Book Extract – Uncoded: A Technological History of Independent India

Back in 1950, India had more than five lakh villages and over 30 crore people. Collecting information about all of them would have been impossible. So, the survey team carefully chose 1,833 villages across the country, and between October 1950 and March 1951, over 600 surveyors travelled through India, interviewing people, observing farmlands and measuring yields. By the end of the exercise, they had gathered enormous amounts of information about the lives of ordinary Indians. But how were they going to chart and analyse all of this data in time to present the government with a picture of the lives of ordinary people in the country?

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, a serious-looking scientist who was leading the survey, decided to use an ‘electronic brain’. That’s how independent India set out on a quest to get its first computer.

Chasing Computers

During the 1950s, the computer was a new and rare kind of technology—a calculating machine that could process a large amount of data in a short period to produce understandable results. It promised fabulous possibilities and inspired much awe. Most countries coveted it, but it was so notoriously expensive that few could afford it. Mahalanobis, however, needed a computer urgently—India had decided to conduct National Sample Surveys periodically, and only a computer could get through all that data in time.

In 1950, an Electronic Computer Laboratory was set up at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Calcutta (now Kolkata), founded by Mahalanobis. He hired two young graduates, Samarendra Kumar Mitra and Soumyendra Mohan Bose, to assemble a computer from scratch. This was an extremely difficult task because the parts were not readily available in India and importing them would have been too costly. Left with no other choice, Mitra and Bose scoured through scrap markets and disposal depots, salvaging useful materials from leftover machines of World War II and cobbled together India’s first analogue computer by 1953.

Although Mahalanobis was proud of the fact that the ISI had managed to build a computer despite formidable odds, he was acutely aware of the machine’s technical limitations. So, even as he nurtured the design and engineering teams at the ISI, Mahalanobis continued to hunt for more advanced computers anxiously. That’s how he came upon the Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC), which was being marketed by the British Tabulating Machine (BTM) Company, and decided to place an order.

For a princely sum of around 2,00,000 rupees, BTM agreed to custom-build India’s first digital computer, the HEC-2M, in 1954. Since this was the only such machine that India was purchasing, it wasn’t feasible for BTM to maintain it. So, the ISI sent two of its engineers, Mohi Mukherjee and Amaresh Roy, to Letchworth in England to observe how the computer was being built and learn how to operate and maintain it. In 1956, the HEC-2M finally arrived in India. Mukherjee and Roy spent two months assembling it, based on notes from their training in England and sometimes on instinct. The computer was so big that it took up an entire floor at the ISI! Since it wasn’t designed to cope with the humidity of Kolkata, the computer was placed in an air-conditioned area, which, too, was a novelty at the time.

By today’s standards, the HEC-2M had incredibly low computing power. It could only perform up to 200 additions or five multiplications per second (modern computers can perform lakhs of calculations in a millisecond!) and wasn’t easy to use. Nevertheless, it performed complex calculations on the National Sample Survey data, served other divisions at the ISI and even fulfilled computational requests from other scientific institutes in India. Most importantly, it initiated a budding computing culture as Mukherjee and Roy trained other engineers at the ISI and even created instruction manuals on how to use the machine.

Despite its uses, the HEC-2M wasn’t advanced enough to meet the needs of the rapidly growing National Sample Survey data, and Mahalanobis soon ordered another big computer—the Ural-1 (named after a mountain range in present-day Russia)—from the Soviet Union, using financial assistance from the United Nations. Ural-1 arrived in India in 1958, followed closely by eight Soviet engineers who took three months to assemble it. The engineers also held training sessions for Indian engineers in the construction, operation and maintenance of the computer. By 1959, Ural-1 was hard at work, its printer reportedly making ‘ridiculous noises’. Even as the ISI cemented its reputation as India’s main computation centre, computing was also picking up at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bombay (now Mumbai). In 1960, the TIFR stole the ISI’s computing thunder by building India’s first indigenous digital computer, TIFRAC (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator).

Building TIFRAC

Much like Mahalanobis, who coveted computers to process the massive amounts of data being collected by the National Sample Surveys, Homi Bhabha, the founding director of the TIFR and the Atomic Research Centre, coveted computers for nuclear energy projects.

In 1954, a group of physics postgraduates specializing in electronics began building India’s first digital computer at the TIFR. Apart from Rangaswamy Narasimhan, who held a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, nobody else in the group had ever used a computer before! Technical information on making computers wasn’t easily available, and the group had very limited knowledge to begin with. Still, they plodded on, reaching out to institutes in the US for technical inputs, importing major components and designing and tinkering around with a prototype. By 1959, their machine was ready and the following year, it was put to use.

The technology driving TIFRAC wasn’t far behind what was being used elsewhere in the world during the 1950s, but in a fast-changing field, it had become obsolete by 1960. So, even though the computer was put to good use, Bhabha, like Mahalanobis, realized that India’s technology gap would be difficult to fill with indigenous machines. He, too, desired a more powerful computer, bringing both scientists into a direct race. 

Although Mahalanobis had made great strides at the ISI, procuring two big computers from the UK and the Soviet Union, Bhabha surpassed him by acquiring CDC 3600, the largest commercially available computer at the time, for the TIFR in 1964, with a grant from the United States Agency for International Development. The addition of this machine catapulted the TIFR to the status of a national computing centre.

In the first year, the institute provided free computer time and programming help. It also conducted a number of programming courses to disseminate computing know-how and developed a variety of software packages. From academic institutions to businesses like banks and oil companies, the CDC had nearly 150 users in its first five years of operation.

It propelled a growing interest in the commercial use of computers, and several companies began installing them in their offices, beginning with Esso Standard Eastern, a petroleum company in Mumbai.

Growth of Computer Education

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 Mahalanobis to 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 of foreign experts from the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. Soon, IIT Kanpur began offering the first intensive short-term courses in computer basics and programming to academicians, researchers and industry managers. Thousands of people benefitted from these courses. By 1966, having acquired another IBM machine, IIT Kanpur became a hub of computer education and data processing activities.

Noticing that there were no textbooks or course materials, V. Rajaraman, a faculty member at the institute, wrote the first Indian textbooks on computing. These cheaply priced books were an instant hit and sold thousands of copies. In 1970, the institute began the first full-fledged postgraduate programme in computer science. Meanwhile, the other IITs also began building strong foundations in computer science and technology. However, in the absence of enough job opportunities in the field of computer science, most graduates ended up heading overseas for higher education and employment. So, even though institutes like the IITs had been founded with a view to strengthen India’s technical workforce, they ended up becoming bases to export bright graduates overseas, mainly to the US.

This overseas connection though, became unexpectedly beneficial for India in the coming decades, as these graduates rose through the ranks at various technology companies, becoming international ambassadors of the skill and capabilities of Indian engineers. Many of them eventually tapped into Indian talent for the foreign companies they worked for and created more job opportunities in computing within India. This was a remarkable development that weathered some truly stormy conditions to transform a technologically backward country into a global hub of Information Technology (IT).

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Meghaa Gupta, Uncoded: A Technological History of Independent India,‎ Puffin India/ Penguin Random House India, 2025. Pb. Pp.296

From factories to farms, battlefields to boardrooms, clinics to classrooms―in the years since Independence, modern technology has swept through all corners of Indian life. But back in 1947, this seemed impossible. Low literacy, poverty and lack of expertise meant that newly independent India was unable to afford the mighty technologies of World War II that were reshaping the globe. Yet, a determined team of far-sighted policymakers and scientists dared to make the impossible possible. Today, India is home to leading software companies and a world-renowned space programme. For many Indians, modern technology has become part of daily life. Uncoded: A Technological History of Independent India is a story of one of the greatest technological transformations in the modern world. Blending a unique narrative with illustrations, trivia, anecdotes and an informative timeline, it explores how a nation used science and technology to rebuild itself and reimagine its destiny against all odds. Meghaa Gupta's exploits in history are the outcome of an irrepressible urge to contextualize the challenges of the present with the past and make greater sense of the times we live in. She works in children's publishing and firmly believes that all change begins with getting children to read books that demystify the world and its infinite possibilities. Meghaa has contributed to the history book On this Day (Dorling Kindersley, 2021) and is the author of the widely-acclaimed Unearthed: An Environmental History of Independent India (Puffin, 2020). She curates the children's and youth section of the Green Lit Fest and the online magazine Sustainability Next.