News and Events, NAL, Bangalore

The dust has settled on the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of India’s Independence. One couldn’t help notice the common factor in the string of the ‘retirement parties’ this year at NAL: every one of them was born in 1947. Not exactly ‘Midnight’s Children’, but children nevertheless of a momentous year for India and the rest of the colonized world. Reading the recently released book, ‘India after Gandhi,’ by the historian Ramachandra Guha, one couldn’t help being amazed at the most difficult circumstances and unimaginable odds against which this country was born. Two distinct aspects to this masterful midwifery caught my attention: the logistics of overcoming these odds and the people who were responsible for it. Given the limited space for this article, I am nervously aware that in highlighting these I run the risk of limiting (only four are chosen here) and understating the issues.

The first fallout of independence and partition was the migration of millions of refugees, described often as the largest human migration in the history of mankind. These refugees had to be housed, fed and rehabilitated by the Indian government. Guha provides some startling statistics: A camp in Kurukshetra ‘was initially planned for 100,000 but it came to accommodate three times that number.’ They ‘consumed 100 tons of flour daily, along with large quantities of salt, rice, lentils, sugar and cooking oil – all provided free of charge by the government.’ In terms of allocating land to those who left their agricultural land behind, ‘a Rehabilitation Secretariat was set up… 7000 officials were working there… the bulk of these officials were accommodated in tents, serviced by makeshift lights and latrines… applications were invited for permanent allotment… within a month more then half a million claims were filed… these claims were verified in open assemblies… every false claim was punished.’ In 20 months ‘250,000 allotments were made’ and ‘neighbours and families were resettled together.’ And this was just one (albeit the largest) among the 200 or so camps for those who came from West Punjab.

The second challenge that had to be grappled with was the integration of the princely states. Guha writes, ‘in a mere two years, over 500 autonomous and sometimes ancient chiefdoms had been dissolved into fourteen new administrative units of India. This, by any reckoning, was a stupendous achievement. It was brought about by wisdom, foresight, hard work and not a little intrigue.’

Next came the drafting of the constitution of India. Guha writes, ‘The [Constituent] Assembly met between 1946 and 1949, against a backdrop of food scarcity, religious riots, refugee resettlement, class war, and feudal intransigence. As one historian of the process [Granville Austin] has put it, “Fundamental Rights were to be framed amidst the carnage of Fundamental Wrongs.”’

The final place of pride (in this article) is taken by the General Elections held during 1951-52. Here again, I only present the numbers from the book: ‘the size of the electorate … was 176 million. Each had to be identified, named and registered… at stake were 4500 seats… 224,000 polling booths were constructed, and equipped with 2 million steel ballot boxes, to make which 8200 tonnes of steel were consumed; 16,500 clerks were appointed on six-month contracts to type and collate the electoral rolls… 56,000 presiding officers… aided by another 280,000 helpers.’

One needs to stretch one’s imagination to appreciate the sheer logistical magnitude of these efforts. Yet, there were people in flesh and blood behind these; some well-known, many lesser-known, and a large number nameless.

One usually hears of or reads about personalities such as Gandhi, Nehru, Patel or Ambedkar. Of course, they were unquestionably among the leading nation-builders. But Guha’s book contains interesting details of the lesser-known colleagues of these leaders.
The rehabilitation effort was overseen by the Director General of Rehabilitation, Sardar Tarlok Singh of the ICS. Patel had as his deputy, VP Menon, ‘who made hundreds of trips to the chiefdoms, chipping away at the rulers.’ B.N. Rau, who although not a member of the Constituent Assembly, was the Constitutional Advisor to the Government of India and was one of the able aides of Dr. Ambedkar. The election effort was administered by the first Chief Election Commissioner, Sukumar Sen, a gold medallist in Mathematics from London University. They were further supported by the gigantic official machinery that successfully executed the monumental tasks amidst most trying and unfavourable circumstances.

It must be noted that only a minuscule portion of a very limited period (about 5 yrs) of India’s post-independent history has been quoted and discussed here. Admittedly, no essay, especially a short one as this, can adequately capture the mood of the times and the extraordinary achievements of the people then. However, I only wished to convey my feelings experienced from reading Guha’s book: pride from what our countrymen have achieved, humility from realizing our enormous debt to them, and optimism from how easy our current problems seem as compared to what was overcome. As Granville Austin so elegantly expressed it, ‘Indians did not default their tryst with destiny.’

The talk in the C-MMACS Lecture Hall on 27 July 2007 turned out to be quite unusual. Braving several acute physical handicaps, the speaker highlighted one of facet of his recent work. He showed with simple examples from diverse complex physical phenomena that the traditional numerical schemes for computing fluid flows do not conserve symmetry and invariants, as one would expect from the physical considerations. The central difficulty is that the usual finite difference schemes introduce a small directional bias in formulating the governing discretised conservation equations, leading to unacceptable errors. He also showed how his difference scheme overcomes the difficulty and conserves symmetry and invariants unlike the traditional schemes. The speaker was Dr Anand Kumar, Scientist G, C-MMACS, who retired on 31 July 2007.

He joined NAL as Scientist B in 1971. He had his undergraduate education in (BHU B.Sc. Hons), where his skill in solving geometrical problems was well recognized and appreciated. He joined IIT Kanpur in 1968 for Post-Graduate education. He completed M.Tech in 1970. Subsequently under the guidance of Dr. K S Yajnik in the area of separated flow, he obtained Ph.D in 1977. During his work in aerodynamics, fluid mechanics and later CTFD Divisions, he developed deep understanding of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). His creativity and depth of understanding are best seen in his computations of flow past a sharp delta wing that captured for the first time the fine structure of cross flow shock and shock-induced secondary separation in transonic flow and vortex breakdown in subsonic flow. They were published in the AIAA Journal in 1996 and the Proceedings of Royal Society in 1998.

Dr Anand Kumar’s interests in computational investigations have led him to diverse areas like viscoelastic fluid flow, liquid crystals, thin films, dendritic solidification and image processing. He also has given invited lectures in CFD Conferences in China, Germany, and Israel. He has held visiting positions in DLR, Germany (1985-86), University of Sydney (1991-92), and Raman Research Laboratory (2002-05). He has also been Regional Editor of CFD Journal, Japan.

All Anand Kumar’s colleagues feel deeply concerned about the progressive Parkinsonian disease that he has been suffering from in the last few years. We all wish him, his wife Dr Gita and his daughters, Aditi and Tara, all the best in his retirement years.

NAL was invited by PROSIM (organizers of the event) to participate in Engineering Design.in 2007 Conference and EXPO which was held at JN Tata Auditorium between 9-11 August 2007. NAL displayed posters describing NAL’s strength in aerospace R&D technology development and its capabilities. There were enquiries from visitors who wanted business interactions on surface coatings of seat belt buckles used in commercial flights and its improvisation; nose cone radomes, parallel computing, etc.

The aim of the three days event was to take the computer aided design technology to small and medium industries so that they can develop low-cost innovative technologies, which can be taken to rural areas.

C V Giri Raj

NAL Foundation day is now scheduled for 7 September 2007. Air Chief Marshal F H Major, PVSM, AVSM, SC, VM, ADC Chief of the Air Staff, Indian Air Force, will deliver the twenty first NAL Foundation Day Lecture on Strategic Aerospace Power: Technlogical and Maintenance Challenges and theTenth NAL technology lecture will delivered by Dr Sekhar Majumdar, Head, Computational and Theoretical Fluid Dynamic Division, NAL. Dr V K Aatre, Former Scientific Adviser to Raksha Mantri will preside over the function.

The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and National Centre for Science Information (NCSI) jointly conducted a training workshop on building institutional repositories using GNU EPrints at NCSI, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The programme was for a period three days from 1-3 August 2007.

NAL deputed Ms Rekha, (ICAST) Ms Neetu Chandra (ICAST) and Mr Kannan (KTMD) for the workshop. The training included installing of Linux operating system and the latest version of EPrints software on Linux and Windows platform. The participants were also trained in the configuration, customization and backup/restore of EPrints software.

The workshop will be useful for NAL’s future development of digital image and video archives.

P Kannan

Prof H P Khincha has been appointed the Vice-Chancellor of Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), Belgaum.

The programme on SARAS scheduled for telecast on 16 August 2007 at 8.00 pm was not telecast due to some technical problem. It will be telecast on 22 August 2007 at 8.00 pm.

Mr Aithu Poojary, Scientist F, SED has superannuated from NAL after serving more than three decades. He is a familiar person in NAL. He joined in 1972 as JRF after obtaining his M.Sc in Physics from Mysore University, became JSA in 1973 and continued to grow with the organization.

Mr Aithu Poojary made great strides in the indigenous development of digital analog instruments under the guidance of Dr S R Rajagopalan. He developed co-quad analyzer for vibration studies and a host of electroanalytical instruments like charging current compensated D.C. polarograph, harmonic A.C. polarograph, charging current eliminated A.C. polarograph, pulse polaro-graphs, corrosion rate monitor and potentiostats for moderate and high current applications. The polarographs developed by him were useful for detecting ppm (parts per million) and ppb (parts per billion) levels of chemical impurities. It is gratifying to note that the know-how of all these instruments have been transferred to Elico Pvt. Ltd, Hyderabad. A patent has been obtained for pulse polarograph. More recently he has contributed to the development of a pH controller suitable for plating systems.

Apart from this he has served the division and NAL in various capacities as divisional representative for ISO, member in committees (SPC-II, SDC). The key role played by Mr Poojary as Chairman, Telephone Exchange for the creation of the state-of the art telephone exchange will always be cherished in NAL.

Mr Aithu Poojary is a simple, honest, dedicated, friendly, cheerful and contented person. We wish him all the best for his retired life with his family. We are surely going to miss him.

The Discovery channel recently produced a programme featuring India’s first indigenously designed plane SARAS. The programme will be telecast on 16 August 2007 at 8.00 pm. This will be part of the programme titled "Daily Planet Goes to India" which explores and interprets science and technology driving India’s development, from grassroots innovations to moon missions.

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