page_title: Rangaswamy Narasimhan
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Rangaswamy Narasimhan / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Building on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA.
context_page_description: Rangaswamy Narasimhan was an Indian computer and cognitive scientist, regarded by many as the father of computer science research in India. He led the team which developed the TIFRAC, the first Indian indigenous computer and was instrumental in the establishment of CMC Limited in 1975, a Government of India company, later bought by Tata Consultancy Services. He was a recipient of the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri from the Government of India in 1977.
context_section_description: Rangaswamy Narasimhan was born on 17 April 1926 in Chennai in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. He graduated with honours in Telecommunication engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy, then part of University of Madras in 1947 and moved to US to obtain his master's degree (MS) in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. He stayed in US to secure a doctoral degree (PhD) in mathematics from Indiana University.
  In 1954, he returned to India, accepting Homi J. Bhabha's invitation to join the project team set up by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, (TIFR) Mumbai for the development of the first indigenous computer. Five years later, the prototype of the computer was ready and the computer was inaugurated by the then prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who named the equipment as Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator (TIFRAC). In 1961, he went back to Illinois, US to conduct further research on cognitive science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and worked as a visiting scientist at the Digital Computer Laboratory of the university till 1964. His next assignment at TIFR was the establishment of a software development centre and that is reported to have paved way for the founding of the National Center for Software Development and Computing Techniques (NCSDCT) under TIFR. The institution was later renamed as the National Centre for Software Technology and was merged into the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in 2003.
  In August 1963, the Government of India set up an interdepartmental Electronics Committee under the chairmanship of Vikram Sarabhai for finding ways for self-sufficiency in the electronics industry sector and Narasimhan was made the chairman of one of the sub committees, entrusted with the responsibility to look into the possibilities of finding ways to reduce dependence on IBM and International Computers Limited. One of the recommendations of Narasimhan Committee was to establish a national organization for manufacture and maintenance of computers which was later endorsed by the Electronics Commission, headed by M. G. K. Menon, and Narasimhan was entrusted with the responsibility which resulted in the formation of Computer Maintenance Corporation, later day CMC Limited as a fully owned government company in 1977 with Narasimhan as its founder chairman. He was also connected with TIFR at their National Centre for Software Development Computing Techniques from 1975 to 1985.
  Narasimhan was associated with several agencies and organizations for his research; the Industrial Design Centre at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, the Speech Pathology Unit of Topiwala National Medical College and Nair Hospital, the All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, the Central Institute of Indian Languages, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and the Centre for Applied Cognitive Science at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto were some of them. He sat on the council of the International Federation for Information Processing as the representative of India during 1975-86 and was a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Indo-French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research from 1988 to 1990. He retired from TIFR service in 1990 as a professor of eminence but retained his association with CMC past his retirement in the capacity as an advisor even after the company was bought by Tata Consultancy Services in 2001. He died on 3 September 2007, at the age of 81, in Bengaluru in Karnataka.
caption: The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Narasimhan's early researches were hosted by the university
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