F.C. Kohli on Globalization

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.

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.

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 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.