F.C. Kohli on Outsourcing Strategy

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.