July 2019 – Page 2 – The KGP Chronicle

Welcome aboard

At IIT Kharagpur, the week started with the Director, Prof. Sriman Kumar Bhattacharyya, delivering his welcome address to 1st year students and their parents at the Netaji auditorium. On the weekend, many of them had strolled through the campus, visiting the hostels and the other popular spots. The Director congratulated the parents and reassured them that they were leaving their children in safe hands and that there was every possibility that IIT KGP would soon turn out to be a “better place than home” for many of them. He said, “We take utmost care that the students live comfortably and have reasonably good food. We have all gone through the process and done well… your children will also do well.” Prof. Sudhir Kumar Barai, Dean, Undergraduate Studies, who also addressed the audience, spoke in a lighter vein, “I was reminded, when my child was born, that I would spend many sleepless nights as a father. You can well imagine what a huge challenge our Director faces, given that he has to take care of 1600 students.”

Mr. Ajay Saluja nodded his head in acknowledgement, a wide smile plastered over his face. He had come down from Betul in Madhya Pradesh with his younger son and wife to see off his daughter, who is now a First year student of the Department of Ocean Engineering and Naval Architecture. “I have been to my daughter’s hostel during the weekend, and am now hoping she settles down well. I will be going back tomorrow.” A proud father, he listened attentively to the Registrar, Prof. B.N. Singh, as he congratulated and thanked the parents for choosing IIT Kharagpur and gave the parents a brief description of its academic faculties and facilities.

Like Mr. Saluja, most of the parents will be leaving the campus in a day or two. Together with their children, they have shopped for the bare essentials from Tech Market over the weekend. New bedding and pillows, blankets, phone charger, extension cord, some chocolates, chips, sweets and biscuits…anything that will make the parting a little easy.

In conversation with Emma

Emma Bancroft Toner, a fourth year UG student from the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, University of Waterloo, was at IIT Kharagpur this summer to conduct her research on “Female Empowerment: Exploring the Influence of Living and Working in Informal Settlements”. Emma was here on a MITACS grant and her supervisor was Prof. Priyadarshi Patnaik of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. Emma immensely enjoyed her stay at IIT Kharagpur and was thankful that she had been given the opportunity to collect and work with primary data. Still the sprightly teenager, I found Emma at the Technology Guest House, her home for the two months of her stay, waiting for me with that ubiquitous nylon bag from Tech Market in hand – a favourite of hers. The market, as I found out, had also been one of her favourite haunts. The conversation quickly veered from her work at IIT Kharagpur to the sights and sounds she had enjoyed so much. Excerpts from the conversation:

What are ‘informal settlements’? And what are the challenges that women in them face?

Informal settlements could be any sort of home on government land or land not owned by the family living there. It could mean shacks or smaller homes. Both children and women have problems in the sense that they could be migrants, leaving behind social bonds and support. Such settlements can offer women a lot more social and economic opportunities but since they are poor, there are problems like lack of access to social services like police or health care, many of which could lead to more violence towards women and children. A lot of such issues are often exacerbated by the combination and intersection of displacement, poverty, lack of resources and services.

What are the areas you are looking at?

At IIT Kharagpur, I looked at women who are from informal settlements but are also employed. I have been interviewing people from these communities and have been asking them about their home life, community life, their experiences of working, how employment has worsened or improved their lives. I interviewed sweepers in the halls and hostels, mess workers in hostels, helpers at the parlours, a cook or two in the hostels and security guards in the hostels.

However, I realized that people employed here are either contractual or permanent and paid differently. They also have different qualifications. Because of this, I now have had to reframe my focus. I now look at how contractual and permanent workers at public institutions are treated when they are from informal settlements.

How valuable has been this experience?

I am in the last year of my program called “International Development” in the University of Waterloo, Canada. When I was first choosing my thesis, I didn’t think I could collect primary data and do primary research. But then I got the chance to come to India and decided to do a case study here. Most of my cohorts don’t get the opportunity to do research on their own. They are all using secondary data.

Does your data lead you to any conclusions?

I still have to go through my data and compare it and change some things. But from what I have seen, I believe that overall a lot of things have improved for women who are employed – they do feel more empowered, have more skills, are exposed to new experiences, and their finances have improved. Some things are undoubtedly worse as they do not have enough time with their families and neither have the chance to do other things like following hobbies or travel. But things are better. There is one woman who told me that before employment she felt she was very dumb, but after coming to work she realized she is among the brightest in her team. What it has done to her sense of self-esteem is wonderful, and that is what I want to focus on.

What has it been like to visit India?

This is the first time I am visiting India, and travelling outside Canada alone. I didn’t know what to expect. Although I did take many classes on south Asian politics and religion, the experience has been completely different. I have loved every bit of my stay here. I wasn’t prepared for the heat but the culture, the people, the colours are wonderful. We don’t have such colours in clothes and homes and streets back home.

What is your feel of the IIT Kharagpur campus?

The campus is beautiful. I was so surprised because our campus is all concrete buildings. There are so many trees and such lushness all around. When I hadn’t started my work, I would go on long walks every day. There is so much to see. All the trees have signs and there are so many different kinds of them. Most of our campus has academics but here, at the Tech market, there are people from the community and even from outside. A lot of worlds meet at the Tech market. The whole vibe of the campus has been really nice. The park is beautiful… I see families here. This is more of a little town than a university or college.

Besides, I have gained so much. My translator – Barsa Majumdar, who is a third year Dual Degree student in the Biotechnology Department – and I have become good friends. I was welcomed to their family home in Calcutta and she showed me around the city and even their ancestral village. I had both city and village experience. She introduced me to her friends as well. Her family was so welcoming. I also dressed in a sari and went to the famous Dakshineswar Temple in Kolkata.

I also gained a lot from the intellectually stimulating discussions I had with the faculty of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, particularly Prof. Archana Patnaik and Prof. Priyadarshi Patnaik, who was my supervisor.

Will you talk to your friends about the program?

Yes, I surely will. In fact, I have already been talking to my friends about the experience. I was really lucky to do this. I am the only one in my class to get the MITACS grant. There are around 25 of us doing the ‘ID’ program Around 15 have taken up placements in NGOs in Tanzania, Peru, Vietnam, Sri Lanka or some other country and 10 of us are working on our thesis. Most of us don’t get the opportunity to travel while working on a thesis. But I wanted to do both and through MITACS I have been able to do it.

Emma is currently working with an NGO in Odisha. She will then take a trip to north and western India before heading home sometime in August

It’s Time for Young Innovators

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IIT Kharagpur has launched the Young Innovators Program 2019, a global science and technology competition empowering greenhorns to solve real-life challenges through innovations. Registration for the third edition of this popular event has started on July 18, 2019.

YIP is a unique program of IIT Kharagpur aimed at igniting the innovative young minds of school children. The competition aims to recognize the creative ability of students studying in classes VIII – X towards sci-tech innovations in thematic areas of global relevance. The thematic areas for YIP 2019 include

Energy and Environment
Health and Cleanliness
Hardware Modelling,
Product Designing
Disaster Management and
Financial Inclusion

Students will conceptualize their innovations in the first round. Those selected for the second round will be required to mature their proposals further and present through video demonstrations. In the semifinal and final rounds which is scheduled to be held at IIT Kharagpur from November 8-9, 2019, the selected students will demonstrate working models of products and processes and make feasibility presentation on their projects.

At various phases, the students would have the opportunity to receive guidance from faculty members, researchers and students of IIT Kharagpur through mentoring sessions. The theme of Financial Inclusion is an addition this year which is a special interest area for the event sponsor ICICI Bank. The other event sponsor Indegene would offer the opportunity of mentorship for projects related to the theme Health and Cleanliness.

“As we look around, we are blessed with bright, young minds everywhere, each of whom is a leader and an innovator. Through YIP, we aim at igniting that spirit of innovation in these minds and enable them to think beyond doubts and beyond barriers. They are the next generation of problem solvers, the stewards of our future who will, in a few years, embark on a journey to build a better world,” said Anandaroop Bhattacharya, Associate Dean (International Relations) and a faculty member of Mechanical Engineering Department at IIT Kharagpur.

The Young Innovator Programme of IIT Kharagpur started in 2017 and in just 2 years has spread its wings not only across the country but also overseas. Last year the reach was to more than 2000 schools and this year with international schools the figure has almost doubled. The semi-finalists of YIP 2018 included two schools from Singapore. This year, the Institute will also reach out to embassies to support the global outreach further. The program has received rave reviews including words of appreciation from the Honourable President of India.

Ways of being

Star Tribune

Subbiah Ramalingam (1956/BTech/ME), Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, passed away on February 9, 2019.

Fondly called Dr Ram, or simply Ram, by his legions of admirers, friends and well-wishers, he enjoyed a distinguished career as a researcher and teacher, spanning half a century. His major research included modelling thin films for tribological applications, intelligent sensors, real-time sensing for manufacturing automation, solid lubricants, thin film deposition processes and coating technology, machining theory, metal forming, and manufacturing automation. He is regarded as one of the pioneers in the study of machining processes, sensors, and friction and wear (tribology) and taught courses in the materials aspect of bio-medical design.

Ram was born in Udumalpet, Tamil Nadu. With funds borrowed by his brother, who was also an engineer, he entered IIT Kharagpur, where he left his mark as a student with multifarious talents. He organized a film society (which showed movies on a suspended bed-sheet), and wrote poetry. A quintessentially ‘argumentative Indian’, he provoked dialogue and debate, often by purposely choosing to take the opposite side to the prevailing view.

He joined Hindustan Motors after graduation, and then, encouraged by a visiting professor from America, took up study in the University of Illinois (1960). A small handbook he co-authored with his senior professor while he was still a student remained in use for decades. That was a sign of things to come. Ram eventually authored or co-authored more than one hundred articles, and held six patents.

Ram began teaching at the University of Minnesota in 1980, where he was also the first Director of the Productivity Center. He had taught previously at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, SUNY at Buffalo, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was visiting professor in several top laboratories in Australia and became the first non-Japanese member of the Japan Society for Precision Engineering. Ram was much sought after as a consultant, and gave many invited lectures at universities in the US, Italy, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands.

He loved to travel, and a lively interest in the places he visited combined with his love for science. For example, he saw ancient cylinder seals in museums and noted their relationship to repetitive processes in manufacturing. In the open air museums in Germany, he found examples of early machinery, craft implements, and manufacturing tools.

Ram received the Taylor Research Medal from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and was a member in many learned and professional societies, including the Materials Research Society, the American Society of Metals, and the North American Manufacturing Research Institute. He was named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (1986), and was elected by his peers to the highest honour in his profession, Member of the National Academy of Engineering (1998).

He is survived by his wife, Vivian (née Safowitz); his youngest brother, sister, and several nephews and nieces. He is also mourned by his former students, colleagues and acquaintances who turned life-long friends. Letters received by his family and colleagues after his death describe Ram as an admirable, unique, inspiring scientist and teacher, a man of exceptional intellectual integrity, and a generous friend who had enriched lives.

FRSC for Kgpian Praveen Linga

Prof. Praveen Linga, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) for his contribution in the field of chemical sciences.

Prof. Linga is Associate Professor Dean’s Chair at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS). He did his M.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur 2002. His received his doctoral degree from UBC, Vancouver.

Prof. Linga’s research interests include Gas hydrates, Carbon Dioxide Capture, Storage and Utilization, LNG Cold Energy Utilisation and Energy Storage, District Cooling and Seawater Desalination. He is championing three hydrate technologies for desalination, gas storage and data-centre cooling reports NUS. His Linga Lab specialises in developing innovative technologies to strengthen energy-water nexus.

In 2018 he was also nominated as ‘Highly Cited Researcher’ by Clarivate Analytics, USA.

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Smart Sensors for Smarter India @SIH2019

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From life-saver to asset-tracker to theft-preventer, SIH 2019 Hardware edition at IIT Kharagpur witnessed prototype sensor development for a wide array of industrial challenges. 93 green horns from seven states participated in this week-long national competition where they were posed challenges by Ministry of Coal and Garden Reach Shipbuilding Yard to develop industry-scale hardware solutions ranging from Smart Communication to Smart Vehicles, from Security and Surveillance to Miscellaneous technological ideas related to tertiary sectors.

This is the first time that public and private sector companies have become part of Smart India Hackathon in its 3 years of existence, including 40 industries and 9 Central Govt. ministries and departments. The purpose is to bridge the gap between industry and academia in order to improve the competitiveness of Indian goods and services in the global market and to encourage entrepreneurship among students in line with Startup India program and thus to boost employment.

Prof. Sriman Kumar Bhattacharyya, officiating Director of IIT Kharagpur, said, “What started as an initiative to playfully involve students to think creatively has emerged as a major initiative which has seen youth from all over India think hard and come up with solutions for many problems facing India today.”

Prof. Shailendra K. Varshney, coordinator of the event at IIT Kharagpur said, “Smart India Hackathon is an innovative platform to ignite young minds to think, to solve problems with the help of technology. It is learning through innovation!”

The Ministry of Coal announced five winners for all of its five problem statements carrying an award of Rs. 1 Lakh each for designing prototypes.

While Team Gravity Plus from Lingaya’s Vidyapeeth, Faridabad, Haryana developed a sensor which could use a combination of the chemical composition of air to locate victims trapped under mining debris or roof fall or gas explosion, Team Wild Crew from Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Dwarka, Delhi developed a prototype sensor and software which would work as an automatic alert for Safety Officers and Ambulances for accident victims in vehicles.

Team Magnificent Dreams from PSNA College Of Engineering and Technology, Dindigul, Tamil Nadu developed a prototype control panel to display key parameters of heavy earth moving machinery, Team Enigma 99 from CVR College of Engineering, Ibrahimpatan, Telangana developed a smart sensor based fuel tank guard alarm to give protection against theft and siphoning.

Team Robogyan Dr. Akhilesh Das Gupta Institute of Technology & Management, Delhi, developed an IoT device with GPS which can help CSR project monitoring on a real-time basis and create a databank of all the assets to conduct appropriate analysis. The team’s prototype is market ready confirmed team member Jai Garg.

Garden Reach Shipbuilding Yard adjudged Team Tesseract of Sri Ramakrishna Engineering Colleges, Coimbatore, as the only winner for their new hardware design solution towards insulation issue in Auxiliary and Deck machinery motors in naval ships. They were awarded Rs. 50,000/- as prize money. Mr. Ambudhi Shukla, Deputy Manager in Garden Reach Shipbuilding Yard, said, “Students apply their fresh minds and bring into play new concepts. They have worked well and devised cost effective, simple solutions which can be implemented industrially.”

FRS for IIT KGP Alumnus

India Today

Dr. Sudipta Seal, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur has been recently elected as the Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry for his contributions in the field of Chemical Sciences.

Dr. Seal specializes in the areas of Nanomaterials processing and characterization, Nanobiotechnology, Materials for optics, sensors, coatings, fuel cells, Oxidation/Corrosion, Surface Science and Engineering and Chemical Mechanical Planarization. He is at present Department Chair of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Central Florida.

Dr. Seal graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 1990 with B.Tech. in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering. He did MS in Metallurgy from the University of Sheffield and PhD from University of Wisconsin in Materials Engineering and Biochemistry. He has been associated with UCF for close to 22 years.

“As a materials engineer I’m always involved in new material formulation and development for a variety of applications in biomedical, space and the environment. Getting recognized by the Royal Society of Chemistry is not only a humbling experience but will also create a lot of future research opportunities,” Dr. Seal said in an interview to UCF Today. (Read Full Interview Here)

The Royal Society of Chemistry is one of the oldest and most reputed professional body headquartered in the United Kingdom with the goal of advancing in chemistry, developing its applications, and disseminating chemical knowledge.

Learning through Hackathon

India Today Careers 360 Outlook The Quint Business Standard The Week Silicon India NDTV Hindustan Times

The week-long Hardware Edition of Smart India Hackathon 2019 started at IIT Kharagpur on July 8, 2019. 14 teams from 7 states, Assam, Delhi, Haryana, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and West Bengal are participating in this PAN India competition.

In Smart India Hackathon-2019 Hardware edition, problems are broadly based on Agriculture & Rural Development, Food Technology, Waste Management, Clean Water, Renewable Energy, Healthcare & Biomedical devices, Smart Vehicles, Robotics and Drones, Security & Surveillance, Smart Communication, Sports and Fitness, Sustainable Environment, Smart Textile, Smart Cities areas.

“With India’s fastest moving economy, we need to solve the problems that exist in society. For this, we thought of an open innovation competition and students came up with the idea of Smart India Hackathon. This is not only the world’s largest innovation competition, but it is also currently in its third successful year of implementation. Student participation is increasing with each passing year indicating that the students are no longer limited to class. I am sure this competition will not only give winners but also society solutions for many problems like agrarian crisis, water scarcity and many more,” said Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’, Minister of Human Resource Development, who inaugurated the event across 18 nodal centres in 9 states, 1 UT and NCR through video conferencing.

“There are many areas where the country is looking for viable solutions and I am really happy to see a large number of young talents are coming forward to take up those challenges, to think differently as to how solutions to these problems can be given; and that’s what is very important,” said Prof. S K Bhattacharyya, Director (Officiating), IIT Kharagpur.

At IIT Kharagpur 93 students will work towards solving challenges for Smart Vehicle, Smart Communication, Security and Surveillance and Miscellaneous. The students are expected to bring out technology-based, easy, workable solutions through “out-of-the-box-thinking”, which will lead to commercial products to develop start-ups.

Explaining the concept of Hackathon, Prof. P P Chakrabarti of IIT Kharagpur who has been mentoring this event addressed it as a new education methodology. “The paradigm of engineering education is transforming in such a way that there are newer methods of learning and gradually becoming part of the core curriculum. Hackathon enables multiple aspects – first is the doing aspect of core engineering, second is bringing focus on economics, humanities and social sciences along with technical aspect and creative idea generation, this forming a convergence,” he pointed out.

More than 1.2 lakh students from 2235 colleges sent their entries for 198 problem statements, submitted by more than 40 industries and 9 Central Govt. Ministries and various Govt. Departments for SIH 2019 Hardware Edition. In the Grand Finale, around 2000 participants from 250 teams of 178 different colleges are participating to provide innovative hardware solutions for 124 problems.

Depending upon the nature of the problem, cash prizes for selected ideas and solutions will be given to participating teams. For simple problems Rs. 50000, for complicated problems Rs. 75000 and for complex problems Rs. 1 lakh will be awarded.

SIH 2019 has given particular attention towards promoting the participation of female candidates and the national figure seems is enthusiastic this year with a ratio of male and female being 1.6:1. Out of close to 93 students participating at IIT Kharagpur, 29 are girl students.

The event is coordinated by Prof. Shailendra K. Varshney, Associate Professor at IIT Kharagpur’s Dept. of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering.

Where there’s a will…

Careers360

An AI-based intelligent traffic control system could revolutionize traffic management in India. Already, the Delhi Traffic Police are mulling over the matter. At IIT Kharagpur, an undergraduate student team -Bits n Bytes – presented an exhaustive model of such an AI system based on real time traffic feed and lifted the top prize at the up.AI Challenge recently.

The up.AI Challenge is what can be called the ‘endgame’ of the up.AI summit that was held at the IIT Kharagpur campus last October (http://www.kgpchronicle.iitkgp.ac.in/eat-pray-love-artificial-intelligence/). After a week-long jamboree in 2018 that saw a congregation of close to a thousand students, various faculty members and industry experts to talk and think about the application of Artificial Intelligence in various sectors, the up.AI Challenge was launched. Under the mentorship of IIT Kharagpur professors, students were to work on projects during the winter vacation and then present their conclusions to the judges.

They did this summer. And the result was the winning idea of Bits n Bytes, followed by the projects of team EduFYI and TinTEd-AI which won the 1^st runner-up and 2^nd runner-up prizes respectively. EduFYI proposed an AI tool to automatically guide its users through a distance learning course, helping them to learn faster and more efficiently. TinT-AI proposed an AI-based Intelligent Automated Software Applications (iASA) to replace the prevalent ASA or Applicant Tracking Systems in the recruitment industry.

The intelligent traffic control system devised by Y. Sai Sanjeet, P. Anusha and P.V.S.L Hari Chandana of the winning team uses a deep reinforcement learning architecture to dynamically adjust traffic signals’ duration using a Deep Q network. The idea is to reduce the waiting time of vehicles at traffic intersections and allow a smooth flow of traffic.

Hari Chandana says, “Compared to the existing approaches that focus on traffic signal optimization for a single intersection, our approach is based on a collaborative control of traffic signal phases of multiple intersections.” As the model uses Independent Q-Learning, it takes all the other intersections as part of the environment and gets to train on a wider sample of data.

The model, the team says, is adaptable and can be used to control traffic in any area, by simulating the road network and training the model on it. The model can then be used to intelligently control the real-time traffic in that particular road network.

Like Bits n Bytes, EduFYI also tackles a relevant problem. In online distance learning courses, it often becomes difficult for instructors to answer individual doubts and questions. With classification of these questions into educational categories, the instructor can hope to better address student queries. At the same time, students can get a better evaluation of their understanding of the study material.

Divyansh, who was guided by Prof. Jiaul Paik, says, “For our task, we decided to classify the questions based on Bloom’s taxonomy.” The project termed “ConvNets with BiLSTMs for Question Category classification using ELMo Embeddings” has led to a model that has showed 80 per cent test accuracy and, it is hoped, will improve personalized learning such as in the online MOOC sector.

TintEd-AI hopes to help job-seekers to get hired and recruiters to hire using AI. The lone member team of Kumar Aniket was mentored by Arindam Chatterjee of HSBC Global Analytics, India, and Poornima Muthuswamy of Innovation Team Wells, Fargo, California.

His ‘Tint’ has several components – Resume Job Matcher, Job Recommender System, Automatic Resume Summarizer based on NLP and Automatic Resume Scoring that takes into account not only how the resume scores across different fields of education and professional degrees but also word count per section such as experience, leadership, projects etc. Aniket says, “Strategic use of AI, combined with the personal touch of human recruiters can help companies fill open positions faster and with more qualified candidates.”

Anirban Santra, a PhD student of the Computer Science and Engineering Department, who was the Program Chair of up.AI said, “Several of the ideas presented at the up.AI Challenge may have been visited before. But what is important is that undergraduate students took up the challenge to use AI to come up with solutions and learnt a lot in the process.”

Many of the participants have plans to further develop their ideas. Kumar Aniket, for example, wants to develop a Virtual Interview Analyzer. Prof. Sudeshna Sarkar, Head of the CoE for AI, said, “Up.AI tapped into the massive interest of students in AI. I hope that in the coming days, they will develop their interests and come up with more robust solutions using AI.”

My life, My time @IITKgp

Puran Dang (1959/B.Tech/CE/RP) is Founder and Senior Advisor at Minuteman Group LLC, Lexington, Massachusetts. He is also a respected community leader and founder of many organizations such as the first IIT Alumni Group in the world, and a founding team member of TIE-Boston. He is Chairman Emeritus of MIT Heritage of the Arts of South Asia, and global ambassador of Akshaya Patra, which serves hot lunch to poor children in India and Nepal. Dang was awarded the Distinguished Service Award by his alma mater in 2010. His bittersweet memories:

My life has been a strange amalgam of many happy and sad moments. I was born in Lyallpur, Punjab, India. My parents fled to India during the communal riots following the Partition of 1947. They came to Delhi with no home, no money and no hope. A deep struggle followed, but we survived. In 1955, I got the letter of admission from IIT Kharagpur. My elder brothers, Khushi Ram Dang and Shiv Lal Dang, were the only earning members of our family of ten. They borrowed money to send me to Kharagpur so that I could get a good education. Both loved me deeply.

I reached Kolkata by Janta Express and then took another train to Kharagpur. The thought of the unknown gripped me. Soon I was in front of RP Hall, a brand new building then, but right away, a gang of seniors surrounded me and snatched from me the can of biscuits which my mother had made for me. I felt I had made a huge mistake in coming so far away in the strange land of Hijli. After some time, which was not too pleaseant, I was directed to my room – C-127 – on the first floor overlooking the railway track. I heaved a sigh of relief when other students arrived, many from Delhi.

Director S.R. Sengupta eventually banned the practice of ragging. Thereafter, RP Hall brimmed with the sounds of laughter. Friendships were forged and life became normal. RP Hall was ‘Little India’, with students coming from all over the country. Walking the corridors of the new Institute building, attending classes in the new classrooms with brilliant teachers, I felt that I was indeed in a great institution.

It has been sixty years since, but I vividly remember my professors of engineering, mathematics and humanities. We had faculty from all over the world – USA, UK, Germany. Prof. T.W. Price was from USA, Prof Mackay from the UK, and the towering Prof. Ralph Kraus, Head of Mechanical Engineering, was from Germany. Another inspiring teacher was Prof. B.R. Seth, Head of the Mathematics Department. Internationally known, Prof. Seth was a great speaker with a booming voice and he had lot of interest in the Gymkhana activities.

From the very beginning, I had a lot of interest in reading and writing in English. My Hall mates would gather around me and admire me for my knowledge of English authors, political figures, and great spiritual gurus like Swami Vivekananda, Sri Ramakrishna and many others. I also had a lot of expertise in debating.

Students usually ran away to their homes during the Pooja holidays. One such holiday, five or six of us decided not to go home. We started for Digha, which was about 60-70 miles away, on our bicycles. We reached in the evening, sore feet and bone tired. But the beauty of the beach was so enchanting that we forgot our fatigue. The sun rise and sun set were out of this world. We rode back two or three days later. I will never forget the experience.

I was there during the first Convocation ceremony of the Institute in 1955. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr. B.C. Roy, our first Director, Dr. Jnan Ghosh, and many other celebrities were on the dais. I saw beaming faces of the first batch graduates. Prime Minister Nehru gave out the degrees with great pride, as if he had achieved a great milestone of his life. His impressive speech on this occasion is an all-time masterpiece. I often see that occasion in my dreams. It fortified my belief that I was indeed in an Institution that will make history in the world. I was not far from the truth.

Four years later, in 1959, I graduated and came back home with my head held high and pride in my heart.

In 1964, I got united with my life long partner, Kamlesh. She got her PhD from Pusa Institute (Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Delhi). Few months later, I was on the road to Chandigarh when I got severely injured in an auto accident near Panipat. I suffered compression fracture of my back and would have died had it not been for the President’s surgeon, Dr. Sen, who saved my life. I came back home after four months, totally bedridden with my fragile back. With steel and leather jacket around my body, I could walk around with a stick but I slowly improved. In 1970, I migrated to Lexington, Massachusetts, USA. Kamlesh and my two daughters joined me one year later.

Receiving the Distinguished Service Award

God has been very kind. I founded the very first Alumni Association of IIT Graduates (IIT-SINE ) in the world that has now expanded to 40 countries. I have been given multiple awards for my services to noble causes but the greatest gift was given to me about ten years ago by my alma-mater, IIT Kharagpur. I was one the first four winners of the ‘Distinguished Service Award’.

I remember the Director, Prof. Damodar Acharya, and Prof. Amit Patra on the stage in Kalidas Auditorium – a memory that I have preserved for a life time. I am most grateful to them. After I finished speaking, I came directly to the most admired Prof. G.S. Sanyal, and put my gold medal around his neck. Prof. Sanyal, Prof. Acharya, Prof. Patra, and Prof. Madhu Chakrabarty have graced my home here in Lexington multiple times.

Distinguished Service Award from IIT-SINE

All successes of my life are because of my education at my alma mater, IIT Kharagpur. I am most grateful to my professors and to the Almighty. I am a worshipper of the greatest poet and writer, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, and often read his Geetanjali.

Many years ago, Prof. Madhu Chakraborty invited me to speak to students and faculty at the Netaji Auditorium. It was such a joy!

My eyes are moist with gratitude for my Institute!

Current Affiliations of Shri Puran Dang:

Chairman Emeritus of the EKAL VIDYALAYA, USA-NE which is teaching 180,000 very poor students in 60,000 villages in so that they live better life in remote far off villages of India. The institution was conferred the prestigious Gandhi Peace Prize in 2019. He is also the Chairman of VISION-AID, USA which helps Vision Impaired unfortunate people in India by providing gadgets to see/read. The incumbents are also taught Computer skills like programming so that they can get jobs and lead somewhat normal life.