F.C. Kohli on Scale Economics

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 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.

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.