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7/15/2020 A Tribute: Satish Dhawan (1920-2002) – A Quarterly Publication of ACCS
During his tenure as director of IISc, he set about rejuvenating the Institute with foresight and vision and
expanded its academic scope by introducing new disciplines that included automation and control;
materials science; molecular biology and biophysics; computer science; technology for rural areas;
theoretical physics, applied mathematics; solid state chemistry; and atmospheric sciences,[9] while
augmenting the faculty with new talent.

During 1971–72 Dhawan was a visiting professor at Caltech on a sabbatical. While there, Vikram Sarabhai,
highly regarded as the Father of the India’s space program, unexpectedly passed away on 30 December
1971, creating a sudden leadership vacuum in the nascent program. The then prime minister Mrs. Indira
Gandhi promptly and urgently summoned Dhawan to return to India and take charge of the program.
Dhawan agreed but only after some pragmatic conditions articulated by him were conceded. They
included

¼ his views about the space program that India should pursue, its administrative structure, and the
need to keep it away from Delhi. If these were accepted he would be honored to lead the program.
The government agreed, and a new structure was set up involving a policymaking Space
Commission, an administrative arm of the government called the Department of Space. And a
science and technology agency called the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)—all three
headed by one person.[10]

Thus began a parallel career track for Dhawan who continued to be the director of IISc at Bangalore. He
convinced the government that this arrangement would bring synergy to the space program as it would
establish the necessary close ties between the IISc and ISRO in developing space technology. This was
clearly a variation of the GALCIT model he had seen work remarkably well at Caltech. He was persuasive
enough. On a token salary of Rs. 1 per month, he became the chairman of Indian Space Research
Organization (ISRO) and the chairman of the Indian Space Commission.

Dhawan’s strategy for organizing India’s space program carried great foresight. This is re ected in the
resolution setting up the Space Commission and the Department of Space. It read:

In order to promote a rapid development of activities connected with the Space Science, Space
Technology and Space Applications, the Government of India consider it necessary to set up an
organization, free from all non-essential restrictions or needlessly inelastic rules, which will have
responsibility in the entire eld of Science and Technology of Outer Space and their Applications.”[11]
The Space Commission was established with full executive and nancial powers modeled on the lines of
India’s Atomic Energy Commission. Dhawan well knew the exasperating and dampening e ect a
scienti cally uninformed government bureaucracy has on the development of forward looking science and
technology, and the herculean e orts needed to counter it. I got a sardonic expression of it from him in a
chance encounter when I made a casual remark about the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) project India had
just initiated, while watching a hang gliding demonstration in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) sometime in the
1980s.

Dhawan wanted the space program to have a sustainable national relevance with close interfaces with end
users. One of his primary aim was to make space technology work for the development of Indian society,
starting from the grassroots. He constantly worried about the lower strata of society and how they could
be uplifted with a humane protective cover provided by space technology—the unemployed, unskilled,
uneducated—without being uprooted, displaced, and dispossessed of their pristine cultural heritage. He
had a deep sense of moral order and social justice.


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