increased share in the domestic/ international markets. Two of his R&D projects on ‘As hot rolled ribbed bar production at BSP’ and ‘Development and production of hot and cold rolled CORTEN steel plates and sheets’ were adjudged the best implemented projects in 1985 and 1992, respectively.

His contribution for ‘Indigenous development and commercialization of hot and cold rolled weather resistant steel’ resulted in a National award for import substitution. The technologies developed through his involvement have been protected under intellectual property rights in the form of a patent and three copyrights. Besides, based on the developed technologies he has published 16 technical papers in various journals and/or presented in the national as well as international conferences. In recognition of his contribution to the field of metallurgy and material science he has been awarded the ‘Jharkhand Engineering Excellence Award 2001’ by The Institution of Engineers (India). The award was given away by the then hon’ble Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Shri Babulal Marandi. The contribution of Dr. Balbir Singh to the Integrated Project Management System, which is being practiced at RDCIS for the past 16 years, has been commendable. The system facilitates selection, micro-planning, monitoring and evaluation of R&D projects at the Centre. Evaluation system in particular, is unique and has great relevance to business in the increasingly competitive environments. As per the system, the benefit accrued by implementing an R&D innovation is quantified and subsequently certified by the Plant. Quantification of benefit in monetary terms, using suitably designed parameter sensitive standard procedures, enables RDCIS to assess how an innovation affects the dynamics of cost reduction, quality improvement and value addition. Moreover, it helps in justifying many fold returns on R&D investments. For example, R&D projects pursued by RDCIS during 2008-09 have contributed Rs. 515 Crore to the bottom line of SAIL by returning about 12 times revenue to the company. In order to ensure high confidence level of R&D services provided to Steel Plants, customer satisfaction index (CSI) is also computed based upon feedback received from the customer on each accomplished project. An average CSI value of 4.8 at 5.0 Scale has demonstrated commendable service level of RDCIS during the fiscal 2008-09. As far as the extent of contribution of Dr Singh in developing such useful systems of project management is concerned, they have been brought to the present level with his involvement, right from the conceptual stage. Based upon these systems and output analysis thereon, 6 numbers of papers have been presented in the national conferences and 8 numbers of copyrights have been registered/ filed under intellectual property rights act. AWARDS / RECOGNITIONS 1.Jharkhand Engineering Excellence Award 2001 2.National Award for Import Substitution 91-92 3.Best implemented project award in the year 1992 for the project: 4.Best implemented project award in the year 1985 for the project 5.Best Technical Group award 1993 6.Best Infrastructure & Support Group award 1996

Balbir Singh (BT/MME/80)

Muktesh (Micky) Pant is the President, Global Branding for Yum! and Chief Marketing Officer for Yum! Restaurants International. In this role, Micky provides global focus and prioritization of the company’s actions and to establish a Global strategy in over 100 countries. Yum! is the world’s largest restaurant company in terms of units, with 35,000 restaurants of the following brands - KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, A&W and Long John Silvers. Prior to joining Yum! in 2005, Micky served as Global Chief Marketing Officer for Reebok International. He worked for Reebok for ten years in various marketing capacities, and at the time also served as a Director on the board of the American College of Sports Medicine. He was instrumental in establishing Reebok in emerging markets in Asia. During his tenure as Global CMO, Reebok was the winner of two Golden Lion awards at the Cannes Film Festival, considered by many to be the highest awards in advertising, and recognized as the Interactive Marketer of the Year by AdWeek magazine in 2003. As Chief Marketing Officer of global marketing, Micky Pant oversees the marketing of the Reebok brand globally. In the past year, he has overseen several successful marketing campaigns, including “Terry Tate, office linebacker,” and the creation of “Rbk”—a new urban collection featuring signature shoes for Jay-Z and 50 Cent.

Based on such campaigns as Terry Tate, Ad Week recently named Reebok Interactive Marketer of the Year, Footwear News selected Reebok as “Marketer of the Year” and the Cannes Film Festival choose the company for a Golden Lion. Micky studied Chemical Engineering at IIT Kanpur and started his career with Unilever in India, and spent fifteen years with Unilever in India and the UK. He subsequently worked for PepsiCo and Reebok. Micky lives in Plano, TX with his wife and daughter. He is fond of running, astronomy and playing bridge

Muktesh Pant (BT/CHE/76)

He has served in Kathmandu, Nepal, in those tumultuous days leading to the introduction of democracy in that country; in Pakistan, at a particularly difficult period in our bilateral relations that witnessed some of the most tricky diplomatic situations in that country, such as the IC 814 airplane hijacking and its violent aftermath and the Kargil War, the Agra Summit and the risky situation during operation Parakram following the terrorist attack on our Parliament in 2001. Sudhir has been an Ambassador in Thimphu, Bhutan during the historic period when the transition to constitutional democracy and the coronation of its present King was taking place. Another area of Sudhir's specialisation has been the Arab world, where he served as India's Ambassador to the UAE and earlier in Egypt and Algeria. He studied Arabic to meet the requirements of this specialization. He has also considerable experience of multilateral diplomacy at the UN in New York, when he served as a member of India's delegation to the UN Security Council when India was a member of that body in 1991-92, just when the former Soviet Union collapsed and the balance of power in the world began to change with the first Gulf war. Sudhir is now India's Ambassador to Germany, Europe's economic powerhouse and a leading innovator of technologies for the future. Today, in areas such as climate change and green energy issues, this diplomatic engagement takes on a special relevance. All through his diplomatic career that has take him to so many different parts of the world, he has kept up his keen interest in ornithology and wildlife, in particular, and conservation issues, in general. Mr. Sudhir Vyas has been conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding achievements in managing the diplomatic relations of India with several countries

Mr. Sudhir Vyas was the President Gold Medalist of IIT Kanpur from the Class-of-75. He was amongst the first few IITians to change course and opt for an altogether different profession. He sat for the All India Civil Services examinations conducted by the Union Public Service Commission to top the IAS in 1977. He joined the Indian Foreign Service the same year. As a student at IIT Kanpur, Sudhir had wide ranging interests from history to art, but he was especially known for his interest in and knowledge of wildlife, in particular, ornithology. A keen bird watcher, he had taken several initiatives to spread such interests at IIT Kanpur. In the course of his diplomatic career spanning 32 years now, Sudhir has spent almost a one-third dealing with India's neighbours where India's foreign policy faces some of its severest challenges, either from those capitals or handling their affairs from the Foreign Ministry in Delhi.

Sudhir Vyas (BT/EE/75)

Dr. Anil Kumar Chopra obtained his B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Houston in the area of fluid mechanics and multi-phase flows. Dr. Anil Chopra entrepreneurial skills eventually led him to start PetroTel Inc. in 1999. His company's vision is to help find major sources of hydrocarbons in India and across the globe using the latest technology available to only a few multinationals. One of the first consulting projects of Dr. Chopra and PetroTel was the seismic interpretation of Reliance's onshore and offshore blocks. This work led to the biggest discovery of gas in India. PetroTel also helped Reliance put together the very first field development plan of the Dhirubhai field. Today, Dhirubhai field produces more than 1 BSCF/day of gas and is supplying India's energy needs. Dr. Chopra and his company PetroTel's work led to another giant discovery in the KG basin in India with GSPC. As a result of this discovery, PetroTel has executed the field development plan for GSPC for commercialization of the Deen Dayal Field. Dr. Anil Chopra is presently the Chairman and Founder of Petro Tel Inc. as well as Plano Research Corporation. Dr. Chopra is a visionary entrepreneur who has pioneered a number of technological innovations in the field of energy resources across various countries in the world, including India. He is one of the few IIT-ians that have had long-term success in the oil and gas industry. Today, Dr. Chopra's PetroTel is recognized worldwide as an industry leader in oil and gas field consulting in the areas of enhanced oil recovery, reservoir characterization and simulation, coal bed methane, production, and exploration technologies. It provides professional consulting and advisory services along with integrated project management support to domestic and international petroleum companies.

Dr. Anil Chopra has been continuing his dream of providing the world with its energy needs for over three decades. He started a new company, PetroJava International Inc. in 2004. Dr. Anil Chopra has always been very thoughtful in supporting cutting edge research and giving back to the society. In the year 2004 he funded the Distinguished PetroTel Lecture series in Chemical Engineering at IIT Kanpur. He has been a prominent supporter of the Ispatbharti Foundation, which works towards energy efficiency technologies for the small and medium manufacturing enterprises in India. To help deserving students to achieve their dream of high quality education Dr. Chopra started the Legacy Park Foundation in 2003 to provide scholarships for under-privileged students. Dr. Anil Kumar Chopra has been conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding entrepreneurial contributions in the field of petroleum, software and energy, as well as service to society in promoting education.

Anil Chopra (BT/CHE/76)

Yashavant is a pioneer in IT Education in India. A true entrepreneur, he has single-handedly set benchmarks for IT education and has played a major role in taking IT learning to every nook and corner of this country. He has authored several bestsellers over last 15 years and helped shape careers of millions of programmers throughout Asia. Most recently, he has created several interactive training titles for KSET’s flagship “Quest” Content Delivery Platform which have become a stellar success. In recognition of his immense contribution to IT education in India, he has been most recently awarded the "Best .NET Technical Contributor" and "Most Valuable Professional" awards by Microsoft. His current passion is Internet Technologies, Device Drivers and Embedded Systems.

Yashavant holds a B.E. from VJTI Mumbai and an M. Tech. from IIT Kanpur Kanetkar founded KSET with a single-minded focus on IP creation. KSET Pvt. Ltd. is a market leader in Content Development, Content Delivery and IT Education. KSET and its founders have created products that include 25 books published in English, Hindi, Gujarati and Japanese. In the last 15 years these titles have a combined sale of more than 3 million copies. KSET has created a unique Content Delivery Platform (patent pending) called “Quest”. In less than eight months since its release, it has been adopted by more than 15,000 users in more than 27 countries. The unique Quest methodology of delivering content has found immense popularity in Universities and Corporate world alike. KSET’s promoters have trained more than 50000 students and professionals across the world through Instructor- led trainings, Vision Seminars, Hands-On Workshops and eLearning. KSET’s partial client list includes companies like Phillips, Motorola, National Instruments, ST Micro, T Systems, Microsoft, L & T, Wipro, Phoenix, Infineon, GE HealthCare, Singapore Telecom, Accenture, Air India etc. More recently, KSET has made forays in the field of Avionics Products with it's products like ARINC 717 Data Visualizer and Analysis tool.

Yashwant Kanetkar (MT/ME/88)

Anjali Joshi is an accomplished technology executive who has held significant leadership positions in high-growth companies. She is a currently a Senior Director of Product Management at Google where she leads groups focused on the software, network and computing infrastructure, translation products and internationalization/localization of Google products. The Google Infrastructure is Industry’s most advanced infrastructure in computing space and all its products go through Anjali’s product management organization. Prior to that, Anjali was Executive Vice-President of Engineering at Covad Communications, the first DSL Competitive Carrier in the US and helped the company grow from a startup to a public company. Anjali spent several years at Bell Labs working in the areas of voice and high speed data communications. Anjali received her BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Kanpur, a Masters in Computer Engineering from SUNY and a Masters in Engineering Management from Stanford University.

Anjali Joshi (BT/EE/81)

Anjali has been active with IITK Foundation as a Director and has made excellent contributions. She also demonstrated leadership in drafting the mission statement and structure for the Foundation for next 10 years.

Mr Som Mittal has had a distinguished managerial career in different companies and is credited with the achievement of turning around Digital Equipment (India) Ltd (DEIL), of which he is the Managing Director. Under his tenure, DEIL’s financial performance improved from a loss of Rs 6.23 crores in 1993-1994 to a profit of Rs 15.2 crores in 1995-1996.

Mr Mittal was born on February 7, 1952 and graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1973 earning Bachelors degree in Metallurgical Engineering. Subsequently, he did his post graduation in 1975 from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Through a metallurgical engineer from IITK (by training), Mr Mittal has demonstrated his competence in managing a large company in the high technology sector of information technology drawing on the analytical skills he developed at IITK. Earlier in Wipro Infotech, he established peripherals business which in 5 years time has grown to over Rs 100 crores. The conceiving and setting up the peripheral manufacturing and marketing with technical collaboration of Seiko-Epson in a very short duration was a significant milestone. The peripheral factory was the first to achieve ISO 9000 certification in the Wipro group and was also the first unit to be nominated for Rajiv Gandhi Quality Award. As the CEO of Business Solution Division from 1993-1994, Mr Mittal consolidated the position of Wipro PC product in the market place. Prior to this in SRF Ltd he setup the Joint Venture in record time of 7 months with detailed planning and managing the project without cost over was a major achievement.Mr Som Mittal is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Som Mittal (BT/MME/73)

Prof. Ashok Misra, presently Director, Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay, is a distinguished engineer and scientist, who has served the field of education as a teacher and a researcher for more than three decades. During his tenure as Director from 2000 to the present, IIT Bombay has been transformed into a leading R&D institute while at the same time maintaining its reputation as a leader in quality engineering education. Under his leadership, all important research indicators have improved substantially. The quantum of sponsored research funding, the number of quality research papers published and the number of Ph.D. students graduated have all increased significantly during his tenure. More than 150 Ph.D. students graduated from IIT Bombay this year, which is a significant landmark. Among other pioneering efforts, Prof. Misra has led the development of entrepreneurship activities at IIT Bombay, including the formation of SINE, the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship which is the technology business incubator at IIT Bombay. International collaborations and interactions have also significantly increased during Prof. Misra's tenure. As a visionary in the field of education, he has inspired several other academic institutions to pursue excellence through improvements in the quality of education and quality of the management of education. The success story of IIT Bombay has been noticed not only in India but also abroad, and Prof. Misra has been invited to serve on several external academic committees. He was a Member, Committee for Regulation and Operation of Foreign Universities, Ministry of HRD, Government of India; Member, International Academic Advisory Panel, Ministry of Education, Government of Singapore; and Member, National Advisory Board, College of Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He is a Member, Independent Scientific Advisory Board, African Institute of Science & Technology, a World Bank initiative. He is on the Governing Board of several national institutes such as National Institute for Training in Industrial Engineering, Society for Applied Microwave Electronics & Engineering Research, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute and Whistling Woods International - International Institute for Film, Television & Media Arts, Mumbai. He is a Member, Advisory Council, National Institute of Information Technology, Rajasthan. He serves on the Academic Council of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and was invited to serve on the Advisory Board of CSIR, South Africa. He also serves as Member Expert or Advisor in several national committees for research and development programmes in India. Prof. Misra obtained his B.Tech. degree in Chemical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1968, M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tufts University in 1969 and Ph.D. in Polymer Science & Engineering from University of Massachusetts in 1974.

In October 2007, he was conferred with the degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) by the Thapar University, Patiala. After working in Monsanto for three years he joined IIT Delhi in 1977 where he served as the Head of the Centre for Polymer Science & Engineering during 91-94 and as Dean, Alumni Affairs & International Programmes during 1997-2000. Prof. Misra's research and development contributions have earned him several awards and honours. These include the Fellowship of the National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI); Fellowship of the Indian National Academy of Engineering; Fellowship of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers; and Fellowship of the Maharashtra Academy of Sciences. He is currently President of the National Academy of Sciences, India. Prof. Misra has received the M. Santhappa Silver Jubilee Award given by the Society of Polymer Science in recognition of "Outstanding Research and Leadership in Polymer Science", and the Materials Research Society of India (MRSI) Medal. He was a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University. He has received the Qimpro Platinum Standard 2005, Statesman for Quality in Education Award. He received the Dean's Medal from the School of Engineering, Tufts University in 2006 in recognition as a Distinguished Alumnus. Prof. Misra has led by example, and has coauthored more than 100 papers, two books and 6 international patents. He has served as a member on the Editorial Board of two international journals. He has guided 18 Doctoral theses and 51 Masters theses. Prof. Misra's professional expertise is highly valued by industry and agencies. He has carried out several important sponsored research projects and he has been an active consultant for polymer related industries. He has served and is currently serving as a Director on the boards of several major companies; these include National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), Reliance Industries Limited and Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers (RCF). Prof. Misra is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Ashok Misra (BT/CHE/68)

He has done, and continues to do, groundbreaking innovative experiments that focus on the functional organization of the visual thalamus and cortex and mechanisms underlying the development and plasticity of connections in the visual pathways. With several papers in Nature and Science on themes like ‘visual projections into auditory thalamus and cortex’, ‘multiple representations of the body within “SI” primates’, ‘retinogeniculate terminations and morphological differences between X- and Y-cell axons’, ‘neural activity and the development of brain circuits’ etc. Dr Sur has more than 140 publications in the top neuroscience journals. Dr Sur has supervised more than 30 doctoral and post-doctoral research fellows. As an excellent teacher and the winner of the GSCT Award (1989) for his teaching at MIT 1989 and School of Science Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2000) at MIT, Dr Sur is winner of several prestigious awards in his field. He has received Meghnad Saha Award, IEEE (1976), Charles Judson Herrick Award of the Americal Association of Anatomists (1983), Whitaker Health Sciences Fund Faculty Award (1986), Distinguished Neuroscientist Award ASIOA (1987), McKnight Neuroscience Development Award (1988), the TOKEN Award United Nations Development Program (1991) and the Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer Award (2001). He has also received AP Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1985), McDonnell-Pew Visiting Professorship at Oxford University (1997), Hans-Lukas Tumor Scholar in the Brain Science MIT (1997), Sherman Fairchild Chair of Neuroscience (1998) and the Distinguished Overseas Lecturer, Australian Neuroscience Society (2000). Member of the Scientific Advisory Board, Department of Biotechnology, India and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Encylopedia of Neuroscience, Dr Mriganka Sur is a member of boards of the most bodies/ panels in the field. He is also a member of several advisory committees and administrative services at MIT. He has given many invited talks and participated in expositions in the field of neuroscience almost everywhere in the world. Dr Sur is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding and seminal contributions in the field of Neuroscience.

Dr Mriganka Sur (BT/EE/74) is the Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA. After graduating from IIT/K in Electrical Engineering in 1974, Dr. Sur completed his graduate studies from the Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. After serving in the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, Department of Neurobiology and Behaviour at SUNY Stony Brook, Section of Neuroanatomy at School of Medicine of Yale University, Dr.Mriganaka Sur joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in 1986 where he is serving as the Head of the Department since 1987. Professor Sur is one of the leading neuroscientists in the world today with his ars of specialization in fields such as (a) organization of somatosensory cortex in primates, (b) organization of the sensory-perceptual systems of the brain, (c) activity-dependent mechanisms of pattern formation in retinal projections to the visual thalamus (c) rewiring cortex and the role of visual activity in cortical development and plasticity, (d) cortical circuits and dynamic processing networks in visual cortex and (e) cellular, systems and computational approaches to critical networks and processing.

Mriganka Sur (BT/EE/74)

Dr Pawan Kumar Goenka (BT/ME/75) is currently the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd., Mumbai. After completing his B Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1975, he went to Cornell University from where he obtained his MS as well as PhD in Mechanical Engineering. His MS work on lubrication and tribology of artificial hip joints and subsequent work on engine lubrication and tribology for his PhD thesis at Cornell University gave him wide spread recognition. After obtaining the Doctorate, Dr Pawan Kumar Goenka joined General Motors, Global Research and Development Center at Detroit, where he continued research in engine lubrication & tribology. He developed a software package “FLARE” (Friction and Lubrication Analysis of Lubricating Reciprocating Engines), which is widely used in automobile industry worldwide. Later, he led GM Engine Research activities in mechanical components and NVH (Noise, Vibration, Harshness). After serving for 14 years at GM, Dr Goenka returned to India and joined Mahindra and Mahindra (R & D) in 1993. Dr Goenka's first task in Mahindra’s R&D was to introduce CAD-CAM and deal with problems related to engine and vehicle NVH. This led to a project for reworking the guts of the Armada vehicle and then Chrysler-Cherokee project. He subsequently moved to other projects such as Armada 98, Bolero and Load King. The latest in this series is Scorpio, which has been conceptualized and designed by the in-house Integrated Design and Manufacturing team led by Dr Goenka. "Scorpio was the most exciting project any automotive engineer could think of being involved with. Our team was involved in everything, from market research to design to setting up the plant. I could never have got such an opportunity at GM" says Dr Goenka. Launch of Scorpio helped Mahindra’s move into the urban market segment and helped launch SUV segment in India. Dr Goenka is internationally recognized for his pioneering work in engine tribology. His methods for the analysis of engine bearing and engine friction, which were developed 20 years ago, still remain in use as a common reference in automotive engineering. He is an expert in vehicular emission control and alternative fuels.

Dr Pawan Goenka was conferred prestigious "SAE Fellowship" by the Society of Automotive Engineers, USA in 2004, the highest grade of membership bestowed by SAE International for outstanding engineering and scientific accomplishments, resulting in meaningful advances in automotive, aerospace, and commercial vehicle technology. The fellowship program, established in 1975, recognizes only 20 scholars worldwide for this honor every year. He is the second Indian recipient of this honor. Dr Goenka is also Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering. He is highly respected in Indian industry for his phenomenal commitment to engineering design and quality assurance. He is a member of National Committee on Quality, constituted by Confederation of Indian Industries (CII). Dr Goenka moved into his current role of COO of Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. in April, 2003. Dr Pawan Goenka is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Pawan Kumar Goenka (BT/ME/75)

Dr Pradeep Sindhu, the Vice-Chairman and CTO of Juniper Networks, the company that he founded in 1997, is responsible for its technical road map and plays an active role in the day-to-day design and development of future products. Juniper Networks, provider of purpose-built systems routers that meet the scalability, performance, density and compatibility requirements of rapidly evolving, optically enabled internet protocol networks, is today a leading internet infrastructure company with market capitalization of about sixty billion US dollars. Gone public in 1999, the company is only second to Cisco in the market share of Internet backbone routers and provides new IP infrastructure solutions for the world’s leading service providers. After completing BTech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1974, Dr Sindhu obtained his MS and PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Prior to founding Juniper, Dr Sindhu was a key member of the technical team at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC. His research specialized in VLSI design tools and high-speed interconnects for shared-memory multiprocessor systems. This work led to the commercial development of Sun Microsystem's first high-performance multiprocessor system family, which included the SS1000 and SS2000. Dr Sindhu played key roles in the architecture, design, and development of these machines. Dr Sindhu also played a central role in the architecture, design, and development of the M160/M40/M20 routers ? Juniper's flagship Internet router family. The Juniper device fuses Dr Sindhu’s VLSI expertise onto fiber optic breakthrough to deliver any-to-any IP connectivity at multi-gigabyte speeds, complete with quality-of-service (QoS) management. Dr Sindhu’s contribution to router technology for the Internet will remain a legacy for the next several decades. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is proud of the achievements of Dr Pradeep Sindhu. In recognition of his outstanding and seminal contributions in developing path-breaking technologies for the VLSI design tools and high-speed interconnects for shared-memory multiprocessor systems and using them to set up and manage top telecommunication companies of truly international standards, the Institute hereby confers upon Dr Pradeep Sindhu its Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Pradeep Singh Sindhu (BT/EE/74)

After serving IIT Kanpur as Operations Manager in its Computer Center, he joined Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). During his 19 years at TCS, he contributed to its growth to make it one of the largest software and management consultancy organizations. In 1992, Mr. Kumar moved to RPG-Enterprises as Chief Executive of International Software Division of its joint venture with Fujitsu of Japan and ICL of UK. He was instrumental in making Fujitsu-ICIM the seventh largest software services export company of India. In 1996, Mr. Kumar joined IBM Global Services India as its President. Thereafter, Mr. Kumar was the President of DSQ Software Ltd for a year . From 2001 Mr. Kumar was Founder, Chairman and CEO of vMoksha Ltd. He is currently a Director on the Boards of Gujarat Venture Fund and Lord Krishna Bank. Mr. Pawan Kumar has been conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award, of IIT Kanpur, for his excellence in entrepreneurship.

Pawan Kumar (BT/CE/69)

Dr Prabhakar (Prabhu) Goel is the Chairman of Duet Technologies Inc, a company which is engaged in designing chips as well as developing software in electronic design automation and telecommunications networking. Dr Goel earned his Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and received Presidents Gold Medal Award. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, US in 1974. After this, he held positions in Engineering and Management with IBM and Wang Laboratories. Dr Goel has been a leading entrepreneur and was Founder and CEO of Gateway Automation Software, which was acquired by Cadence. In 1990 Dr Goel was recognized as Entrepreneur of the year for New England by Inc. Magazine and Ernst Young. In addition to being successful entrepreneur, Dr Goel has been very active n supporting community organizations both in US and in India. In 1994, Dr Goel initiated the Foundation for Excellence Project which support very bright but needy students who otherwise would not be able to complete their education. Dr Goel was recognized for his outstanding community service and their support for education in India by Indians for Collective Action in November 1996. Dr Goel is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Prabhakar Goel (BT/EE/70)

Dr Prabhakar (Prabhu) Goel is the Chairman of Duet Technologies Inc, a company which is engaged in designing chips as well as developing software in electronic design automation and telecommunications networking. Dr Goel earned his Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and received Presidents Gold Medal Award. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, US in 1974. After this, he held positions in Engineering and Management with IBM and Wang Laboratories.

Prof. Rajeev Sangal is the Director of the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, a new-era research university in India. He holds B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, and MS and PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Besides heading the university, he also leads the largest academic centre on language technology in India, located at IIIT Hyderabad. His team is working on machine translation systems from English to Indian languages. His work on machine learning combines statistical methods with linguistics structures for the processing of language. Work is also being undertaken pertaining to knowledge representation, information extraction, search engines, and speech. Earlier, while he was a Professor at IIT Kanpur, his team developed language access systems (a kind of machine translation systems) from five Indian languages to Hindi. Rajeev Sangal has been involved in Machine Translation and NLP in India for more than 20 years. He has authored 3 books, and a large number of research papers in NLP and AI. He is the President of NLP Association of India, and a member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics, journal of ACL. He has served on the editorial board of Computer Society of India's journal from 1995-2003. He referees for ACL, COLING and AFNLP conferences. He was the Program Chair of ICON-02 and ICON-04.

Prof. Rajeev Sangal, IIIT-H’s Director and Head of IIIT-H’s Language Technologies Research Center (LTRC), has, in recognition of his contribution to engineering research in India – particularly his pioneering work in machine translation and language technologies – been named a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), (October 2009). Prof. Rajeev Sangal, IIIT-H’s Director and Head of IIIT-H’s Language Technologies Research Center (LTRC), has, in recognition of his contribution to engineering research in India – particularly his pioneering work in machine translation and language technologies – been named a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), (October 2009).

Rajeev Sangal (BT/EE/75)

Nitin Saxena obtained his B Tech in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002 from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur where he is currently a Doctoral student. As a B Tech student, Nitin Saxena was part of the team that recently announced a polynomial time algorithm for primality testing. This solves one of the most outstanding open problems of mathematics and Computer Science - as prime numbers play a pivotal role in all the areas of Mathematics and Computer Science. The result is now considered as the biggest advancement in a decade in computational number theory.

What has astounded the scientific community is the elegance of the solution - the algorithm is only thirteen lines long, and its proof of correctness takes less than three pages. Nitin is a very gifted individual. Besides doing excellently in his field of study, computer science, he has also demonstrated his talent in mathematics. Nitin had ranked 10th in the Indian National Mathematics Olympiad, and was awarded the prize for the Best Solution to a challenging problem. What, however, distinguishes him from the majority, is the motivation and dedication to work at hard problems. By carrying out the outstanding work on primality testing, Nitin has undoubtedly done IIT Kanpur and its alumni immensely proud. He, along with his team members, has demonstrated in the most decisive fashion that the very best possible research work can be done at IIT Kanpur. Nitin Saxena has been conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for his outstanding contributions in Complexity Theory by developing a Polynomial Time Algorithm for Primality Testing.

Nitin Saxena (BT/CSE/02)

Dr Ravi Sethi is the President, Avaya Labs. Avaya Labs is focused on creating business communications applications, customer relationship management innovations, messaging solutions, personalized information portals, business infrastructure and architectures, Web centers, hosted solutions, data networks and services for Avaya's customers. In his role as head of research for Avaya, Dr Sethi is responsible for advancing high potential technologies, understanding customer trends and needs, and seeking out a variety of alliances in academia and industry to introduce leading-edge technologies and competitive products. Prior to this appointment, Dr Sethi had been the Senior Vice President, Communications Science Research at Bell Labs, where he led a team of 300 researchers in areas such as data networks, network management, storage systems, network applications, speech, content distribution and delivery, software engineering and security. Dr Sethi began his career at Bell Labs as a summer intern in 1969. He joined Bell Labs full time in 1976, after serving as assistant professor, Computer Science, at Penn State University. In 1996, Dr Sethi was named Research Vice President, Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Bell Labs, and in 1997, took on the additional role of chief technical officer for Lucent's Communications Software Group. Dr Sethi has made significant contributions in the areas of compilers, programming languages and algorithms. He has received the Bell Labs Distinguished Technical Staff Award, and has been named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. During his graduation days at IIT Kanpur he and five other students were picked to help the professor teaching one of the first university computer courses ever taught in the country. Dr Sethi holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering, specializing in Computer Science, from Princeton University. He is the co-author of the influential textbook, "Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools," and the author of the textbook, "Programming Languages: Concepts and Constructs." His books have been translated in Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Korean. While working for Bell Labs he was awarded the "Distinguished Technical Staff award", and was named a "Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery". In 1996 he was named research vice president in charge of computing and mathematical sciences and, additionally, in 1997, chief technical officer for Lucent's Communications Software Group.

He has authored 3 books, 60 journal publications, 33 presentations and publications in the areas of programming languages, algorithms and compilers. He is best known as one of three authors of the classic Computer Science textbook, Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools also known as the Dragon Book and the text book titled "Programming Languages: Principles and Practice. Served as a member of Advisory Committees of University of California, Riverside, Princeton University, Penn State University and University of Puerto Rico, Served as member of the Editorial Board of Science of Computer Programming; Served member of several conference programme committees as well chair of various ACM symposia; Member, SIGPLAN, Member at large, SIGACT, Fellow of Association of Computing Machinery and winner of Distinguished Member of Technical Staff of Bell labs Dr Ravi Sethi is nominated for the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding work in the field computer science and managing a research group in the same field.

Ravi Sethi (BT/ME/68)

He obtained his B. Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Ph. D degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Goyal joined IBM Corporation in 1982 as research staff member at the TJ Watson Research Center. He was named Vice President, Services & Software, and Director, Computer Sciences, in 1996. In that capacity, he was responsible for setting IBM's long-term research direction in computer sciences, as well as ensuring that the best emerging technologies contribute to IBM's services offerings and software products. His early work in scalable databases led to IBM's Universal Database (DB2) family. He was also responsible for setting the early direction in web application servers which lead to the development of WebSphere product family.

He led the research efforts to create the RS/6000 SP supercomputer and the Deep Blue World Chess Champion computer. His main research interests are high performance systems, databases and distributed systems. He has authored several journal publications in various fields and has received five outstanding innovation awards from IBM. He was elected an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to the theory and practice of highly dependable systems, and elected an ACM Fellow in recognition of outstanding technical and professional achievements in the field of information technology. Dr. Ambuj Goyal has been conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding managerial contributions.

Ambuj Goyal (BT/EE/78)

Dr. Jitendra Malik, B Tech (IITK,EE,1980), PhD in Computer Science (Stanford University), Chair, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California, Berkeley, He is currently the Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Computer Science Division, Department of Electrical Engg and Computer Sciences at University of California, Berkeley. He received the gold medal for the best graduating student in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, a Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the Rosenbaum fellowship for the Computer Vision Programme at the Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley,. He was awarded a Miller Research Professorship in 2001. He is a fellow of the IEEE. He is also a faculty of the Cognitive Science and Vision Science groups. He served as the Chair of the Computer Science Division and as Department Chair of EECS. Jitendra Malik is one of the most distinguished scientist in the field of Computer Vision and according to his student Prof. Pitro Perona of Caltech, he is one of the two most cited computer vision visionary in the world. With 24 Ph.D's and over 150 research papers in the field of Computer vision makes him one of the most cited scientist in the world. Jitendra Malik was born in Mathura, India in 1960. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. In January 1986, he joined the University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently the Arthur J. Chick Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also on the faculty of the Cognitive Science and Vision Science groups. His research interests are in computer vision and computational modeling of human vision. His work spans a range of topics in vision including image segmentation and grouping, texture, stereopsis, object

recognition, image based modeling and rendering, content based image querying, and intelligent vehicle highway systems. He has authored or co-authored more than a hundred research papers on these topics.He received the gold medal for the best graduating student in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1980, a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989, and the Rosenbaum fellowship for the Computer Vision Programme at the Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge in 1993. He received the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, in 2000. He was awarded a Miller Research Professorship in 2001, Arcther J Chick Endowed Chair in 2002, Longuet Higgins Prize in 2007 and the list goes on. Jitendra is an humble, quiet, and amicable person who was quite popular as a student and was Senator of his batch. He participated in Inter IIT Quiz competition in the Cultural Festival and was one of the star in those days. Jitendra Malik is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Jitendra Malik (BT/EE/80)

What has astounded the scientific community is the elegance of the solution - the algorithm is only thirteen lines long, and its proof of correctness takes less than three pages. Neeraj is a very gifted individual. Besides doing excellently in his field of study, computer science, he has also demonstrated his talent in mathematics. Neeraj was also selected for Indian National Mathematics Olympiad, 1997. He was awarded the National Talent Search Scholarship, as well as the Jagadis Bose National Science Talent Search Scholarship, both in 1996. What, however, distinguishes him from the majority, is the motivation and dedication to work at hard problems. By carrying out the outstanding work on primality testing, Neeraj has undoubtedly done IIT Kanpur and its alumni immensely proud. He, along with his team members, has demonstrated in the most decisive fashion that the very best possible research work can be done at IIT Kanpur. Neeraj Kayal has been conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for his outstanding contributions in Complexity Theory by developing a Polynomial Time Algorithm for Primality Testing.

Neeraj Kayal obtained his B Tech in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002 from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and is currently a Doctoral student in the same department. As a B Tech student, Neeraj Kayal was part of the team that recently announced a polynomial time algorithm for primality testing. This solves one of the most outstanding open problems of Mathematics and Computer Science - as prime numbers play a pivotal role in all the areas of mathematics and computer science. The result is now considered as the biggest advancement in a decade in computational number theory.

Neeraj Kayal (BT/CSE/02)

Dr Rajendra Singh is the Chairman of the Board of Directors at both LCC International and Telcom Ventures, USA. After obtaining the BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1975, Dr Rajendra Singh proceeded to US for his higher studies. He obtained the MS degree from the University of Maine at Orono, Maine, USA in 1977 and PhD from Southern Methodist University at Dallas, Texas, USA in 1979. From 1979 – 1982 he worked as Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Kansas State University and City College of New York, USA. Beginning with his doctoral dissertation on Spectrum Efficient Schemes for Mobile Radio Communications, which was published in 1980, Dr Singh has actively contributed to the academic and professional development of the wireless telecommunications industry. As a former faculty member of both Kansas State University and City College of New York, and a member of numerous electrical engineering societies, Dr Rajendra Singh has a distinguished record of academic achievements including the organization of and participation in the CTIA scientific panel which investigated time dispersion for TDMA and FDMA. Dr Rajendra Singh, with his wife Neera, co-founded LCC International in 1983. Since then LCCI has emerged as one of the world’s leading wireless telecommunications consultant companies. It has been actively involved in the design, optimization and build out of hundreds of cellular, PCS, paging, trunked radio and other two-way mobile systems throughout the world. It has performed technical services for the largest wireless operators in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Ranked as 66 in top 100 American companies, today it is a NASDAQ listed company with more than 800 employees and does business in over 40 countries. In addition to being the founder of LCCI, Dr Singh is one of the co-founders and a Director on the Board of Directors of Teligent Inc., a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) and has also established, developed and directed APPEX Incorporated, a billing services firm that was sold to Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in October 1990.

In 1986 Dr Rajendra Singh co-founded APEX System Corporation, an IT Service company that merged with EDS in 1989. In 1990 he co-founded PORTATEL del Sureste, a cellular wireless services company in Mexico. In 1991 he invested in Portugal GSM System and Service. In 1992 Dr Singh invested in BPL Cellular for a GSM Cellular System in Bombay India. In 1993, he co-founded TRICOM, a digital SMR System in Mexico. In 1994 he created a holding company for personal investments, Telcom Ventures, LLC. In 1994 he founded SMR Services Companies in Brazil, Argentina and co-founded Teligent in USA, a wireless competitive local exchange carrier. Teligent is a NASDAQ listed company with over 3000 employees. In 1995 he invested in Aether Systems, a wireless ASP Company. In 1999 he founded Chamber Biz, a B-2-B internet company. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is proud of the achievements of Dr Rajendra Singh. In recognition of his outstanding and seminal contributions in developing path-breaking wireless mobile radio communication technologies and using them to set up and manage top telecommunication companies of truly international standards, the Institute hereby confers upon Dr Rajendra Singh its Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Rajendra Singh (BT/EE/75)

Mr Saurabh Srivastava was born on March 4, 1946 in Allahabad. He did his early schooling at St Joseph’s high school in Allahabad. In 1961 he passed the senior Cambridge examination in the first division and was ranked 6th in the state of Uttar Pradesh and given a state scholarship. In 1963, he appeared for the All India Joint Entrance Examination for the IIT’s. He stood 2nd in the All India exam and chose to join IIT Kanpur in the Mechanical Engineering Department. HE graduated from IIT Kanpur in 1968 with a CPI of 9.1. On graduating from IITK, Mr Srivastava chose to go to the US for further studies. From amongst the various acceptances, which included the school like Columbia and Cornell, Mr Srivastava chose to accept a full fellowship offered by Harvard University and completed his Masters degree there.

After a distinguished academic career at IIT Kanpur and Harvard University, he worked for several years in USA and joined IBM, thus entering in the field of Information Technology. He is among the few IITians who returned to India leaving a comfortable life and career in USA. He visualized the potential of software exports at a time when there was hardly any software export from India. In 80’s he successfully built the software exports for Indian Companies like A V Thomas Software Research Limited and Tata Unisys Ltd. (IIS Infotech) which has become one of the top 20 software companies in India and the first software company to get ISO 9001 Quality Certificate. With liberalization he saw great opportunity to expand business worldwide through acquisitions and collaboration and now have presence in several countries. He became the Chairman of the Electronics and Computer Software Promotion Council (ESC) and served in that capacity for 4 years. He is also a founding member of National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) and is currently its Vice President. The contributions made by Mr Srivastava for the cause of Indian software export are outstanding. He is an enterprising entrepreneur with a vision, excellent professional and outstanding alumni. Mr Saurabh Srivastava is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Saurabh Srivastava (BT/ME/68)

Dr K VijayRaghavan, after doing B Tech in 1975 and M Tech in 1977 in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur obtained his PhD degree in Molecular Biology from TIFR Bombay. From 1984 to 1988 he worked at California Institute of Technology, USA in the area of Molecular Biology and Genetics. After returning from USA he joined NCBS as a Reader where he is currently a Professor and the Director. Dr K VijayRaghavan has earlier worked on the function and analysis of a blood oxygeneator and heart- lung- machine at IIT Kanpur, genetic analysis of flight muscle in Drosophila, genetics of steroid hormone regulated genes in Drosophila and the molecular analysis of brain mRNAs in flies. His current interests lie in understanding mechanisms underlying animal development, in particular the formation of muscles in the fruit fly Drosophila Melanogaster. A Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Science Academy, Dr K VijayRaghavan is recipient of several awards as British Council Fellowship, Proctor and Gamble Fellowship (Caltech), Lucile P Markey Fellowship (Caltech) and Biotechnology Career Development Award of Rockfeller Foundation. In 1998, Dr K VijayRaghavan was conferred with the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Biology.

Author of several technical papers in refereed journals, Dr K VijayRaghavan is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Genetics. Dr K VijayRaghavan has been conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding contributions in the field of Biological Sciences.

Vijay Raghavan K (BT/CHE/75)

Anupam Khanna graduated from IIT Kanpur in Electrical Engineering at the top of his class in 1974. Later his studies at Stanford University spanned Electronics and Systems Engineering, Exploration Geophysics, Management Science and Economics, earning him three graduate degrees including a Ph.D. Subsequently, he was at Oxford as a visiting fellow associated with the Department of Economics and University College where he undertook research on global economic governance and international regulation.

Anupam has worked for World Bank for the last 28 years where he started as an economist and rose to become the chief economist and senior manager of policy support at the WB head quarters. He advised senior management and the boards of directors on strategy and policy as well as on fiduciary and compliance issues for many organizations in several countries. Infrastructure for industrial development, electric power and state enterprise reforms as well as environment have been his chief concerns throughout his long career. Anupam is presently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Global Development Network, an independent international organization headquartered in New Delhi, to promote excellence in research and policy analysis in developing countries, where he is responsible for launching new flagship global research projects on climate change and urbanization in developing countries. Dr. Anupam Khanna is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for his outstanding professional achievements in the fields of public policy and infrastructure management.

Anupam Khanna (BT/EE/74)

Mr Lalit Jalan (BT/EE/79) has had a distinguished academic background finishing in the top 2% of his class throughout. After completing his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering in 1979 he did his Masters in Computer Science and MBA in Finance from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylavania. He is currently heading eBusiness for the Reliance Group (13 billion $) which is the largest Indian private sector company. He is responsible for the end-to-end e-transformation of all Reliance businesses and functions. On completion of his education he joined General Electric Company as a Strategic Planner. After working with them for 2 years and getting his green card he returned back to his homeland India to startup a business. He started a distribution / real estate development company and over the next 11 years grew it to a 250 crores business. This was achieved with only a small seed capital and funded through internal accruals. At that stage Mr Anil D Ambani, Promoter of the Reliance Group who had studied with him at Wharton, coaxed him into heading the Polypropylene business which was the biggest Reliance initiative at that time. In just 42 months, Lalit grew the Polypropylene startup business to a US $1 billion (Rs 6,000 crores) turnover from scratch. This has been the fastest ramp up of capacity in the world and made Reliance the 5th largest world producer. He is the Youngest Business Head ever at Reliance, contributing to 25% of Reliance's turnover. He was appointed to this position despite the lack of petrochemical experience. This has to be a record of some sort not just by Indian standards but global standards. It is really difficult to think of any profitable business growing at this rate. If this story was allowed to be aired by Reliance, this is the type of story that makes the cover of Forbes. His major responsibilities included setting up of entire domestic and international distribution network;

customer acquistion / customer acceptance of the products; staffing of the entire team; financial systems and controls; successful introduction and acceptance of more than 25 different grades, many of them for the first time in India. Despite such a demanding job, he has continued to run a consumer distribution business (personal family business) in parallel. The Polypropylene business alone created jobs for thousands of engineers in India across a wide variety of relevant disciplines - Electrical, Mechanical, Chemical, Industrial and for business majors such as Finance and accounting, to Sales and Marketing. The distribution business in Calcutta also continues to impact employment in Sales, Logistics and finance. While many distinguished alumni have certainly done well in the US and have created billion $ market cap companies, the concentration of wealth from a billion $ market cap tends to remain in the hands of a few people. What Lalit has created in a billion $ Revenue business spreads wealth across a wider set of people and impact is felt over a longer range of time Mr Lalit Jalan is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding managerial skills.

Lalit Kumar Jalan (BT/EE/79)

Notable contributions to the field

•Analysis of primary operators on AdS4 and AdS7

•Three-point functions in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and AdS/CFT

•Noncommutative perturbative dynamics (with Nathan Seiberg and Mark Van Raamsdonk)

•Noncommutative solitons (with Andrew Strominger and Rajesh Gopakumar)

•OM-theory (with Nathan Seiberg, Andrew Strominger and Rajesh Gopakumar)

•Stringy interactions in pp-waves

•Some insights about tachyon condensation

Shiraz Minwalla (MSC5/PHY/95)

Shiraz Minwalla is a recent Indian string theorist. Early on he became a Harvard Junior Fellow and subsequently an assistant professor at Harvard University and assistant professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai his home town. He graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1995, and was awarded the President's Gold Medal for topping the entire batch; he later moved to Princeton University to earn his Ph.D. He was awarded the Swarnajayanti Fellowship 2005-06 by the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India.

Mr. Lalit Kishore Chaudhary was born on October 15, 1962 in New Delhi, India. He did his schooling in Ghana and Nigeria, qualifying his West African School Certificate Exam ('O' Level) in 1977 from 'EDO' College, Benin City, Nigeria. Later, he received his B. Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in the year 1986. Having spent most of his earlier years abroad, he was determined to stay in India and serve his country. Mr. Choudhary joined Harig India Ltd. in 1986 as an Engineer Trainee and became the General Manager of the plant in 1997. After having worked in almost every department in Harig, in 1998 he was invited to be the head of Graziano Trasmissioni Ltd. an Italian/Swiss MNC, manufacturing gears and synchronisers for trucks and tractors in India. Starting from inception to the execution of the whole plant, he helped secure the land, factory construction, and setting up the operations. Through his diligence, intelligence, and unparalleled dedication to work, he rose to be the Chief Executive (MD) and was proud to have nurtured this plant into a steadily growing venture. In subsequent years, he was also the plant Director of Fairfield Atlas Ltd. in Belgaum, Karnataka. Mr. Choudhary was a considerate and kind person, who contributed to many social causes supporting rural education and other similar activities. He was also well known for his personal courage, steadfastness and firm principles.

Alas, on September 22, 2008, this courage led him to attempt to calm down an unruly mob of the ex-employees of Graziano Trasmissioni Ltd. and losing his life in the process. While Mr. Choudhary could have deserted his station on that unfateful day, but he choose to reach out to the mob for initiating a dialogue. Unfortunately, the mob turned violent and in the ensuing physical attack by the mob, Mr. Choudhary was fatally injured. In recognition of his exemplary courage and upright behavior, Mr. Lalit Kishore Choudhary is posthumously conferred the Satyendra K. Dubey Memorial Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Late Mr. Lalit Kishore Chaudhary (BT/ME/86)

Jagjeet S Bindra (BT/ChE/69), popularly known as Jeet, was the President of Chevron Pipe Line Company, USA, in which he is responsible for both domestic pipeline operations and for international pipeline projects. He went to US as a Research Assistant and obtained his MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1970. He also received his MBA from Saint Mary's College of California in 1979. Jeet joined Chevron Research Company as a Research Engineer in 1977. In 1980, he was transferred to the Corporation Engineering Department. For the next six years there he managed several US and non-US refining, chemical and upstream projects for Chevron.

In 1986 he went to Los Angeles as the Chief Engineer for Chevron's EI Segundo Refinery. He later managed Operations at El Segundo. In December 1991, he was appointed as the Group Manager (Projects), with responsibilities for providing leadership to capital projects with cumulative value of the order of $2.5 billion. He played a key role in evolving Chevron's Project Development and Execution Process (CPDEP), which resulted in major improvements in Chevron's project management system performance and savings of several hundred million dollars per year. In September 1994, he was appointed as Manager, Strategic Planning, the post at which he worked with the Corporate Officers in developing strategic direction for the company, including opportunities for mergers and acquisitions. In August 1995, he was assigned to lead an effort on Chevron's behalf, and on behalf of several other major international oil companies, to negotiate with Russia, Kazakistan and Oman the structure satisfactory to all parties to finance, design and construct a 1500 Kilometer pipeline from western Kazakistan to the Black Sea. On January 1, 1997 he was appointed President, Chevron Pipeline Company. Presently he is the Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Caltex Australia Limited. Jagjeet S Bindra is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Jagjeet Singh Bindra (BT/CHE/69)

Sanjiv was a co-founder of the Pan IIT Alumni organization and has played a key role in its growth. Pan IIT has grown to become a huge global organization covering over 150,000 IIT alumni all over the world. This organization has helped to bring alumni from all IITs together on a common platform for activities like branding, global events, advocacy on behalf of alumni and nation building in India. The branding efforts have specially helped all IIT alumni in the US by associating the IIT education with excellence. This organization is making more difference in the world and has grown bigger than most companies and organizations founded by IIT alumni. Increased involvement by the IIT alumni, fostered by the Pan IIT movement, has helped all IITs. Besides co-founding the organization, Sanjiv has been instrumental in architecting the global structure of the organization, helped initiate it in India and has been a member of the Global and USA boards for many years. He has recruited many distinguished alumni to become active participants and assume key positions in the Pan IIT organization. He has also ensured that IIT Kanpur plays a leading role in this organization. When Pan IIT was founded, the first chairman of the Global Board was Narayana Murthy, Chairman of the USA Executive Council was Abhay Bhushan and Chairman of the India Executive Council was Pawan Kumar – all IIT Kanpur alumni. IIT Kanpur alumni continue to dominate Pan IIT activities with Umang Gupta as Chairman of the Pan IIT USA board, Gunjan Bagla as Pan IIT USA President and Arun Seth as Chairman of the 2010 Global Conference. Sanjiv has excellent relations with the alumni leadership of all the other IITs and plays a key role in resolving many issues and bringing alumni together for common causes. Sanjiv Sahay was the Chairman of Pan IIT 2007 Global Alumni Conference held in Santa Clara, CA, in July 2007. This is considered to be the best Pan IIT conference ever held with over 3,500 paid attendees and famous speakers like Jeffrey Immelt, Hillary Clinton and Arun Sarin. Sanjiv pulled together a huge team of volunteers from all IITs for this event and provided exemplary leadership. The event was widely covered in the mainstream media in US, UK and in India, including in Time magazine, Financial Times and ABC News (links attached). Sanjiv was the President of the IIT Kanpur Alumni Association –led the effort to globalize the Alumni Association and harness the latest technologies to increase interaction among alumni worldwide. Many new chapters were created or reactivated and coordination among chapters increased with an online Chapters council. A new website with an online database was created and efforts were initiated to change the structure of the alumni association to make it more effective and responsive to the alumni. This led to a new AA constitution which was finalized shortly after his term ended. Sanjiv recruited and motivated many alumni to take leadership roles in the AA and in various chapters.

Sanjiv has been a member of the Board of the IIT Kanpur Foundation since 2002 and has been playing a key role in its activities and has helped get various prominent alumni involved with its activities. Sanjiv helped to found the IITK West Coast chapter which is the biggest IITKAA chapter in the US and has always been willing to help out with any IITK alumni activities needing help. He is currently helping with the IITK Golden Jubilee events in the US as the Convenor of the Steering Committee. For his outstanding service to the IIT alumni cause, Sanjiv Sahay was honored with the IITK West Coast Alumni Leadership Award in 2008. Sanjiv has been involved with other not for profit causes including helping to launch the Pan IIM alumni association in the US (IIMUSA) for the IIM alumni in the US and has been a charter member of TiE Silicon Valley, which helps budding entrepreneurs. He is an entrepreneur himself and is founder and CEO of Asquare, Inc. (a technology consulting company) and Zirana.com ( a web 2.0 startup). Sanjiv graduated with a B.Tech. (EE) from IIT Kanpur in 1977 and did a PGDBM from IIM Calcutta in 1979. While at IIT Kanpur he was very active in the Student’s Gymkhana and served as Gymkana President (’76-’77), Convenor of the Student Senate (’75-’76) and as a Senator from ’72-’74.

Sanjiv Sahay (BT/EE/77)

Mr. Anil Kejriwal has over 35 years of entrepreneurial experience that has spanned a range of industries and countries. He started his career in 1974 with several start-up industries in the chemicals and electronic fields. He was also the founder and promoter of Ramtech Industries, which earned numerous Government of India awards in the 1980s for its pioneering efforts in computer manufacturing and systems integration and achieving the highest exports of computer systems from India. As part of his global operations, Mr. Kejriwal also set up a shipping company (Oram Shipping and Safetrans) with South Korean partners.

His operations were based out of Singapore from the 1980s with offices in Hong Kong, Seoul, Amsterdam, Taipei, Moscow, Riga, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, Kolkata, and Delhi. Mr. Kejriwal was also one of the first to conceptualize and construct plug-and-play software technology parks (STPIs) in India, under the brand names 'Logix Park' in Noida, U.P., and 'Asyst Park' in Salt Lake (Kolkata), West Bengal. His ventures have helped establish various overseas IT companies in India over the last 10 years. Recently, Mr. Kejriwal has promoted ventures based in the Healthcare systems (Resourceway Inc.), Infrastructure development (Tax Free Industrial Estate in Uttarakhand) and Logistics domains (Container Freight Station at Navi Mumbai port). He is also an investor and Board Member of Edseva Software, a company based in the education management domain, which he aims to support through strategy advisories and consolidation of his strong professional networks. Mr. Kejriwal has also been keenly working on setting up several new projects including a 25 MW Solar Power plant in Jodhpur, Malt manufacturing plant in Ganganagar and E-learning and skill development centres. Mr. Anil Kejriwal graduated with a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree in Chemical Engineering in 1974 from IIT in Kanpur. He is a citizen of Singapore.

Anil Kejriwal (BT/CHE/74)

Ashish Gupta (CSE/88) is a co-founder of Helion and serves on the boards of Gridstone Research, Jivox, Kirusa, MuSigma, Naukri.com, and SMS Gupshup. He has co-founded two successful companies - Tavant Technologies and Junglee that pioneered comparison shopping on the internet. He has also worked at Woodside Fund, Oracle Corporation and IBM research. His investments include Daksh (IBM), Odesk, Obongo (AOL), Speedera (Akamai), MakeMyTrip, Merittrac (Manipal Group), and Kaboodle (Hearst). Ashish also serves on the Board of the Kauffman Fellows Program, the leading educational fellowship in venture capital; and the Foundation for Excellence that promotes education in India. Mr. Ashish Gupta, a Kauffman Fellow, is a non-executive Director. He has obtained a Bachelors of Technology degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, where he was awarded the President's Gold medal; and a Ph.D. in Database Technology from Stanford University, U.S.A. He has authored several patents, publications, and a book by MIT press. Mr. Gupta is a partner at Helion Venture Partners, investing in early stage companies in India and in the U.S. Mr. Gupta has been involved in several startups in the U.S. and in India as an investor and board member. These include Daksh, now part of International Business Machines ("IBM"), rated as the top Business Process Outsourcing ("BPO") company in the world. He is also a co-founder of Tavant Technologies. Before working at Tavant Technologies, Mr. Gupta was at Amazon.com which he joined in 1998 with the acquisition of Junglee.com where Mr. Gupta was co-founder, Vice President of Engineering, and board member. Junglee was a pioneer in data integration technologies and the application service provider internet business model. He has also worked at Oracle Corporation and at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

Mr. Gupta has published and presented numerous papers at international conferences, as well as edited a book on "materialized views" published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology press. Ashish has extensive experience in software development and related technologies. Prior to joining Woodside Fund, he was an active advisor and investor in several information technology companies, including Daksh, acquired by IBM for $160 million; Bodha, acquired by Peregrine; Obongo, acquired by AOL; and Pointcross. Ashish was Founder, Vice President of Engineering, and Director of Junglee Corporation, a data integration software company. Junglee was an early pioneer of the web services business model and was acquired by Amazon.com for $230 million in 1998. Ashish was responsible for engineering and operations, and he helped grow the company from 5 to 70 people. Before Junglee, Ashish was Senior Member of Technical Staff at Oracle Corporation, and also held technical research positions at IBM and Stanford University. He is the holder of seven patents and has written and presented numerous papers at international conferences, including a book published by MIT Press.

Ashish Gupta (BT/CSE/88)

• Project Samvahak (A project for the development of the Battlefield Management and Decision Support System) • Electronics Warfare System. • He was an invited member for the task force set up on cyber security development in the union territory of Chandigarh. Some of the key appointments tenanted by him are as follows: • Commander (CEO) of the Project ASCON – Army’s national backbone communication network • Chief Signal Officer of a Corps in the Northeast - Responsible for all dimensions of Operational Communications spanning, Satellite, Mobile and Tactical involving planning and infrastructural aspects for corps zone (spread over 14 key cantonments in 3 states of the north eastern part of India). • Colonel Communication (Director) of a command headquarters responsible for planning and management of Communication Development. • Director of a Project Management Organization for Battlefield Management systems automation and Decision Support System. • Commanding Officer: of a command Signal Regiment in the eastern sector. His Regiment was awarded the “Best Unit” trophy for its class in the Army during his command tenure. He has also attended prestigious National Security & Strategic Studies course at National Defense College (NDC), New Delhi. The NDC is subscribed to and attended by senior officers from approximately 25 countries. Maj Gen(Retd.) Dharam Veer Kalra, VSM thus has been First and only Alumnus (Undergraduate) among all IIT’s to have attained distinguished rank of a Major General or equivalent in Indian Armed Forces.

Maj Gen (Retd.) Dharam Veer Kalra, VSM is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and IIT Mumbai (M.Tech – Computer Science). He was commissioned in the Indian Army – Corps of Signals in the year 1973. He rendered 35 years of illustrious service to the nation in the field of IT and Telecom operations and management for the Armed Forces. He retired as the Additional Director General Information Systems (ADGIS) in the Army in the year 2009. As the ADGIS he was responsible for the development of the Data Networks, development and fielding of TacC3I Systems, Automation of the Army etc. Prior to his last assignment he was Chief Signal Officer of the Western Command of the Indian Army. He was awarded the Vishist Seva Medal (VSM) on January 26, 2009 for the distinguished services rendered to the Indian Army in the field of Telecom and IT. He has contributed meaningfully towards modernization of Indian Army as member of following project during his tenure with the Corps of Signals: • EMI/EMC Development project for the Army • DIPAC (Digital Image Processing and Analysis Center): Member of the founding team of the project to set up Data Reception Centre.

D V Kalra (BT/EE/72)

Dharam Vir is a distinguished civil servant of India. Recently retired as the Chief Secretary of Haryana. Earlier he had held several important positions in the State and Central governments. Vir had brilliant academic record. He was recipient of UP Merit Scholarship in Intermediate. He did B.Sc. (Hons.) in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, during the year 1969 and was recipient of IIT Merit scholarship during the first two years. Thereafter, he did M.Sc. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in year 1971. He pursued research for two years at IIT, Kanpur before joining the IAS in the year 1973. He also did MBA from the University of Leeds under the Colombo Plan. At IIT, Kanpur, he played a very active role in student’s affairs and contributed immensely towards social process amongst students. He was a member of the committee of students, which drafted the constitution of the students’ gymkhana during the year 1970, in which the concept of Students’ Senate was introduced. The Committee’s proposal was accepted and the senate system came into existence, which continues to play a significant role in the life of students of the institute. He also launched a fortnightly wall paper entitled ‘Onlooker’. Vir was elected Vice President of the Physics Association for the year 1970-71, the highest position that a student could hold. As Chief Secretary, Vir has played a very significant role in finalizing and implementing several policies, projects and schemes. Dharam Vir has been closely associated with education and food and agriculture sectors for a long period. He was Director, School Education, Vice Chancellor of two State universities namely State Agriculture University and Guru Jabheshwar University of Science & Technology, and Principal Secretary of Technical Education Department.

He was member of Board of Governors of IIT, Roorkee; Executive Council of NIT / REC, Kurukshetra; MW Regional Committee of AICTE, All India Board of Vocational Education, Executive Council of Guru Jambheshwar University, and Board of Governors of Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research. He was also Member-Secretary of the State Admission and Fee Committees for private technical institutions located in the State. He has published a number of articles on education related topics in The Tribune, leading newspaper published from Chandigarh. Vir has worked at most of the positions dealing with food and agriculture. Dharam Vir has also published a few articles on e-Governance projects executed directly under his supervision. One of his papers received Silver Icon Award at the 6th National E-Governance Award during the year 2002. The Institutes of Directors has admitted Dharam Vir as Distinguished Fellow in view of his services. He is President of Indian Yoga Federation and Haryana Yoga Association.

Dharam vir (MSc2/Phy/71)