Dunu's Unfinished Business

The slightly frayed jeans and long silver hair tied into a ponytail give him the appearance of an ageing beatnik, but unlike other ageing beatniks, there’s still a spring in his step and a edgy excitement in his voice.

Dunu Roy, 65, got a BTech and an MTech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, in the late 1960s, but spent the better part of the next two decades repairing bicycles, water pumps and tractors in Madhya Pradesh’s Shahdol district. It’d be easy to label him a slightly off-kilter “genius”, but even today, Roy would prefer being called a student revolutionary.

“Those were heady days,” he says, talking about the 1970s. “The national dream was fraying; the Congress was, for the first time, being defeated; the wisdom of large-scale projects like the Bhakra dam was being questioned, and the increasing slum population in cities was challenging prevalent notions of development.”

The student movement had spread in India, and the IITs weren’t immune. “Unlike today,” says Roy, “a national spirit and feeling of community was alive in the student population.” Students came forward in large numbers to work in rural areas.

Around the same time, the Front for Rapid Economic Advancement of India (FREA), run by a group of US-based Indians, had started work in the country. Their goal was to spur growth in small- and medium-sized industry.

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“I pity those who graduate from IIT just to sell soap in the US,” he says caustically. According to him, the 1990s were a “dark period” for student activism. However, things are beginning to look up.

Questions are being asked once again. The Hazards Centre has started getting 15-20 interns every year from the IITs. Roy is being invited to speak at colleges across the country. The student movement is making a comeback, and Roy is, as before, at its helm.

Does he think the film 3 Idiots is indicative of the changing attitude towards engineering? “Yes and no,” he says, after thinking for a moment. Roy admits that the film raised questions about an engineering education, but believes that the answer it provided was flawed.

“It basically said you could succeed in professions like photography or music despite your engineering degree; but it never answered the real question—how do you make engineering relevant?”

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