Popularly known as FC Kohli, the industrialist who was considered as the father of the Indian software industry and had pioneered India’s ‘Technology Revolution’ has died at 96
Kohli studied a Master’s degree from MIT and returned to India, joining Tata Electric Co in 1951 to set up the country’s first load dispatch centre. In 1969, the Tata group doyen J R D Tata asked Kohli to set up TCS, after Tata Electric installed a computer system to control the electric line between Mumbai and Pune. It was the third utility in the world to adopt computers. He helped the country build the $100 billion IT industry as the first CEO of TCS.
Widely recognized as the brilliant technocrat parachuted in the Tata Electric Companies, Kohli was actively involved in the decision to bring IBM to India as part of Tata-IBM in 1991. This was part of the joint-venture for hardware manufacturing and support in India initiative.
Though after hanging his boots, Kohli worked on an adult literacy programme to teach people who have never been educated, and it was reported that it did help build literacy. “That’s perhaps the biggest contribution to my own country and government in helping increase literacy. It allows people to read starting small and basically for those who have never ever read and had no options and designed especially for them,” Kohli had said on October 2, 2020.
FC Kohli was born in Peshawar British India on 19th March 1924. He joined Tata Electric Companies in 1951 and helped set up the load dispatching system to manage the system operations. Following this, he became the director of the company in 1970 and was appointed as the first CEO of TCS. In 2002, Kohli was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour, for his contribution to the Indian software industry He retired in 1999 at the age of 75.
