Saluting A Pioneer

Meet
Major General (Retd) A Balasubrahmanian, the man with an epoch-making
vision in IT and its relentless pursuit across an entire life-time
who receives the Lifetime Achievement to IT award for 1999.

A military discipline and precision
informs all that he does. Right from the erect posture belying the
age of 72 years, the meticulous maintenance of the order of books
in his library, an immaculate sense of dressing to the brisk hand-shake.
Behind this tough exterior, lies an unrelenting will to work for
enhancing the quality of life of people.  

It would be ambitious to trace the accomplishments spanning his
lifetime within the columns of these pages. Meet Major General (Retd)
A Balasubrahmanian, AVSM–A defense personnel-cum-computercrat, combined
into one distinct personality. The epoch-making contributions to
the IT industry pertain to his valuable efforts towards the growth
of IT in India, while not being an integral part of the industry.
A rare milestone set by a unique personality, indeed!

Even as a child the ‘fancy for the
uniform’ was a continuous one and it blossomed into a career in
the defense services. While in college he majored in chemistry,
with an optional in military science. His varied interests ranging
from cricket to music only equipped him better for a tenure in the
armed forces. With an engineering degree in Telecommunications from
the College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, he joined the Signals
Corp of the Indian Army as an officer in 1950. He pursued a post
graduate course in Radio Engineering from the Marconi College in
UK in 1952. Back home, in the Signals Corp, Balasubrahmanian specialized
in Advanced Electronics and Guided Missiles from the Institute of
Armament Technology.

It was by sheer chance that he got
into computers. As a specialist in guided missiles he was chosen
as a core member of the Special Weapons team to develop a training
simulator for anti-tank missiles. That was the turning point in
his career. “On the one hand, there was the longing for the general
army life and on the other hand, there was R&D. I chose to stay
on in R&D as I had got deeply involved in computers after my
course in advanced electronics,” he explains. “Besides, R&D
was an everyday challenge, with a new purpose awaiting each day,”
he adds.

"Those were the days when computers
were just coming into India and being in the defense we were the
most privileged to have an IBM mainframe computer for our R&D,”
he reminisces.  This was in the mid-50s. He still remembers
the first computer he worked on, the IBM 1602 and the Electronics
Associate 231 R. “While the simulator we developed was linked to
an actual missile, it never got used as the government decided to
import one at the last minute,” he says, with regret in his voice.
“Nevertheless, the lessons from the endeavors of the team has percolated
to other developments in projects such as ‘Agni’, ‘Prithvi’, ‘Akash’
and ‘Nag’ within the defense,” he asserts. The special weapons team
was moved to Hyderabad and was subsequently named the Defense Research
and Development Laboratory (DRDL).

By 1959, when Balasubrahmanian had
risen to the rank of a Major, he was entrusted with the responsibility
of setting up a computer center in DRDL. The first computer in the
center was an IBM 1620. He doubled up as a programmer, systems integrator,
systems engineer and a maintenance engineer. He also set up regional
computer centers in Hyderabad, Dehradun and Delhi for R&D. His
team developed a computer simulator for the railway track recording
car to check the track level for safety of trains. In yet another
project he and his team developed a text analysis simulator for
the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages in Hyderabad
to aid the teaching process in English vocabulary.

However, even while computers were
getting popular, the phobia that the ‘all-knowing chip’ might replace
humans was claiming attention within the average psyche, in factories
and industrial set-ups. At this juncture the concept of man-machine
heuristics got edified. “The basic concept is that machines are
not there to replace man. There is respect for human capabilities
and we should strive towards enhancing it using machines,” he states.

During those days, the renowned computer
science professor Huskey was in India at IIT Kanpur. He initiated
the small group of users, including Balasubrahmanian, who met him
to organize themselves into a computer users’ group for interaction
and knowledge-sharing. The same group proceeded to meet at a conference
at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. A direct fallout
of this was the formation of an All India Computer User’s Group
that became the nucleus of the Computer Society of India. Balasubrahmanian
registered the CSI at Hyderabad as a Founder-Secretary on March
6, 1965. “The end eavor was to ensure that usage of computers has
a social relevance,” he says. Balasubrahmanian also became the President
of CSI between 1969 and 1972.

One of the major contributions during
his tenure at CSI was making a presentation to the GoI Committee
of Automation, to evolve a professional dimension reinforcing the
fact that industrial automation will not lead to replacement of
people in factories and industrial set-ups. “We rather suggested
ways of mitigating socio-economic problems,” he says. Recalling
his association with Balasubrahmanian, Dr N Seshagiri, Director
General of NIC, says, “During the formative years of the Indian
IT industry he has done a lot of work in CSI. In my interaction
with him from those days I have known him to be a perseverant and
hard-working person who has contributed a lot to the growth of IT
in this country.”

Find
out more about Balasubrahmanian