Three Times When India Trumped Western Countries for being Denied Technology E01

     On last 28th February I wrote a piece on how India undertook a process that is Sciencization. This is a three part article series throwing light on three stories of grit, perseverance and passion that helped India build technologies that were denied to it. 

    Chronologically going, the first story is of the denial of the supercomputers. The then Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi in 1987 was of the view that India should start leaving its footprints on supercomputing. USA had developed its first supercomputer called Cray and it was performing very well in the markets. The then Minister of Science had went to settle the deal with the Americans but they were apprehennsive of selling the technology to Indians for the reason that it could be used by India for non-civil purposes. India tried assuring the Americans but still, they refused. In India however the scientific community was divided into two schools of thought- the one that supported importing the technology and the other that supported indigeneous development of technology. We had several nuclear technologies to be tested lined up. The "Budhha had already smiled" in 1974 under the Prime Ministership of Indira Gandhi and in the upcoming years India would again test its "Shakti" under Atal Bihari Vajpayee! Moreover ISRO was also in the requirement of the technology for its communications satellites.  For augmenting the research and development that would be required India was hungry of computing powers of the order of million floating-point-operations per second. 

    Rajiv Gandhi asked Dr. Vijay Bhatkar whether they would be able to make a supercomputer indigeneously or would it be better to export one anyway. Dr. Vijay assured him that India can build one at a cost lesser than that incurred by USA in making Cray. The very next year, in 1988 Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) was established and work started. And in 1991 PARAM 8000 was launched. 

   It is important to know how news outlets reacted to the achivement. A US newspaper's headine read, "Denied supercomputer, angry India does it!"

   By 1996 USA agreed on selling the technology to Indians. The Cray ultimately entered India but at a far less price than that was offered before for the same product. Dr. Bhatkar had said truly that great nations are not built on borrowed technology! 

Sumit Narayan