New Delhi: The India Habitat Centre stayed packed till 10:30 pm on a Tuesday for the launch of Roots and Wings, Sonali Malhotra’s biography of IIT Madras mathematics Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, whom Forbes had once called India’s “deep tech don.” Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal was the chief guest, but the real star of the evening, as everyone kept saying, was the “maverick” himself.
The room was a reunion of sorts: IIT Kanpur and Madras batchmates, founders whom they have mentored, bureaucrats, and at least one influencer moderating the fireside chat that ran the evening well past its slot.
Gaurav Bhatnagar, founder of Mediology, who organised the launch, set the tone early with a story about meeting Jhunjhunwala as a 19-year-old IIT Delhi student with no business being on his radar. He recalls meetings that happened on lawns and “squeezed in the backseat of an Ambassador car” as the professor shuttled between meetings that, it turned out, were midwifing India’s startup ecosystem.
When Bhatnagar got a job offer from Microsoft in the US, the professor didn’t hesitate: “Go, he said, learn, then come back.”
Bhatnagar’s twist: he only learned from the book itself that those were the very years Jhunjhunwala was nursing the disappointment of being passed over for IIT Madras director and grinding through funding troubles for his wireless-in-local-loop venture.
“Proof that his generosity doesn’t shrink when times got hard,” he said.
Author Sonali Malhotra traced the book’s origins to grief — she lost her father during Covid, and a line from a song pushed her to write about the mentor at the top of her gratitude list before it was too late. She recalled her stint at Invest India, watching startup missions multiply without anyone tracing them back to a small tenant office at IIT Madras — Room 312 — where Jhunjhunwala had been chasing “sovereign technology” since 1981.
Goyal’s speech turned into something close to a masterclass in public procurement. He walked the room through how India’s LED bulb price fell from Rs 310 to Rs 38 through auctions and prompt payment. He credited Jhunjhunwala’s DC-power obsession as the spark behind the renewable push. But he also couldn’t resist a political dig.
“But sadly over the last 40, 50 years we’ve seen the decay of West Bengal due to which so many people had to leave that state and find other areas to work in other states to live in,” he said, adding that Kolkata’s loss is “India’s gain” in getting Jhunjhunwala to Chennai instead.
The Research Park bet
The book launch ended with a fireside chat with YourStory founder Shradha Sharma, who asked Jhunjhunwala about the Research Park’s origin story.
He recalled an early industry collaboration that went wrong before it went right: he’d promised a manufacturer he could redesign a piece of equipment for Rs 1 lakh, a promise a newspaper splashed on its front page before he’d built anything.
“I was very worried,” he said. “But the chairman took out his chequebook and gave me Rs 1 lakh. No paperwork, nothing, and said go build that.”
The park itself, he said, was deliberately built without any government money: “We refused to take funding for the Research Park from the government because I have a strong belief that easy funding hurts. We borrowed almost Rs 300-350 crore from the bank…we returned the money, we made Rs 80 crore cash profit.”
That discipline, he said, has since produced 350 startups till two years back in June 2024. The value of these 350 startups today is Rs 70,000 crores.
Jhunjhunwala was equally blunt on education and argued that colleges are teaching students to pass exams rather than to build.
“Cut out the syllabus by 50 per cent…We are teaching you to learn, and as long as you learn to learn, you’ll never become obsolete,” he said.
He also defended a decades-old push for a women’s reservation quota in IIT undergraduate admissions that has since pushed female representation at IIT Madras close to a quarter.
“The immediate reaction was very negative, but it took two, three meetings for us to persuade,” he said.
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Future innovators
On India’s AI anxieties, Jhunjhunwala refused to be drawn into the panic.
“Why do we only talk about AI? Take battery cells, that is also something that we are importing. Tell me what we are not importing in technology,” he said.
Arguing that the country’s real attention lies elsewhere, he said: “Can we solve the problem of transport? Can I solve our garbage problem? Can we solve our water-logging problem?… every problem is a big opportunity.”
His closing line drew the loudest applause of the night, as he rejected the idea that India needed a handful of celebrated founders: “Not two entrepreneurs, not 200, not even two million, we need 20 million, and probably more.”
Multiple videos from mentees who couldn’t attend played through the evening. For two hours, the room had settled into the kind of sustained attention Delhi book launches rarely hold past the first hour.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)