Tata Consultancy Services

Faqir Chand Kohli, born 19 March 1924 in Peshawar in a Punjabi Hindu Khatri family, studied at Khalsa Middle School and National High School in Peshawar before earning a BA and BSc (Honours) at Government College, Lahore, where he was a university gold medalist — a colonial-era education foundation for someone who would later be called the 'father of the Indian IT industry'.

Kohli's father died during his final college year; after a planned Indian Navy commission fell through, he won a scholarship to Queen's University in Canada, completed a BSc (Honours) in Electrical Engineering in 1948, then an MS at MIT in 1950 — an academic trajectory rare among mid-century Indian engineers and central to the global perspective he later brought to TCS.

After MIT, Kohli trained in power system operations at Ebasco International, the Connecticut Valley Power Exchange and New England Power Systems before returning to India in 1951 to join Tata Electric Company, where he set up a load dispatching system — an early instance of applying Western utility-grade engineering practice to Indian infrastructure.

At Tata Electric, Kohli became a general superintendent in 1963 and deputy general manager in 1967, and introduced the use of digital computers for power system design and control — including the CDC 3600 mainframe at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research — making Tata Electric one of the first utility companies anywhere to deploy computers for grid management.

At the request of J.R.D. Tata, Kohli helped set up Tata Consultancy Services in 1969, after Tata Electric installed a computer system to control the Mumbai-Pune power lines — only the third such utility deployment globally — and TCS initially served Tata Group companies before signing its first external contract with Burroughs Corporation in 1972 for software services.

Kohli became TCS's first chief executive and also served as its deputy chairman, leading the company for nearly three decades before stepping down in 1996 — a tenure long enough to span the era of mainframe-era software exports through the early years of Y2K-driven outsourcing.

Kohli served as president and chairman of NASSCOM between 1995 and 1996, using that role and later positions on its executive committee to shape global partnerships and showcase the India-delivered IT-services opportunity — a critical bit of institutional advocacy at the moment Indian IT was scaling into a global export industry.

Kohli played an important role in Indian technical education, helping IIT Kanpur's founding director P. K. Kelkar with faculty selection in 1959 and chairing the Board of Governors of the College of Engineering, Pune — pushing it to autonomous status, an early example of the founder-as-institution-builder pattern that would recur across Indian IT.

Kohli was on the board of directors of IEEE between 1973 and 1974 and chaired the India Council; he was also president of the Computer Society of India and chaired the 1976 Southeast Asia Regional Computer Conference in Singapore — a portfolio of professional-society roles through which he championed Indian computing on the international stage.

After retirement, Kohli remained engaged with technology advocacy — driving efforts in adult literacy, water purification and regional language computing, and advising TCS — explicitly framing his post-CEO decades as the time to deploy computing for India's social problems rather than for export revenue alone.

Kohli was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2002 for his contribution to the Indian software industry, and received honorary doctorates from institutions including Shiv Nadar University, the University of Waterloo, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur and Queen's University — recognition from the very engineering ecosystems he had helped nurture.

Kohli died of a heart attack on 26 November 2020 at the age of 96, leaving a TCS that had become the largest Indian IT services company by market capitalisation and the most valuable company within the Tata group — a $190 billion industry footprint the Wikipedia article credits him with having personally midwifed.

Queen's Alumni Review notes that India's IT industry posts roughly $190 billion in annual revenue and directly employs about four million people (with another 10 million indirectly) — a scale that the article traces substantially back to Kohli, who died on 26 November 2020 at the age of 96.

Kohli told interviewer Shai Dubey in 2007 that going to Queen's University on a scholarship was 'the pivotal moment in his life', specifically because Indian education of the era emphasised rote learning whereas Queen's taught him 'to think critically' and 'to question' — a methodological shift he credited with much of his subsequent trajectory.

In 1945, in his final year at Government College, Lahore, Kohli's father died; the emotional shock and need for independence pushed him to apply for the Indian Navy, but a chance newspaper advertisement for a government scholarship to study electrical engineering at Queen's redirected him to Canada in 1946 — a single small ad rerouting the trajectory of Indian IT.

The Queen's piece emphasises the culture shock Kohli faced in post-war Kingston — a visible minority in a much smaller student body, with different food and culture — but argues the more important shift was methodological: critical thinking over rote learning, which he carried back into every institution he later built in India.

Kohli earned a job at Canadian General Electric after his Queen's BSc, then won a scholarship to MIT for a master's in electrical engineering in 1950 — using the Western educational ladder to acquire credentials and exposure he could not then have obtained at home, before returning to India in 1951 with a Tata Group offer.

The article notes that Kohli's family had to flee Peshawar for India during Partition's violence and start over — a personal upheaval that preceded his Tata career and that the piece frames as part of the determination he brought to building institutions in his adoptive country.

At Tata Hydro-Electric, Kohli oversaw systems operations for power distribution and, by 1968, made Tata Electric one of the first companies anywhere to use a computer to control the power grid — a utility-side innovation that the article positions as the immediate precursor to TCS, which he and J.R.D. Tata set up within two years.

The Queen's piece highlights Kohli's intuition that Western countries would not have the engineering capacity to produce all the software the burgeoning computer industry required — a structural-arbitrage insight that became the core economic premise of TCS and, by extension, of the entire Indian IT-services industry.

Subramaniam Ramadorai's history of TCS, cited by the Queen's article, records that Kohli and his team 'believed they were not building a mere business but a new industry for India' — a self-conscious nation-building framing that distinguished TCS from a typical startup of the era.

To produce the talent TCS needed, Kohli promoted the new Indian Institutes of Technology created by Jawaharlal Nehru, both finding teaching staff for them and teaching some courses himself — a deliberate pipeline-building strategy that linked the company's growth to the expansion of the country's technical-education capacity.

Politician and author Sudheendra Kulkarni quoted Kohli saying 'our industry has benefited, but India has not benefited much from our industry. We have to do more, a lot more, for India.' — a self-critique that the Queen's piece frames as the motivation behind his post-retirement work in adult literacy, water purification and education.

The article credits Kohli with industrialising the once-boutique production of software — dubbing him 'the Henry Ford of IT services' — for the way he converted bespoke software development into a repeatable, scaled, offshore-delivered industrial process, an organisational innovation arguably as consequential as the technical ones.

Faqir Chand Kohli died in Mumbai on 26 November 2020 following a cardiac arrest, Bombardment House executives told The Hindu; he was 96 and is survived by his wife Swarn and family — closing a life that had spanned the colonial-era Peshawar of his birth through the Mumbai of India's $190-billion IT industry.

The Hindu notes Kohli joined Tata Electric Co. in 1951 and helped set up its load despatching system, becoming a director of Tata Electric in 1970 — utility-side experience that directly preceded his pivot to building TCS as a software-services vehicle for the Tata Group and the country.

TCS said in a statement that Kohli joined the company in 1969 at JRD Tata's behest, first pivoting into management consultancy and then, over the next two decades, into software development — explicitly describing a deliberate strategy of staged evolution rather than a single founding bet on software exports.

TCS credited Kohli with helping the organisation 'navigate multiple technology waves over two-and-a-half decades by continually investing in people and staying relevant to customers' — a phrase that frames the TCS playbook as continuous re-skilling against recurring technology shifts rather than any single product bet.

Kohli stepped down as TCS CEO in 1996 and continued to promote technology to solve India's social problems — a transition the obituary frames as the moment his personal mission shifted from commercial IT-services exports to public-interest computing in adult literacy, water purification and regional-language tools.

Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran, in a statement, said Kohli led innovations 'in areas far-ranging from adult literacy, water purification, software engineering, software automation, complex-systems and cybernetics' — a breadth of curiosity that the obituary presents as the hallmark of his post-CEO decades.

Former TCS CEO and vice-chairman S. Ramadorai called Kohli 'a brilliant technocrat and a business leader with varied interests' and said 'the nation has lost a legend today' — a peer tribute that frames Kohli as both a Tata internal figure and a national-level IT-statesman.

TCS chief executive Rajesh Gopinathan's statement emphasised Kohli's 'sense of purpose, clarity of vision, strength of character and unwavering belief in investing in people' as leaving an indelible stamp on the organisation's culture — locating TCS's talent-first identity squarely in its founder's legacy.

Industry body NASSCOM called Kohli 'the visionary leader who foresaw the opportunity of India in technology services and built TCS many decades back when almost nothing existed in the tech sector in India' — crediting him with the original India-as-IT-services thesis at a moment the country had no software industry to speak of.

As NASSCOM chairman in 1994-95, Kohli led the industry body to build global partnerships in key markets, showcase the India-delivered IT-services opportunity, and foster a culture of collaboration among competing Indian IT firms — an unusual act of pre-competitive industry cooperation that the obituary flags as decisive for the sector's collective growth.

Happiest Minds founder Ashok Soota called Kohli 'a giant among giants' who was 'extremely supportive whenever I reached out to him for any industry related guidance' — a personal testimonial that captures Kohli's role as informal mentor across the wider Indian IT sector, beyond TCS's walls.

The Hindu notes that with JRD Tata's active support Kohli built TCS into a company whose market capitalisation stood at roughly INR 10,20,967.59 crore on the day of his death — making TCS the most valuable company in the Tata Group, and a concrete measure of the long arc from the 1969 in-house consultancy to a global IT-services heavyweight.