The life of Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Chairman of ITEL Foundation who spent over four decades at IIT Madras as a professor, is chronicled in a biography titled ‘Roots and Wings – Building the Dee Tech Ecosystem in India’.
The book is written by Saloni Malhotra, founder of Desicrew Solutions, and was launched on Tuesday, July 21, at an event in Delhi.
During her speech, Malhotra recalled her days with Dr Jhunjhunwala and said that when Javed Akhtar visited ITEL Foundation, a non-profit incubation and innovation center in Chennai, he said: “When I see the work here, I see hope for the future.”
Among the dignitaries present at the event was Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, who also delivered a special address and spoke about how he has time and again looked to Dr Jhunjhunwala for guidance and support.
“The way each of you, in your chosen work, contributes to India’s development and to our journey towards a fixit of Bharat by 2047. Collectively, I believe, what each of us does in our work can be found to some extent through the life and times of Professor Jhunjhunwala,” he said.
He then pointed out that Dr. Jhunjhunwala comes from Kolkata and discussed how his life could have turned out differently if the city’s circumstances had been different.
“But unfortunately, over the last 40 or 50 years, we have witnessed the decline of West Bengal, due to which a lot of people have had to leave that state and find other areas to work in, other states to live in, and you can experience that. I have found that whenever I have gone to West Bengal for any of my official duties, in the last few years, the level of poverty, the level of deprivation, the level of almost inhuman life that many poor people were destined to live there, was very high,” Goyal said. “Painful.”
“We were witnessing a situation where people like Dr Jhunjhunwala had no hope for Kolkata. But Kolkata’s loss is India’s gain,” he said.
Dr. Jhunjhunwala spoke about the importance of technology and said that it is always advancing.
“New things come. Every decade, something new will come. Unless we empower ourselves and take control of our technology, we will be pushed the way the United States has for the past two years,” he said.
