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November 2002

• Scientists at the IIT in Kanpur have developed a battery-powered "infothela" equipped with an assortment of Internet and telecom facilities to impart the benefit of information technology to people in remote areas. Laced with "digital mandi" facility, this "infothela" may later be christened as "computer thela". Prof. Prashant Kumar of Mechanical Engineering and Designing Department, said that a prototype of the "infothela" was ready and would work with the help of BSNL's cable network. In the first phase, experts plan to conduct services of this appliance between Kanpur and Lucknow, covering about 50 villages. ... more.
  
• The textile technology department at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi is working on a process of organ transplants, which could do away with the need for donors. "The main problem often with organ transplants is rejection," said Associate Professor Bhuvanesh Gupta, who is working on the project along with Nishat Anjum and Nilesh Revagade. He added that "... we are using tissue engineering, where we take healthy cells from the partly damaged organ itself and allow these to grow into new tissue." ... more.
  
• Wireless connectivity is the only viable way to go, if the rural masses are to be e-nabled, (as) there is simply no way one can put wires into the ground on the scale required, feels Phillip Clay, Chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ... Prof. Clay hoped that Indian institutions would come forward to use the large course resources that MIT had recently placed in the public domain ... MIT has had a long association with Indian academia: It led the American consortium whose programs resulted in the creation of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-K) in 1961 - and exactly forty years later, it again joined hands with the Government of India to create MediaLab Asia ... more.
  
• A group of experts dealing with universal knowledge and language (UNL) project at IIT Bombay are in the process of creating a Hindi word Net which would be the first word Net in the country according to Pushpak Bhattacharya, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science who is in Goa attending the five-day international conference on UNL underway at Fort Aguada at Sinquerim  ... "We have already created word Net in Marathi which is small in size and now the plan is to link Hindi with Marathi," he said ... more.
  
• America's arbiter of recessions ... IITian Anirvan Banerji is Director of Research of the Economic Cycle Research Institute. Banerji has graduate degrees from Columbia and the Indian Institute of Management, and an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology. He has consulted with the Asian Development Bank as well as central banks around the world, is a member of the OECD Expert Group on Leading Indicators and serves on New York City's Economic Advisory Panel. "The real issue [for the economy] is business confidence more than investor confidence. This is what I'd call a "Rodney Dangerfield" recovery - it gets no respect. We are in [an economic] recovery, we have been in a recovery for all the year, however, it's a recovery that gets no respect because the stock market's been plunging" ... more.
  
• Kajal Se Kala Cheej Kalank Hai (Ignominy is blacker than black)
  Suraj Se Chamkila Cheej IIT Hai (IIT is brighter than the sun)

  This rather odd-sounding couplet is pasted on the walls of many houses of Patwa Toli village in Gaya district of Bihar. The village literally takes it to heart. In the last 10 years, 25 students from the nondescript hamlet have got into various Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and 75 have entered Regional Engineering Colleges, now known as National Institutes of Technology ...  Jitendra Kumar, son of Thakur Prasad, was the one who wove the 'engineering dream' in the village ... Kumar is now working at PricewaterhouseCoopers-Global, a software consultancy in New Jersey, USA ... before he left for the United States in 1997, Kumar set up several study centres at the village to train aspirant engineers. It has almost become mandatory for those who have got into the IITs to guide those who are aspiring to get in a kind of village ethos. Said an IIT graduate: "I spend at least two hours a day to help young men prepare for the entrance examinations." ... more.
  

• Microsoft's Mr. Technology ... "even Bill "Microsoft" Gates turns to an Indian when he needs sound advice on technology - and 30-something Anoop Gupta (BTech '82 IIT Delhi) is his sole personal advisor on matters technological.  Gupta is one of the eight key people who interact with Gates ever since he took over the role of the chief software architect at Microsoft two-and-a-half years ago, leaving the business operations for Steve Balmer to run" - Rediff.com ... more.
  

• India signed agreements with Cambodia to establish cooperation in technical education ... PM Vajpayee was in Phnom Penh to attend the first India-ASEAN Summit ... an accord on cooperation between IIT Mumbai and Cambodian Institute of Technology was reached between Mumbai IIT Director Ashok Mishra and his counterpart Im Sethy ... more.
  
• The Bay Area Diwali event organized by the IIT Spouses Association on November 9, 2002 was a grand success with over 800 attendees from all the IITs. The event featured the first ever Inter IIT Cultural competition, a dance troupe, dinner, mithai, dancing to DJ music ... more.
  

• "A Beautiful Mind From India Is Putting the Internet on Alert" ... Wall Street Journal article on November 4, 2002, highlights the work done at IIT Kanpur on the primality algorithm ... "Will Manindra Agrawal bring about the end of the Internet as we know it? The question is not as ridiculous as it was just two months ago. Prof. Agrawal is a 36-year old theoretical computer scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. In August, he solved a problem that had eluded mathematicians for millennia: developing a method to determine with complete certainty if a number is prime" ... more.
  

• IITB alumnus Nandan Nilekani (BTech EE '78) has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Conference Board, which publishes the US Leading Indicators series, joining the CEOs of blue chip corporations including British Airways, Deutsche Bank,  PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Alcoa and others. The Conference Board is a business organization which "creates and disseminates knowledge about management and the marketplace to help businesses strengthen their performance and better serve society" ... more.
  

• Bawandar (Sandstorm), a film made by an IIT Bombay alumnus - Jagmohan Mundhra (BTech EE '68) - will be screened on Friday, November 8, at 6 pm in New York City, at a film festival titled "The Indian Diaspora", which is being organized by the Indo-American Arts Council. The film stars Nandita Das, Raghuvir Yadav, and Deepti Naval, and is about a rural low-caste woman who is gang-raped by upper-caste men in her village, when she speaks up against the prevalent custom of child marriages. Instead of hanging her head in shame, as she was expected to do, she decides to knock the doors of justice. Against all odds, she maintains her dignity and courage as a woman and from a rape victim becomes a rape activist ... more. The film has been reviewed by Planet Bollywood, MorningIndia, and the Hindu and by several other reviewers. Jagmohan has directed 21 English films, including "Night Eyes" with Ashok Amritraj, and his Hindi filmography includes "Kamla", "Vishkanya" and "Suraag" ... Jagmohan is a Distinguished Alumnus awardee for 2002 from IIT Bombay.
  

• Rakesh Mohan, economist and deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), today rapped India Inc for the manufacturing sector’s poor labour productivity and for not giving due importance to research and development. He also added that because of the low salaries paid to engineers from reputed institutes such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) by Indian manufacturing companies, many engineers were joining the service industry. "The R&D work done by the companies is a reflection of the quality of engineers they get for the salaries they pay," he said ... more (Business Standard - November 2, 2002).
  

• The Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology (KReSIT) at IIT Bombay is amongst many educational institutions in India that are offering distance learning programs through satellite or VSAT. Lectures are conducted at a central location and beamed to several other centres. According to Deepak Phatak at KReSIT, "At IIT Bombay, we aim to take this phenomenon a step further by reaching out to students and working professionals instead of they reaching us. This distance education project will eliminate all physical barriers to education by creating a national virtual classroom." ... more (Economic Times - October 29, 2002).

   

October 2002

• Intel has announced that it is prepared to spend $150 million in the next two to three years to make sure that Wi-Fi technologies succeed ... Intel awarded more than $1.2 million in grants to help five universities set up laboratories and curriculum to study wireless technology. Carnegie Mellon University, the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India, Rutgers University, University of California at Los Angeles and Virginia Tech received grants ... more.
  

• India has finally got its own state-of-the-art supercomputing facility for bio-informatics and computational biology. As a step towards rolling out a national supercomputing grid, the government has established this facility at IIT Delhi. The facility will take up ‘in silico’ studies in genomics, proteomics and drug design. The facility hosts a 70 processor Sun cluster (900 MHz Ultra Sparc III) and a 16 processor PC cluster with an aggregate compute power of 150 gigaflops, according to project head Prof. B Jayaram ... more.
  

• Desh Deshpande gave the keynote speech at the residence of the Indian Ambassador at the East Coast PanIIT Golden Jubilee celebration ... "We have much to learn from (the US) where there has been a culture of charity and community outreach that extends back to this nation’s founding fathers ... giving back is a lifelong pursuit ... the philanthropic traditions in India, by comparison, are still in infancy, and it is our challenge to embrace and adopt the philanthropic spirit so rich here" ... more.
  

• The East Coast PanIIT Golden Jubilee celebration event was held on October 11-13 and a cover story in Times of India was titled "Guru Dakshina: The IIT of receiving and giving". "In a East Coast Pan-IIT Conference that had "Giving Back" to India as its central theme, scores of IITians came together to pay tribute to their teachers from back home ... the IITians are now broadening the scope of giving back through a more grassroots effort. And the giving back need not be through just financial contributions. Alumni can now volunteer their time and knowledge through guidance and mentoring Also, instead of focusing more narrowly on specific IITs they passed from, alumni are being encouraged to adopt a pan-IIT approach ... more.
  

• Google research scientist Krishna Bharat was motivated to begin working on a program to simplify searching for articles on the Internet out of sheer frustration, as the task of searching for news amidst the Web's endless flow of information was very tiring. The result was an entirely computer-generated news site, http://news.google.com, which has some journalists wondering if they would be replaced ... the Bangalorean, who did his Ph D in computer science from Georgia Tech, says he wrote for the campus newspaper while earning a BTech from IIT Madras ... more.
  

• IIT Bombay alumnus Prakash Apte (BTech ME '68) has been appointed Director of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. Dr. Apte is a PhD in Economics from Columbia University with a PGDM from IIM Calcutta. Apte was Dean (Academic) at the Institute and he is a professor in Economics and Social Sciences with special interest in International Finance, Exchange Rate Behaviour, Financial Directives and Risk Management. Click here for his bio-data from the IIMB website ... more.
  

• "IIT grants likely to be performance-based now" according to the Economic Times ... "Accountability seems to be the new byword in the department of education. Institutes of higher technical education, especially the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are being made accountable for government grants. The government proposes to link the grants to performance levels of the IITs. At present all IITs receive equal grants from the government - about Rs 65 to Rs 70 crore of plan fund - irrespective of the size ...  more.
  

• "And they grew up " ... Despite the slowdown, companies incubated at IIT Mumbai have ventured out of the incubator. eInfinitus, for one, is now a Pune-based company and is slated to shortly release the first beta product of its technology to improve the functioning of IP networks ...  Phonologies, promoted by Sachin Lamsoge, Raj Kiran Talusani and Dipankar Barman, has relocated to a South Mumbai office. The company claims to be the first Indian firm to provide a single solution for VoiceXML and VoIP ... On campus, things are going well for Herald Logic as well. It’s got an office in Pune and one in Singapore. But Vishal Gupta, the under 25 co-founder of Herald Logic doesn’t see much sense in moving out of campus yet ... more.
  

• "Where are the start-ups now? " ... It's still pretty much life in the trenches, sans the sleeping bags. The now real tech slowdown, coupled with risk-averse investors have left the eight-odd start-ups incubated on the IIT Bombay campus during '00-'01 balancing precariously between survival and extinction. Four out of the eight have since moved out of campus - Myzus Infotech, RightHalf (acquired by Purple Yogi), eInfinitus and Phonologies. One almost bit the dust - Trellis Labs was virtually non-operational for three months ... more.
  

• Next Ypanels event in the Bay Area is on October 29th ... join a distinguished set of panelists and participants for our second Ypanels. Following an hour of networking and hors d'ouvres, we will have two parallel panels "Semiconductors: Digital Convergence in the Home" and "Career Spotlight: Flying through these turbulent times" ... more.
  

• Mumbai Monthly Meet on October 18th features a presentation on Urban Transport Priorities and High Capacity Bus Systems at 6:30 PM at Coomaraswami Hall, Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai ... more.
  

• IIT Chennai Professor Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala has been awarded the prestigious H.K. Firodia award for science and technology this year ... Prof. Jhunjhunwala, Head of the Electrical Engineering Department at IIT Chennai, was cited for his work in telecommunication and computer networks (TeNeT) for the national and international markets, and for his vision to enable India to have 200 million telecom and Internet connections, for which he developed the corDECT Wireless in Local Loop (WLL) ... more.
  

• "If we can have two-minute noodles, why can't we have instant sambar-rice? This is a question that has troubled Subhash Pandit for a long time. A mechanical engineer from IIT Mumbai, Pandit decided to use his expertise in machinery to do something about it" ... more in Times of India.
  

September 2002

• "IT firms revoke IIT campus offers" according to a report in the Economic Times ... "Like an unwanted guest, the impact of the tech meltdown is doing the rounds of campuses yet again. Students across the country's best technology schools - the IITs - have had their campus offers deferred and even revoked by some companies that recruited them in the course of the last academic year. About 100 IIT students have been affected by the withdrawals and deferrals. Bangalore-based WebTek Software is learnt to have revoked over 30 offers. WebTek, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dresdner Bank's investment banking division, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, notified students in late May that it would be unable take them on board ... more.
  
• New York Times OpEd piece by Tom Friedman on globalization on Sunday, September 22nd, features quotes from two IIT Bombay alums ... "Globalization fatigue is still very much in evidence in Europe and America, while in places like China and India, you find a great desire for participation in the economic expansion processes," said Jairam Ramesh (BTech ME '75), the Indian Congress Party's top economic adviser. Taking advantage of globalization to develop the Indian I.T. industry has been "a huge win in terms of foreign exchange [and in] self-confidence," added Nandan Nilekani (BTech EE '78), chief executive of Infosys, the Indian software giant. "So many Indians come and say to me that 'when I walk through immigration at J.F.K. or Heathrow, the immigration guys look at me with respect now.' The image of India changed from a third-world country of snake charmers and rope tricks to the software brainy guys." ... more.
  
• MIT’s Technology Review magazine has named Surya Mallapragada (BTech ChE '93) as one of the top innovators for 2002. Surya's IIT research project on nano-patterned surfaces led her to delve deeper into the subject at Iowa State. Coaxing nerve cells to grow is a daunting task. For years, Surya Mallapragada, Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Iowa State University, has been trying to work out ways in which she can influence the growth of nerve cells. Finally, she devised biodegradable polymer scaffoldings that would guide cells to grow in a particular direction. ... more.
  
• Shyam Sunder (BTech - IIT Delhi CE '77), a graduate of IIT Delhi, has been picked as the lead investigator in the building and fire safety investigation of the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Shyam Sunder is the Chief of the Materials and Construction Research Division in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL) and he will focus on three buildings - WTC towers 1, 2 and 7. BFRL is part of the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) ... more.
  
• IIT Bombay has announced the award winners for the Class of 2002 ... the President of India Medal was awarded to Dilys Thomas (BTech - CSE). Dilys will be proceeding to Stanford University for further studies, but said that he would be returning to India after a few years. A. G. Krishna Kant was awarded the Dr. SD Sharma Gold Medal for being an all-rounder in academic and other activities. He has decided not to seek a job abroad, but to instead work in a well-known firm in Bangalore ... more.
  
• For the first time in the history of IIT Bombay, a Preparatory Course Student - Chinmay Karsandas Patel - has been awarded the silver medal from the Department of Aerospace Engineering. The Preparatory Course is a one-year program intended to help prepare students from the Scheduled Caste / Scheduled Tribe category in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics before joining the regular program at IIT Bombay ... click here for more on this program.  Several Dalit organizations have criticized the Preparatory Courses as being examples of the humiliating treatment meted out to the SC/ST communities ... read the write-up by the Dalit Forum and by the Dalit Media Network.
  
• The Forbes' list of the 400 Richest Americans, has only one Indian American this time around ... IIT Delhi alumnus Vinod Khosla, the man with the "Midas touch", who made it to the list at 391. Big names like Steve Case of AOL Time Warner Inc. and home decor queen Martha Stewart are out of the running, but traditional company CEOs like Samuel Johnson of Johnson & Johnson are in. Some of the Indian Americans in the year 2000 list who were absent this time include Sanjiv Sidhu, CEO and founder of i2 Technologies, Gururaj Desh Deshpande of Sycamore Networks, Pradeep Sindhu of Juniper Networks, and Naveen Jain of InfoSpace ... more.
  

• IIT Alumni Canada announces a Golden Jubilee Dinner on October 19 2002, at the Grand Taj Banquet and Convention Centre in Mississauga. Read the event announcement and use the registration form or visit http://www.iitalumnicanada.com ... more.
  

• "As a cocoon for high technology start-ups, the business incubator ... is spartan ... yet, nestling within these frugal confines is an invaluable track record: one that many venture capitalists throughout the world would love to have on their books today", says Priya Ganapati of India Abroad in a lead article on IIT Bombay's business incubator. "The success rate here is unmatched ..." says Dr Deepak Phatak, head of the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, which hosts the business incubator ... more.
  

• Jairam Ramesh (BTech ME '75) has published a book titled "Kautilya Today", on globalising India. The book is a compendium of 200 columns he wrote in the India Today magazine between 1998 and 2002 ... Sheela Bhatt of rediff.com interviewed him recently. Jairam is secretary of the Congress Party's economic affairs department and serves on numerous other committees and advisory positions ... more.
  

• Deputy Prime Minister Advani spoke at the inauguration of a two day conference and exhibition on the usefulness of the cow in the Indian economy at IIT Delhi, and called for a constitutional amendment for a blanket ban on cow slaughter across the nation ... more.
  

• Prof. Madhu Sudan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an IIT Delhi graduate, was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize at the opening ceremony of the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing on August 20 ... more. A Salon.com report added that "... Nevanlinna Prize, one of the highest honors in computer science, went to Madhu Sudan" ... more.
  
• Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha inaugurated the Akash Ganga Rain Centre in Chennai on August 21 .... the center, the first of its kind in India, aims at educating the city on the necessity and benefits of harvesting the water from the rains that falls on the city every year. Ram Krishnan, an alumnus of IIT Chennai, together with Dr Sekhar Raghavan formed the Akash Ganga Trust and a citizens' action group who harvested rainwater in Chennai ... more.

   

• The Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Bombay is organizing an International Symposium on Process Systems Engineering and Control (ISPSEC03), in honor of Prof. K.P. Madhavan from January 3-4, 2003.  The symposium is expected to bring in eminent researchers from universities in the US and Europe ... more.
  
• A New York Times report about prime numbers cites the work done by the three IIT Kanpur researchers who devised a new primality testing algorithm which allows a computer to tell whether a number is prime. The article adds that Dr. Manindra Agrawal and his students Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur offer a foolproof primality-testing algorithm that runs in "polynomial time" which sent rumbles through the mathematical world ... more.
  

• Sandeep Pandey, formerly with IIT Kanpur, has decided to return the $50,000 Ramon Magsaysay Award on September 4 in protest against American policies ...  more.
  

• The Human Resources Development (HRD) Ministry of India is planning to take steps toward reforming the JEE system ... they feel that in the current form, the JEE was not necessarily getting the cream of the crop for the IITs ... more.
  

• Murli Manohar Joshi, the Union HRD Minister has chided IITians for brain-drain and has urged students of the many branches of Indian Institute of Technology to stop looking westwards in search of lucrative careers ... in a previous speech, he also outlined the upgrading of all RECs to National Institutes of Technology, to be at the same level as the IITs ... more.
  

• TCS, India's largest software exporter, is now entering the chip design business ... TCS has relationships with academic institutions like IIT Mumbai for microelectronics ... more.
  

• The IITs, RECs and other Indian engineering colleges are working out ways to pool their resources for library funding, so as to be able subscribe to a greater number of databases. The institutions that would come together would be of varying levels, ranging from the IITs to the newly constituted National Institutes of Technology or the RECs to other institutes like the Government Engineering College in Pune ... more.
  

• IIT Bombay has signed a MoU with the Export Import Bank of India to promote and market IIT Bombay's technologies overseas. The two institutions have agreed to leverage their respective strengths and exchange regular information on research, technology, trade, business and investment opportunities to facilitate increased co-operation for commercial exploitation of various technologies in overseas market ... more.
  

• An IIT Kharagpur alum was arrested by the CBI for allegedly trying to steal source code while working for Mumbai-based Geometric Software Solutions, which in turn was working on debugging software for a US-based company, Solid Works ... more.

August 2002

• IIT Kanpur has been asked to help calm down some of the hysteria surrounding the "muhnochwa" attacks in Uttar Pradesh according to the New York Times ... more. A Times of India story also refers to the role that IIT scientists are playing ... click here for more.
  
• Jharkhand and Bihar are vying for the next IIT according to a report in the Times of India ... the Jharkhand government has written a letter to the Planning Commission, expressing its willingness to provide 300 acres of land in Deoghar for setting up an IIT there ... more.
  
• Dr. Parvati Dev, President of the IIT Kharagpur Foundation said in a recent speech in Kharagpur that alumni in the US are ready to send aid to their institute and "this could run into a few hundred million dollars". But the problem is that "most of the time we keep sending aid without knowing what the institute actually wants," she said. This is due to a lack of dialog between the institute authorities and former students. Dev was speaking at the concluding session of the year long golden jubilee celebrations of IIT Kharagpur ... more.
  
• India Today's August 19th issue lists the IITs and the IIMs amongst the "55 Things That Make India Proud" ... "those hardcore arbit guys from the Indian Institutes of Technology, have done jhin-chak stuff to do a negation number on sceptics" ... "the elite techie boot camps produce fewer than 2,000 graduates a year-2,500 are admitted from an aspiring one lakh-that organisations in India and abroad gratefully accept into their folds. " And about the IIMs ... "It's official. The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, is the toughest management school in the world to get into" ... more.
  
• Mumbai Monthly Meet ... the dulcet voice of smt veena sahasrabudhe, doyenne of indian classical music, beckons all alumni to the lush green campus for the annual varsha stuti. Come celebrate the season at the campus - all the gurgling waters and croaking frogs from last year have returned ... more.
  
• Nandan Nilekani was the Chief Guest at IIT Bombay's 2002 convocation on August 9th. He said in his speech to the newly minted IITians that "meritocracy is the foundation of any successful institution ...".  Rediff.com's Priya Ganapati interviewed Nandan on the Powai campus ... "When I came to IIT in July 1973, I was a gawky 18 year old from a small town, unused to and unaware of the big sophisticated city ... five years later, I had the experience and confidence to face the world ... this metamorphosis was made possible by people who had preceded me, who had ... the vision and foresight to create a fair and merit-based system that allowed a callow boy to become a confident man. It is acts like these that spur me to give back, recompense for the priceless education and learning I got from IIT," says Nilekani ... more.
  
• Students at IIT Bombay can now experience the thrill of a rocket lifting off without traveling to Sriharikota, thanks to a vehicle simulation facility which has been set up by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) at the Centre for Aerospace Systems and Designing Engineering in the Department of Aerospace Engineering ... more.
  
• Introducing Ypanels in the Bay Area ... inviting all IITians to join over 15 distinguished panelists from industry, academia, the venture capital industry plus over 25 distinguished IIT alumni to kickoff a series of networking events serving all professionals and over 5000 IIT alumni in the Bay Area. The keynote speaker for the inaugural event on August 14 is Arjun Gupta, founder TeleSoft Partners ... more.
  

• Three IIT Kanpur researchers have devised a new primality testing algorithm which allows a computer to tell whether a number is prime. A paper on this groundbreaking development has been distributed to leading mathematicians who have expressed excitement at the finding. Prof. Manindra Agarwal and two of his students, Nitin Saxena and Neeraj Kayal, both B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur who have just joined as Ph.D. students, have discovered a polynomial time deterministic algorithm to test if an input number is prime or not. One of the main features of this result is that the proof is neither too complex nor too long and relies on very innovative and insightful use of results from number theory  ... more.

  The above development is being compared to another groundbreaking groundbreaking by yet another IITian, IIT Bombay alumnus Narendra Karmarkar (BTech EE '78 ), who invented a ground-breaking algorithm in the field of linear programming in 1984 ... more.
  

• Dr. Prem Vrat, Director of IIT Roorkee, has staked a claim that the first train in India ran between Roorkee and Piran Kaliyar on December 22, 1851, and not two years later in 1853 from Mumbai to Thane. According to Dr. Vrat, the new fact came to light in an old book published in 1860, in which its author, Col. P T Cautley, revealed that the engine of the first train was brought from Britain in 1851 and the two bogies began their first journey in the same year. The book titled "Report on Ganga Canal" said that in order to solve the irrigation problems of farmers of the area, British engineers devised a plan of constructing a canal on the river Ganga ... more.
  

• "Nataraj", a walking robot, rolled out of the Robotics Lab at IIT Bombay on August 4 ... at a height of over six feet, Nataraj is the first of its kind in the world, and is the largest robot built in India according to Prof. Amarnath. The robot took eight years to be built and has six legs that enable it to walk, turn, climb stairs and step over obstacles. Nataraj can also carry tools, cameras and manipulator hands for inspection, repair and maintenance ... more. A story in the Melbourne Age newspaper adds that India has built the six-legged robot with tennis balls for shoes to be used in case of accidents at its nuclear power plants. The remote-controlled machine can climb stairs, step over obstacles and carry out repairs inside India's 14 nuclear power plants ... more.
  
• Sandeep Pandey, who co-founded Asha for Education together with IIT Kanpur Professor Deepak Gupta and the late Shri V.J.P. Srivatsavoy, has been awarded the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for 2002. A Rediff.com report adds that ... "A decade ago, Sandeep Pandey quit his job at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and plunged into working for Asha - an education programme for underprivileged children. His years of dedication brought him the Ramon Magasasay award - the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He was selected in the Emergent Leadership Category" .... more.
  
• The Annual Bay Area Alumni Picnic on August 4, 2002 was a great success with several hundred attendees. Junta had a great time with friends and family and Prof. Phatak from KReSIT was the chief guest ... more.
  

July 2002

• China has dramatically increased its budget for science to create new institutes and better infrastructure. "This ... is a far more powerful magnet than star salaries ... My students are most likely to return  ... if I show them that I can publish with the same intensity and quality as I would have at Caltech or Chicago" says Dr. Shubha Tole of TIFR, who was quoted in a recent ToI article titled "Curbing brain drain the Chinese way" ... more.
  
• IIT Kharagpur is setting up an autonomous National Institute for Medical Science and Technology, with a 200-bed virtual hospital to fuse medicine and technology. Topping the list of scientists who brokered this medicine-technology marriage is Presidential-elect A. P. J. Abdul Kalam  ... more.
  
• Amid the thundering sound of power looms at a remote weavers' colony in the crime-ridden Mainpur district of Gaya ... what stands out are the slogans painted on the brick walls. "If you have seen dreams of IIT, then forget what is yours (family and home), make your resolve strong and the rank will be yours," reads one such slogan. And the residents of this colony seem to have taken the advice to heart ... this colony ... where 80 per cent of the weavers are below poverty line, boasts of scientists who work at the DRDO and the India Nuclear Centre as well as software engineers in top-notch companies like Infosys, Wipro, Reliance Industries and even one in the US ... six boys from the colony cleared the IIT examination while two girls got through the state-level engineering examinations ... more.
  
• Infosys has called back all the 60 students it recruited from IIT Powai last year and later rejected ... "the decision has been a big relief to the students who received deferment letters last month after bagging offer letters in January ... the lucky 60 now have a reason to jubilate, finally bidding farewell to job hunts and sleepless nights" ... more.
  
• CapitalIIT announces a PanIIT event in Washington DC to celebrate the Golden Jubilee year of the IIT system from October 11-13 at the Omni Shoreham in Washington DC. ... more.
  
• Kharagpur's Legend ... Frontline magazine article about the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, which is the oldest among the IITs, was formally inaugurated on August 18, 1951 by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. "Over the next 50 years it not only set the standards for other similar institutions, but became a key contributor to the technological self-reliance of the country through numerous research projects sponsored by the scientific departments of the government and by other organisations" ... more.
  
• IITBHF Chicago Chapter announces a PanIIT event to celebrate the Golden Jubilee year of the IIT system on Saturday, July 13 in Chicago. The event features networking sessions with alumni from across the IITs, a panel discussion with participation from prominent alumni, breakout sessions, and much more. Invited speakers include luminaries such as Sam Pitroda, CEO of WorldTel, Rono Dutta, President of United Airlines, Rakesh Gangwal, Former CEO, US Airways, Sunil Wadhwani, CEO, I-Gate, Prabha Sinha, Managing Director and Founder, ZS Associates, and Kanwal Rekhi, Founding Member of TiE ... more.
  

June 2002

• "What is really wrong with leadership in India?" asks Kanwal Rekhi in Silicon India ... "India is at last getting recognition as a pluralistic democracy that has achieved maturity and confidence and is on its way to achieving prosperity for its masses within a generation or two. Faltering leadership at this time by the Prime Minister can only hurt, and is likely to take the focus away from economic imperatives. That may prove to be disastrous for the nation and may set us back several years" ... more.
  
• Cover story in News India Times story about the NY Chapter banquet ... "Nearly 200 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay alumni, a sample of America's brain gain from India, gathered for a reunion banquet at the ballroom of Bombay Palace in Manhattan on May 18. Several old students of India’s own "Ivy League" from across the United States, including California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida and Washington D.C., attended the reunion organized by the IIT Bombay Alumni Association Greater New York Chapter" ... more.
  
• Lucent Chief Scientist Arun Netravali (BTech '67 EE) was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Bush in a White House ceremony on June 12th. Netravali was cited for his "pioneering contributions that transformed TV from analog to digital ... and for technical expertise and leadership ..."   ... more.
  
• Manhattan sub-chapter announces an interactive seminar on "China and India - Perspectives on Strategic Imperatives" at The Princeton Club, 15 W 43 St, NYC, on June 20th, between 5:30 pm and 8:30 pm - click here to register ... more.
  
• Mumbai Monthly Meet on June 29th features a talk on "Are multinational corporations and foreign investment detrimental to India's future ?"  Akshay Jain, Editor of "Dal Roti" and a satirist and activist will hold forth on the erosion of our "sanskriti" .... more.
  
• "At IIT Mumbai, job letters turn into pink slips" reads an Indian Express headline ... "Sleepless nights, gloomy faces, tired looks and red-shot eyes. It’s not just the morning after the farewell parties at Powai’s Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). The students are living the nightmare of the economic slowdown: letters of deferred and withdrawn jobs are trickling in and an increased number of students are joining the list of the unemployed ... more.
  
• IITian Manohar Parrikar and his BJP-led coalition government formally came to power in Goa on June 3rd, with Governor Mohd. Fazal administering the oath of office and secrecy at a function on the premises of Cabo Raj Nivas. Parrikar is the 17th chief minister after the liberation of Goa. Four members from two regional parties - Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) and United Goan Democratic Party (UGDP) and a lone Independent MLA - extended support to the BJP for the formation of the government ... more.
  

• IIT alumnus Dr. Madan Mohan Rao has published a new book titled "The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook, Episode IV: Emerging Powerhouses" ... click here for more.  It covers key trends in the major Internet economies of the Asia-Pacific region, such as the wireless and broadband explosion in Japan and South Korea, the giant markets of China, the software powerhouse of India, e-government in Singapore, and e-commerce in Australia ... more.
  

• Telera, a privately held voice-recognition software company co-founded by IITian Prem Uppaluru, is being acquired by Alcatel for $136 Million in stock ... more.
  

• IIT Bombay alumni reunite in Manhattan ... News India Times story about the New York Chapter banquet. Several old students of India's own "Ivy League" from across the United States, including California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida and Washington, D.C., attended the reunion organized by the IIT Bombay Alumni Association Greater New York Chapter ... more.
  

• IIT Bombay alums will raise $5 Million ... the decision was taken at a reunion banquet in the ballroom of Bombay Palace in Midtown Manhattan that was attended by ... students of India's own "Ivy League" ... Prominent among those present were Nandan Nilekani, chief executive officer of Infosys Technologies, angel investor Kanwal Rekhi ... more.
  

• Mumbai Monthly Meet on June 9th ... the BMC garbage dump of yesteryears between dharavi and bandra-kurla is now the Mahim NISARG Park - 15 hectares of thriving lush green forest ... the panIIT alumni have the special privilege of a conducted *walk thru* exclusively for us on sunday, 9th june followed by breakfast and a small talk on environment by Mr Avinash Kubal (dy diro of the park). pile on to take deep breaths of fresh ozone laced with medicinal flavours - and show the kids what CAN be. assembly at 6.45 am on sunday, 9th june outside the main gate, opp the dharavi bus depot - the early alum gets the birdsong :-)) ... more.
  

• The Times of India reports that "Concerned with the continuing exodus of their faculty members, particularly the young ones, and their best students, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are to adopt a number of measures, including cent per cent fee waivers, teaching positions for bright students immediately after they complete their studies and induction of visiting professors from among outstanding NRIs and persons of Indian origin (PIOs)" ... more.

May 2002

• InsIghT YPoint, the IIT alumni webZine is now online ... click here for the current issue. Lead stories include a roundup of campus news, the history of MI, "Going High Places" with mountaineer "Balya" Limaye, motivation behind alumni gifts, the Isaac Chair, a snapshot of the 2001 Alumni Picnic, an interview with Ajit Shelat, India-based founder of SwitchOn and E=MC² ... plus much, much more ! So read and enjoy ... more.
  

• Details of the Roadshow 2002 events in San Francisco (May 11), Los Angeles (May 12), Pittsburgh (May 17), New York (May 18), Washington DC (May 23) and Boston (May 25)... more announcements to follow.
  

• Annual Distinguished Alumni Meeting was held on May 18, 2002 in Citigroup Center ... click here, here or here for three QuickTime movie clips from the event. The distinguished attendees at the meeting, which was hosted by Citibank Chairman Victor Menezes, included Director Ashok Misra, Prof. MGK Menon, Nandan Nilekani and Kanwal Rekhi.
  

• The IIT Bombay Heritage Fund has a permanent office in the San Francisco Bay Area ... please visit us if you are in Cupertino :

IIT Bombay Heritage Fund
21710 Stevens Creek Boulevard
Suite 225
Cupertino, CA 95014
1-408-252-1664

• The Public Policy Institute of California has published a new study by AnnaLee Saxenian which posits that "brain drain" has evolved into "brain recirculation" ... click here for an India West story, or read the report from the PPIC website ... more.
  

• India West's May 3 issue covered the Golden Jubilee Celebrations of IIT Kharagpur in Fullerton, CA ... more.
  

• The first ever PanIIT meeting was held in Stamford, Connecticut on May 19th 2002.  Rajat Gupta, MD of McKinsey & Company hosted the meeting which was attended by Nandan Nilekani, Victor Menezes, Desh Deshpande, PC Chatterjee, Umang Gupta and many others ... the group is moving forward on several key initiatives, including the plans for a big 50th birthday bash for the IIT system in September 2002 ... click here for a QuickTime movie clip from the meeting.
  

• India Today's Top 10 Colleges issue ranked IIT Kharagpur at #1 overall. IIT Bombay was ranked #1 in Procedure Ranking, but #4 overall. Considering that IIT Bombay ranked #1 in Reputation, Infrastructure, Student Care, and Job Placement ... go figure what this beauty contest means !  "This year, after IIT-Kharagpur (IIT-KGP) wraps up its year-long golden jubilee celebrations, India's oldest school for higher technical education might finally get time to acknowledge its "gifts". The one most likely to stand out comes from a group of IIT-KGP's former students, now settled abroad" ... more.
  

• Vasant Prabhu (BTech '81 ME), CFO of Safeway, was featured in an article in the New York Times on the return of the web-grocer following the demise of Webvan. The article adds that "Vasant M. Prabhu, Safeway's executive vice president and chief financial officer ... did say the company was "quite pleased with the early results." ... more.
  

• Silicon India's May 2002 issue features Chaitan Khosla (BTech '85 ChE) in an article titled "The crossroads of chemistry and biotech"... more. The same issue has a story titled "Chasing Nano" about Arunava Majumdar at UC Berkeley ... more.
  

• IIT Alumni Association of Canada  announces its Annual Dinner - 2002 on Saturday, May 25, 2002. at the TORONTO AIRPORT MARRIOTT, 901, Dixon Road, Rexdale, Ontario M9W  1J5, Tel: 416 567 9400 ... click here for directions. Talk by Distinguished Guests including Dr. GURURAJ “ DESH” DESHPANDE on "Navigating Through Difficult Time" and Dr. A. SCOTT CARSON on "Good Corporate Governance and Ethical Conduct in Business" ... more.
  

• India Today magazine in a recent issue highlighted the NRIs who are at the helm of biotech firms in the USA and who have set their sights on making India a frontrunner in the race to cash in on the biotech boom ...  Among the first CEOs of Indian origin at the helm of a public limited biotechnology company is Kumar Chandrashekaran. The Delhi born, IIT Powai alumni came to the US in the 1960s to do graduate work at Berkley in Chemical Engineering, and taught briefly at Stanford. Then he began working with Alza, a pharmaceutical company recently acquired by Johnson and Johnson, before moving to a sister concern called Syntax. Now at the helm of InSite Vision, Kumar is pursuing research in biotechnology applications for curing eye ailments ... more.
  

April 2002

• "Blue chip off the block" says the Times of India ... "the Nandan Nilekani story began in the flower-power era of the '70s ... he was a fresh graduate from IIT, Mumbai ... I was excited at the prospect of working at Patni with Murthy at the helm," he recounts. A wise decision by a young Nandan who had always been encouraged to foster an independent mindset. He had grown up in an intellectually stimulating and culturally alive family environment" ... more.
  

• Bay Area Pan IIT Happy Hour on Thursday, April 11 at 7 pm was a big success too with over 250 attendees from all IITs ... more.
  

• New York seminar on April 4th was a big success ... click here for a report from the event organizers. Unsolicited kudos from attendees at the April 4th event included the following: "Wanted to personally thank and appreciate the effort behind yesterday's event. I think it was a tremendous success ..." - S.C. ... "... it was well organized and interesting yesterday. I am glad I came" - R. ... "... the event was terrific ..." - S.P.  Congratulations to Vikas, Gautam, Manish and the New York team ... more.
  

• In a move more familiar outside India, Sicom Venture Capital has funded two IIT Mumbai students to the extent of Rs. 1.5 crore for their patent-pending technology development. eInfinitus Technologies, a company set up by two IIT undergraduates, Siddharth Tandon and Jayant Bansal a couple of years ago on the campus of the IIT Mumbai, is eyeing the router equipment vendors. Currently, their technology is being tested by these vendors even as they have applied for a patent for their software, xMPLS (Multiple Protocol Label Switching) ... more.
  

• ToI story headlined "A Beautiful Mind" about Nandan Nilekani formally becoming CEO of Infosys ... "His lone entry into the lobby of the Taj Mahal hotel goes unnoticed ... Half an hour later, Sunjay Dutt’s lope down the same path is punctuated by the popping of flashbulbs and the hubbub of the dozen heavies accompanying him. Nandan M Nilekani ... the CEO of Infosys, smiles wryly. Apparently Dutt has more star quality for middle India than the new 46-year-old chief helmsman of this country’s IT powerhouse, but that relative anonymity sits ever so easy on Nilekani. It’s almost as if he’s reluctant to step into the full media glare as his friend and fellow Infoscion NR Narayana Murthy steps aside to become a Gates-esque chief mentor for India’s bluest chip. In fact, while industry circles buzz with speculation over how hot the seat could prove to be for him amid the lingering gloom over the cyberworld, Nilekani again, is unperturbed." ... more.

March 2002

• Who says IITians aren't cool enough ? ... the Times of India met a few bright young things on the Powai campus to see precisely why it's cool to be an IITian. The motley crew of IITians had nicknames attached ... "Bongi" Mallik, "Nips" Chakraborty, "Ads" Kakkad, "Burr" Mohammed, "Baddy" Aditya, "Ashgo" Goel, and "Armpit" Kamath. "These guys are not just working on their Grade Point Averages, but are also active on the cultural circuit, being enthusiastic JAMmers and quizzers ... the life of the serious IITian is not all that easy ... Nabdus are always on tenterhooks about their quiz scores. Crackus are always held in high esteem ... there is the CPI which constitutes an important part of any student's life ... what a Nabdu dreads is a fakka (getting a KT) ... but a Pseud is one who is above all that - he dresses well, cracks his exams and generally plays God."  So what makes an IITian tick? "We can't help ourselves, we go out and win ! ... We strive for excellence ... We are hardworking and dedicated" ... more.
  

• IIT Bombay has managed to place only 60% of its graduating class as of March 2002 according to an article in the ToI ... this is a significantly slower rate as compared to previous years. The institute had achieved 100% placement by as early as October for some of its previous classes. Salaries too have not improved much over last year, and the highest offer so far is Rs. 8 lakh exclusive of benefits. The offer was made by US-based software company Veritas. NS Rathi, placement officer at IITB says salaries are comparable to last year. However, Veritas and Schlumberger, the global technology services company, were the only foreign companies on campus this year as compared to last year, when IITB had some fifteen foreign companies vying for students ... more.  Another story on the same topic in the Economic Times is titled "Boom to gloom in the tech mart" ... more.
  

• Roadshow 2002 is coming up ... Director Misra and a delegation from IIT Bombay will be going around the US in May-June 2002 ... click here for more.
  

• The IIT Bombay campus has four brand new electric three-wheelers designed by PSU Scooters trundling along on the campus. These six-seaters, which are called "Vikram", are painted white with a slash of green proclaiming their friendliness to the environment, and they emit no fumes while moving about with a gentle hum. IIT has purchased four of them, at a cost of Rs. 2.75 lakh each, to combat the pollution caused by autorickshaws on the campus. "We concluded that since about a thousand autorickshaws enter the campus in a day causing a huge amount of noise and air pollution, there was a need for an alternate transport system," explains Rajesh Dhankar, security officer, IIT ... more.
  

• NY Chapter has postponed its Professional Development Event to April 4, 2002, between 5:30 pm and 8:30 pm at the Princeton Club of New York, 15 W 43 St. (212) 596-1200.  The topic is a Panel discussion on "Emerging economies : China and India" ... please register for the event by clicking on:
               http://www.iitbombay.org/iitb_db/main/EventResponse.asp?ID=13
  It is also an opportunity to network with alumni from other schools including the Univ. of Chicago - Grad School of Business, Dartmouth College - Tuck School, other IITs, MIT - Sloan School of Management, and Stanford U - Grad School of Business ... more.
  

• In its March 11 issue, Barron's has profiled Arjun Divecha (BTech '79 AE) who manages the GMO Emerging Markets Fund which is ranked #1 amongst EM funds by Morningstar. "Arjun ... even engages in an occasional game of cricket, a sport he picked up as a young student at the Indian Institute of Technology in his hometown, Bombay, before coming to Cornell in 1979 to study finance ... the 46-year-old Divecha manages an institution-oriented ($1 million-minimum investment) mutual fund that focuses exclusively in the most tumultuous and complex corner of the mutual-fund universe: the emerging markets." Morningstar gives Arjun Divecha's GMO Emerging Markets a No. 1 ranking among its peers -- and its returns tower over its benchmark's. ... more.
  

• March newsletter from IIT Bombay.
  

• CNN story titled "Curry software gears for 'Made in India' push" featuring IIT Delhi alumnus Pradeep Singh, who co-founded Talisma Corp. based in Bangalore, which is now counted among the global leaders in customer relations management (CRM) software with Sony Corp and Samsung ranking among its clients. An India Today story about the same company also highlights the success of Talisma and IITian Singh ... more.
  

• Rusi Taleyarkhan, an IIT Chennai alumnus, has caused a stir in the world scientific community by claiming to have achieved nuclear fusion in a small table top experiment. Scientists have worked for decades in this direction and the possibility that a team might have cracked the problem is considered so remote that the announcement, to be reported in the journal Science later this week, has been greeted with skepticism in the academic community. The research team making the claim is led by Rusi Taleyarkhan, a senior scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Richard Lahey, a professor of engineering at RPI ... more.
  

• Mumbai Chapter announces panIIT Bombay to Goa trip on March 29th ... RSVP to mumbai[!]iitbombay.org. The expedition leaves on Friday morning and reaches the Arabian Sea by evening; on the 30th, plans are being firmed for an interactive discussion on the budget, technology and business scenario with media coverage; leave Madgaon 31st evening and reach Mumbai on Monday morning.  "The land of zero entropy, palm fronds swaying on the beach, and the local and alumni spirit beckons ... You've got a ticket to ride" says Janak Daftari !   ... more.
  

• Entrepreneurship is alive in India in spite of the the uncertain economic times as proven by the flourishing of business plan competitions. The Economic Times on March 4th reported that "The romanticism of the success stories of previous winners like Myzus.com (Ed. note: incubated in IIT Bombay and now valued at $6 Million) is also a strong motivator ...  Eureka, IIT Bombay's annual business plan competition, drew 150 entries from around the world this year. 'The competition gives students a formal area where they know they will be evaluated ... we identify the ones who are serious and work with them,' says Rajendra K Lagu, Project Director of IIT Bombay's Technology Incubation and Entreprenuerial Cell" ... more.
  

• Jairam Ramesh (BTech '75 ME), the economist and Congress leader was interviewed in India Abroad about India's economic successes and failures ... Jairam writes a regular column titled Kautilya in India Today. You can find all his work and other items of interest on his website. Amongst quotable quotes ...  "The way we managed our exchange rate is a remarkable success story. Our problems have something to do with internals of the economy. We are not exploding externally. We are imploding internally. ... We should invest in physical and social infrastructure. ...  If a government is more interested in rewriting history books and building a temple, we are doomed." Click here for excerpts from the interview and more ...
  

• Media Lab Asia plans to set up four research labs on the campuses of the IITs in Mumbai, Kanpur, Chennai and Delhi.  Well-known faculty members, including Prof. Sanjay Dhande (Director, IIT Kanpur) and Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala (IIT Chennai), have been identified To run these laboratories ... click here for more.
  

• Hewlett Packard's Bangalore-based subsidiary, H-P Labs. India and IIT Chennai announced on Thursday, February 28, that they have launched a joint research and development lab, aimed at developing technologies for emerging economies ... click here for more on this story. Earlier on Monday, February 25, HP had announced the opening of H-P Labs India itself, which would focus on generating innovative solutions for India and other emerging economies of the world. This is the seventh H-P Lab worldwide, and the first in the Asia Pacific region ... click here for more.
  

• The New York Chapter held a very successful Manhattan Happy Hour recently with over 30 attendees from IIT Bombay and from other IITs as well ... click here for a report.
  

• Bridging the divide ... Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Professor of Electrical Engineering at IIT Chennai heads up TeNeT, the Telecommunications and Computer Network Group, which is working on a vision of connecting rural India with telecom and internetnetworking ... click here for an interview with Prof. Jhunjhunwala in the Economic Times.
  

• Current issue of InsIghT, the campus webZine... Cover Story on "Its a WOeMAN's Worlds!" ... Lakshmi Narain and Amrit Kallar examine the birth and development of the women's cell. Focus ... "Oh, Feast is Feast, and Mess is Mess, and never the twain shall meet ... Sachin Sancheti and Amol Gogate take a deeper look at the factors governing the poor quality of food cooked in our messes and the looming mess bills accompanying it and suggest possible avenues of improvement. Opinions ... "The "Mood" point" - The Hows, The Whys and The Why Nots of MI OC and CG team selection, explored by Siddhartha Srivastava ... click here for the entire issue and lots more from InsIghT-Y-Point.

February 2002

• "The sprawling wooded campus of IIT Powai is in the throes of feverish activity ... old timers at the institute say the rate at which infrastructure is being added is unprecedented ... a lot of this work is being done with financial assistance from the institute's alumni ... the major pivot point for these donations has been the IIT Bombay Heritage Fund (IITBHF), formed when alumni from the United States got together in 1996 and founded the first US-based nonprofit organisation for any Indian educational institution" ... click here for the full article in the Mumbai Mid-Day newspaper.
  

• The Pittsburgh Chapter is going to have its first get-together on Friday, February 22nd, at 7 PM at the Udipi Cafe in Monroeville, 4141 Old William Penn Highway. All local  IITians from any of the seven IITs are invited ... click here for more.
  

• February newsletter from IIT Bombay has news about the "Run for India" parade, inauguration of the Gulmohar cafe funded by Noorali Sonawalla through the Heritage Fund, and the launch of a Business Incubator in KReSIT ... click here for more.
  

• IIT Bombay announced its Distinguished Alumnus Awards for 2002. The list of honorees includes Dr. Satish Agnihotri, Krish Prabhu, Ashank Desai, Dr. Jagmohan Mundhra, Parag Rele, Avi Nash, Dr. Dinesh Mohan,  and Raj Mashruwala.
  

• Campus pictures ...

   

   
  • Nilekani, Rekhi, and Sonawalla on campus to inaugurate projects
  • Republic Day 2002 and the "Run for India"
  • Lecture Theatre renamed as PC Saxena Auditorium
  • Alumni Day 2001 and Class of 1976 Reunion
    

• Building on the success of the IITB Manhattan Happy Hours, the New York Chapter has organized a Happy Hour in Orange, NJ on February 22 at 6 pm. All IITians are invited to share drinks, mingle, and network with not just IIT Bombay alumni, but at last count also with IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, and IIT Madras alums ... click here for more.
  

• Mumbai Monthly Meet on February 23 at 4.30 pm features Prakash Kewalramani, IIT-D'75 and Kishan Khanna, IIT-KGP '65 ... are IIT alumni, self-labeled creme-de-la-creme, worth their weight in gold? silver? cream? Is the alumni under-achieving as a terrific national human resource? (Of course, here we are talking apart from the millions of USD and INR donated and expected, at Institute of Engrs, Haji Ali ... click here for more.
  

• Lessons From The Downturn, And The Road Ahead : Nandan Nilekani to speak in the Bay Area on Saturday, February 23, at 4 p.m. at the Cubberley Community Center Theater in Palo Alto ... click here for more.
  

• Dr. Kota Harinarayana, Distinguished Scientist and Program Director, Aeronautical Development Agency, Govt. of India, has been nominated for the Padmashri Award in the Republic Day Honors List for 2002.  Dr. Kota is an alumnus of IIT Bombay, having completed his Ph.D in 1982 from the Department of Aerospace Engineering, and he was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1996.
  

• Times of India article titled  "Where have the IT jobs gone" quotes Prof. Ashok Misra, Director of IIT Bombay who feels that "... if the Massachusetts Institute of Technology brings in IT-enabled rural development, there will be great number of employment opportunities. Demand for MBAs has increased 50 to 80 per cent, and management has become a great career choice. But in a way it's good that engineers will not be concentrated in IT; they will go in other sectors like transport where there is great demand." ... click here for more.
  

• The revolutionary CorDECT Wireless Local Loop (WLL) technology, developed by IIT Chennai, in association with Analog Devices has been introduced in Baramati to provide wireless Internet connectivity in a 25 km radius. This is the first time that this innovative technology for rural telecom connectivity has been introduced in Maharashtra ... click here for more.
  

• Techfest 2002, IIT Bombay's fifth annual technology extravaganza and the biggest of its kind in Asia, is scheduled on February 1-3, 2002. The distinguished guests include Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, Rajat Gupta and Dr. Bharat Balasubramanium ... click here for more.  DaimlerChrysler launched its premium Mercedes-Benz sportscar SL500 Roadster at TechFest according to a report in the Times of India.  Other headlines included - "Huge corporate participation at IIT TechFest", "India can no longer be spectator to invasions : Kalam".
  

• Following the success of its October informal get-together, the New York Chapter plans to hold its next "Manhattan Happy Hour" on February 7th, at 6 pm at Shaan Restaurant, 57 W. 48th St. (Between 5th & 6th Aves.) ... you are invited to share drinks with other IIT Bombay alumni from in and around Manhattan, in a casual setting ... click here for more.
  

• In a delightful New Year's gift, Nandan Nilekani, the newly anointed Chief Executive Officer of Infosys Technologies gifted over 25,000 shares of Infosys to IIT Bombay towards building a world-class hostel on its campus. Nilekani's contribution is currently worth $2.25 million. Nandan has also donated significant amounts towards the renovation of Hostel 4 and Hostel 8, for the construction of the School of Information Technology and for IIT Bombay's Distance Education Program. Nandan had made a commitment to give as much as $5 million to IIT Bombay back in 1999 and he has now fulfilled his promise following this donation  ... click here for a report in the India Abroad issue dated February 1.
  

• The Houston Chapter is sponsoring a talk by Dr. Lienhard, author and voice of more than 1,400 episodes of The Engines of Our Ingenuity on National Public Radio, a program about machines and the people who created them. "Innovation, A Dangerous Guest : Do  You   Really  Want  Creative  People in  Your  Organization" at The Briar Club, 2603 Timmons Lane, Houston TX- 77027 on February 13, 2002 (Wednesday) at 6.30 p.m.
  RSVP: chitra[!]iaccgh.com ... click here for more.

January 2002

• IT industry slowdown is short-term (Times of India, Jan 18): The slowdown facing the IT industry, specially software exports was short-lived and world class talent from IITs would help infotech companies to grab growth opportunities in the global market, Infosys chief operating officer Nandan Nilekani said ... click here for more.
  

• The guru-shishya parampara (Times of India, Jan 13): Mentoring, or the guru-shishya relationship, seems to have acquired a new dimension in the face of the global slowdown ... click here for more.
  

• Nandan Nilekani (IIT Bombay - BTech EE '78 ) has been anointed as the CEO of Indian software giant Infosys. The company’s celebrated Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, N R Narayana Murthy, announced on January 10 that he was handing over the baton of CEO to Nandan, who is currently Managing Director and President. The news received wide coverage in the Indian press ... Times of India headlines included "New role for key Infoscion" and "Nandan Nilekani to take over as Infosys CEO while the Economic Times article says that "Murthy does a Gates, makes Nilekani new CEO".
  

• IT biggies keep away from IIT campuses ... click here for the story in Rediff.com. "... those who believed that the developments in the US would not affect India's IT majors should perhaps reserve judgement. The current downtrend and the business pressures faced by the Indian IT industry after the September 11 attacks in the US are taking their toll ...".
  

• Mr N. Vittal, Chief Vigilance Commissioner of Mumbai will be the guest at the Mumbai Monthly Meet on Friday, January 18 at Haji Ali:
  

  The Time : 5.30 pm, Friday, 18th January '02

  The Theme : Make no mistake, we'll get them

  The Place : Institute of Engineers, Haji Ali

  The Menu : (Politically Clean, mostly correct)
  
  

• An editorial in the Economic Times called for copyrighting the IIT and IIM names and protecting their standards ... "A periodic, independent and objective survey should establish whether ... standards are being maintained. Those who do not should be subject to the possibility ... of being disenfranchised  ... the admission test should be common to all the institutions that have reached the required standards in the previous survey."
  

• Rajeev Khanolkar (BTech '78 ME), founder, president and CEO, of Netforensics, an Internet security firm  announced that it had raised nearly $11 million in the second round of financing ... click here for ET story.
  

• Times of India article on IIT Bombay's "Programme on Airship Design and Development" which is designing an airship in conjunction with the Aerial Delivery Research and Development Establishment, Agra, and several other organizations.  The aim is to build helium based flying ships that can be used for transportation of goods and passengers, or for a "... quick zip from Borivli to Nariman Point" ... click here for the full story.
  

• IITs, IITs, everywhere ... following conversion of the University of Roorkee into an IIT, the floodgates have been opened to demands from politicians for more IITs. Recent headlines include "Why can't Ahmedabad have an IIT" and "... plea to Joshi for IIT in Patna". Read the view from IITians in Powai here ... similar proposals in the past included IIT Chandigarh, IIT Dharwad, and for the