F.C. Kohli on R&D and Innovation

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.

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.

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.

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.