For children: How Jawaharlal Nehru sparked technology education for jobs in the 1960s

Engineering education in British India was largely rudimentary and designed to produce graduates who could work in railways, public works (such as road building) and irrigation (such as canal building). This barely met independent India’s need for a technically qualified workforce for its diverse development projects. From Prasanta Chandra to Homi J Bhabha, all of India’s leading scientists had to search feverishly for suitably qualified people who could work on the nation-building projects they were overseeing. They hired graduates from foreign universities and sent local graduates overseas for technical training.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru set things in motion by opening the first Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) during the 1950s and 1960s with foreign assistance. In August 1961, a consortium of top US universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University, helped establish an IIT at Kanpur as a part of a decade-long programme called the Kanpur Indo-American Program (KIAP).

In the summer of 1963, under the KIAP, an IBM 1620 arrived at the premises of the fledgling institute. Back in the day, this computer was a novelty even at universities in North America and Europe. It was received at Kanpur by a team...

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