Panel discussion on the authorised biography of Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala, authored by Ms Saloni Malhotra

Mr B Santhanam
Former CEO, Asia Pacific & India; Chairman, Saint-Gobain India

I’ve always been afraid of only two people, and one is sitting in front of me. Ashok always makes your expectations go way beyond your capability, so when he invited me onto this panel and I said I’d read a prepared speech, he agreed only with reluctance. Saloni, I read every page, and it was riveting. Some build products, some build companies, a few build institutions, but once in a generation you meet someone who builds ecosystems — Ashok belongs to that rare category. Roots represents values, wings represent imagination — across four decades he has given countless people both. My wife Rajani began her career in Ashok’s lab at IIT Madras at twenty-one, and our families have been close for nearly forty years. Reading the book, I kept asking what the operating system behind this institution-builder really is, and seven things stood out. Infectious intensity — when India struggled with brutal connectivity, he never asked why somebody else couldn’t solve it. Intellectual independence — he insisted the Research Park not be confined by any ministry’s bureaucracy, which is why it is vibrant today. Inclusive innovation — long before Digital India, he decided technology must serve the underserved; the story of a woman near Madurai whose sight was restored through an early telemedicine kiosk captures it beautifully. Influence built on conviction, not position — he never created followers, he created founders; that conviction is what convinced Saint-Gobain to set up its global R&D centre at the Research Park, now home to some three hundred patents. Integrity of purpose — never personally benefiting from any company he nurtured, even as that incubation created value exceeding sixty thousand crore rupees. Finally, impatience not with people but with wasted potential. Ashok, you have never merely been a professor or an entrepreneur to me — you have been a compass, a critic, a co-conspirator. If this book inspires even a few more young Indians to build institutions, your greatest ecosystem may still lie ahead.

Mr Puneet Gupta
Co-Founder & Director, Kaleidofin Private Limited

I first met professor at twenty-three, working at ICICI Bank, and came to his lab in ESB 312 to discuss a low-cost ATM for India. A single ATM then cost more than two Maruti Swifts — no country like ours could afford that at scale. Kandan showed us a prototype that day — a machine producing paper cut into currency shapes — and I took away a belief that such technology could be designed in India at a price point not only for the rich. I kept coming back, and around 2005-06 I learned of a project on connectivity in deep, remote geographies. As a banker, I saw this was the one challenge nobody had solved — with connectivity, we could offer rural customers wealth-management services, not just credit or poor savings products. Soon I had left my job and moved to Chennai, and two years later we rented a full floor at the IIT Madras Research Park. I have been associated with professor ever since. He keeps pushing us to think of the eighty to a hundred crore people nobody else designs for — not two times the scale, but thirty or fifty.

Mr M A Siddique, IAS
Additional Chief Secretary, Finance Department, Government of Tamil Nadu

I’m a little different from the rest here — I was a rogue student of both Jhunjhunwala sir and Professor Baskaran. I escaped communication for public service; he stayed in communication and did his public service from within it. Of the twenty-nine in my batch, I was the only one who stayed in electronics and communication in India, because I wanted to serve here — and his style was to stay, live here, and bring communication engineering to everybody. We used to call him Jhun sir, and he was the only person in our teaching community who was also a businessman — the rest taught only theory, which, as a student solving circuits in minutes, is what I loved. Only after entering public service did I understand what he had contributed was far more than anyone else’s work, because he brought engineering into use for the common public. I met him again after my BTech in 1993, and once more around 2008, by which time his innovations were already grounded in the field in many places. Sir, thank you for everything you have done for this nation — it’s wonderful that your biography now exists for everyone to learn from.

Mr Arun Jain
Chairman and Managing Director, Intellect Design Arena

I met Ashok sometime in 1991 through PPST, an organisation working on science and technology for the nation, and our first conversations were about India’s communication problem — barely a hundred thousand landlines, and we were already talking about ten million. That is when professor began speaking about wireless local loop technology and taking it to villages — a conversation that pulled me closer, raising the question of what companies and ecosystem such a system would need. That is how Midas, and later the Bharat Trust, came about — a way for equity investment to reach entrepreneurs. He joined the Polaris board around 1997-98, when we were still young, and helped make it a recognised name. Around 1999-2000, a few of us — including the then IT secretary, Dr Prakash — began talking about a research park in Chennai, on the logic that Silicon Valley had Stanford and Berkeley behind it. It took time — IIT, with five hundred acres, would not part with two acres for it, which surprised me at how deep institutional bureaucracy can run. What I realised is that real value in an institution comes from a teacher who expands everyone’s thinking, so your canvas scales up not by two or three times but by ten, fifty, even a hundred. ‘Startup ecosystem’ is the wrong vocabulary — he built a system for scaled companies, first expanding your thinking, then asking the first-principle question that points you back to the root of the problem. That has been the core of what professor has given me — the chance to keep questioning. 

Ms Saloni Malhotra
Founder, DesiCrew, and Author of Roots & Wings

Since you’ve asked for a story, let me share one from long before this book. We had just signed some good customers, and I was facing what every young company eventually faces — no cash to pay salaries. I had about a hundred and twenty employees, a salary bill of ten lakhs a month, and two months of cash left. I had a term sheet with a clause that if the founder left, or was asked to leave, she had to offer her shareholding to existing shareholders at a board-decided price. I sent it to professor and asked if I should sign it. He said, this is ridiculous, you cannot sign this. He took out his chequebook, wrote me a personal cheque for ten lakh rupees, and said, pay your salaries and go fight this. My father separately transferred his only home to me for a bank loan, but professor said no — apply instead for the government’s credit guarantee scheme, a collateral-free loan. He fought the board and fought SBI when they refused to sanction it. As Puneet put it so well, when professor backs you, he doesn’t knock on the door — he makes sure it opens and the work gets done. That loan turned out to be the best money our company ever received, and nineteen years on it still runs in the company. As for why I wrote the book — I lost my father in Covid’s second wave, and a Grammy-winning song around then asked people to bring their flowers while living, since you don’t need love once you’re gone. That got me thinking about everyone I wanted to thank while they could still hear it — professor Jhunjhunwala, professor Bhaskar and professor Thyagarajan topped that list. He doesn’t care for physical gifts, so writing the book was the only gift I could think to give him.

Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala
Institute Professor, IIT Madras, and Chairman, ITEL Foundation

I don’t quite know, after all this, what more I should say. I only know it has been forty-five years since I came back to India in 1981, and just as long since I’ve been associated with IIT Madras. We had a dream to help empower India and its ordinary people, and while we worked hard, and there have been individual successes, I don’t think we are, overall, in a much better state. The problems remain: traffic congestion every Indian city faces, cybersecurity where ninety to ninety-five per cent of our products are imported, agriculture running on fossil-fuel fertiliser we depend on the outside world for, even as we damage our own soil and water without an alternative. So the task remains extremely unfinished. What has changed: in 1981 India produced twenty thousand engineering graduates a year, today a million — far more people, far more confidence, if only we can motivate them. We need now to work harder, without changing our values. What has inspired me most are my school teachers, particularly those who taught me Hindi. I still remember a poem from class five, Phool ki Ichha — the desire of a flower — which said it did not wish to sit on a beautiful woman’s hair, nor be thrown before an emperor’s pyre, nor rest on the head of the gods; its only desire was to be scattered along the path where soldiers marched for their country’s freedom. Glory, that poem taught me, is not power, wealth or fame — it lies in serving society. Gandhiji believed the same — that India was a land of entrepreneurs whose real job is to create wealth not for themselves but for society, a simple thing we seem to have forgotten. What India requires is not thousands, not lakhs, but two crore entrepreneurs of that kind. The technology will follow, some learned from elsewhere, much recovered from our own past. For whatever years remain to me, I want to focus on three things: India’s supposedly unsolvable problems — traffic, waterlogging, agriculture; making technologies like solar and power electronics genuinely our own; and empowering young people to become entrepreneurs who can reshape this country themselves.