Tier-two people, first-rate engineers

Rajesh Ramachandran

SHASHI Tharoor, Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, has in a smart alec social media post made his constituents feel good by pointing out that while IITians went to Silicon Valley, the CET (College of Engineering, Trivandrum) alumni took India to the moon. There are quite a few engineers from CET in the team that made the moon mission a success. Of course, Tharoor also acknowledges the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman’s alma mater in the neighbouring district, Kollam. Tharoor’s wisecrack has a great sociological truth in it. The tier-two towns are building the new India. Their vast reserves of human capital remain unappreciated and even unmapped.

The only prayer to our politicians is not to reduce universities and other institutions of higher education to their political fiefs.

S Somanath, the ISRO head, did his BTech in mechanical engineering from Thangal Kunju Musaliar College of Engineering (TKMCE) from the same batch as that of my brother and some of my closest friends. Then, most of my family, friends and neighbours went to TKMCE; and nobody held much in store for those like me who didn’t make it. Such was the veneration for this college, which those outside the state would not even have heard of. Almost every small town in India holds one such mystery — a college or an institution that lets its children soar, literally to the heavens.

For Kollam, this mystery was an unlettered man who made millions selling cashew nuts. He actually turned this town into a global hub of cashew trade. And he put his hard-earned money in a newspaper, which folded up, and also two colleges. While hailing Somanath’s success, one has to pay homage to philanthropist Thangal Kunju Musaliar, who invited the President of India to lay the foundation stone to build Kerala’s first private engineering college in 1956 with his own money and threw it open to meritorious students. And Somanath was a TKMCE topper who walked into Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram for a low-paying sarkari job.

Chandrayaan-3’s project director P Veeramuthuvel is from a similar small town, Villupuram, in Tamil Nadu. Veeramuthuvel first did a diploma from a local private polytechnic before joining an engineering college to get a degree in mechanical engineering. Sure, it would be unfair for a few newbies to lay claim to ISRO’s success. It was indeed the grand vision of the country’s founding fathers that led to this success, no doubt. Amongst our foreign-educated nation-builders Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, Patel and Ambedkar should be counted Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, too. And a grateful ISRO has rightly named the space vehicle that landed on the moon Vikram; Sarabhai’s dreams indeed touched down on the moon.

Brilliant scientists of international repute such as Sarabhai, Satish Dhawan, Brahm Prakash and APJ Abdul Kalam and lesser-known ones like AE Muthunayagam have over the decades built up the edifice which has now become a beacon of India’s hope and self-assurance. But what makes ISRO stand out is that it succeeded where many projects initiated by the nation-builders failed or struggled to stay afloat. In the last 30 years, after the Narasimha Rao government opened up the country to unfair competition, dismantling the structures that were painstakingly built over decades, most of the crown jewels of the nation were either sold off to comprador bourgeoisie or made valueless. Why, even the famed steel frame of the government started rusting and breaking under overbearing political interference.

It is in this context that these sarkari engineers from tier-two towns need to be lauded. Their accents give away the regional-language medium schools they went to. But their success bears testimony to the bottomless small-town talent pools. There may not be many institutions like ISRO that had to bear the brunt of public scrutiny, ridicule and derision. Initially, the space scientists and engineers were laughed at for their regular, repeated failures. Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station was the first such facility to be set up in the country in 1963 and anybody who worked there would always be asked: does any of your rockets ever go up?

Then came the ISRO spy scandal in the 1990s — a false case foisted by the local police in Kerala and a couple of Intelligence Bureau officials. Even the families of ISRO employees were not spared by ugly mobs, which even hurled stones at the space station’s buses ferrying scientists and engineers. Still, these young engineers did not lose heart. Even by the normal standards of measuring merit, they were not the best in the country. Toppers, obviously, were the IITians with their own Bombay-Delhi-Madras hierarchy, who would not count these poor cousins as even second best. So, with no glamour, no vanity degree from foreign shores, these poorly paid engineers were left to fend for themselves with the worst possible budget allocation in the world of space exploration.

Now, it has become a self-deprecatory joke for ISRO engineers to say that since they live frugally on government salaries, they can carry out space missions on shoestring budgets. But this austerity is not just about government pay and perks; it’s also about a tier-two attitude. While the best students after studying in elite colleges funded by Indian taxpayers enrich US Big Tech companies or some banker in Wall Street, it is left to the tier-two town boy or girl to conceive data localisation or to reinvent the wheel to ensure that the Indian hardware industry does not get crushed by a Chinese embargo or western sanctions. All this has been happening without much help from our governments and the only prayer to our politicians is not to reduce universities and other institutions of higher education to their political fiefs. Otherwise, there won’t be any tier-two talent either.

With some investment, autonomy and spirit of enquiry, the nation can reap rich dividends in tech advancements from the tier-two people. India thrives in its small towns, but the miracle of the Indian human capital is that it is not merely geographical, not just about small places, but also includes those deprived of opportunities in big cities.

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