Dewang Mehta

He is the man who sleeps, drinks, laughs and eats software. This colorful, accountant-turned film-maker has reached the software segment after being a journalist and a film censor. It will not be an exaggeration to claim that whatever the Indian software industry has achieved today, by way of a high profile image and various sops from the government, is largely due to Dewang Mehta’s untiring efforts. Under him, NASSCOM has risen from 72 members in 1991 to over 500 members today. Much of the success of this apex software body of the country can be attributed to Mehta’s informal style, excellent PR and successful lobbying in government circles. 

The man who today dreams of making India a software super power had his first brush with computers in 1983 when he was in England to collect an award for his documentary film, ‘Glimpses of India’, in the Commonwealth Film Festival in Leeds. There Mehta learnt that the future of documentary film making and advertising would be in computer graphics. So he did a course in computer graphics from Imperial College London, a qualification which helped him get a job at Orissa Cements, in Bhubaneswar. 

But perhaps this was not his real calling. India’s fledgling, software industry had set up a forum, Nasscom in 1988 to be heard in the corridors of power. And industry veteran Harish Mehta ran

into Dewang Mehta at Delhi’s Taj Hotel lobby, sometime in 1990 and ended offering the job to Mehta himself. Despite 



being warned by friends, Mehta took the plunge for he needed to work there only three days a week and was free to pursue his other interests
simultaneously. As he quips “now I actually work eight days a week.” Since April 1991, both Mehta and NASSCOM have not looked back.