Professor Yash Pal

(26 November 1926 – 24 July 2017)

Prof Yash Pal was at ease with technology as well as science, and among many activities in his life, he had served as a charismatic Director of the Space Application Centre, Ahmedabad. Computer networks were but a dream in India in 1979; however, he encouraged Dr A. R. K. Sastry and me to carry out R & D in this field using the APPLE satellite which was being built at that time. We were but two among the hundreds of young scientists he had encouraged.

A visit to SAC was always inspiring. I remember escorting to that Centre a group of visitors from commonwealth countries who had come to participate in a workshop on computer networking. Most questions to Yash Pal were on the cost of setting up and running something like a SAC in their own countries!

Yash Pal was a visionary. He had shared Vikram Sarabhai’s early enthusiasm for the use of satellite communication and TV education. There was a TV studio brimming with teachers and actors with a rural background, producing TV programs with a development orientation. Mr. Kiran Karnik was then heading this activity.

Entertainment has gobbled up TV channels over the next few decades and the old dream did not quite materialize, but now there are hundreds of people working in India on technology for education. They use video and the Internet and keep working in the direction Sarabhai and Yash Pal pointed.

I remember a meeting of some group he had called as the then Chairman of the University Grants Commission. I was among the invitees. He was embarrassed by the fact they could not offer even a cup of tea to the invitees – the “karmacharis” were on strike! I remembered a time, ten years earlier when at the SAC many people had been voluntarily working on the campus hours beyond office closing time! Here was a man from the new-era institutions coping with one that is a left-over from the days of the British Raj!  

Yash Pal would be remembered by the hundreds of colleagues he had encouraged, by the millions of young people he had communicated with over TV, and by people now working in the institutions he had helped develop.

Srinivasan Ramani