FC Kohli: The IT visionary India forgot to remember

Born on 19 March 1924 in Peshawar, Kohli was a gold medallist at Government College for Men in Lahore. When his father died in his final year, he applied to join the Indian Navy and was selected, but while waiting to be commissioned, a notice for a scholarship to Queen's University in Canada caught his eye. Kohli applied and won it.

The Indian Navy's loss would be IT's gain. After his bachelor's in electrical engineering from Queen's and his master's from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he returned to India to join Tata Electric Companies, where he helped make it one of the first utility companies in the world to use computers for power grid management. It was at Tata Electric that he met Swarn, the consumer rights lawyer who would become his wife; they raised three sons together.

The foundations of what is today a $300 billion industry were built on his clarity about the opportunity. In an address to the Computer Society of India in 1975, he put it with characteristic directness: "Many years ago, there was an industrial revolution; we missed it for reasons beyond our control. Today, there is a new revolution—a revolution in information technology (IT). If we miss this opportunity, those who follow us will not forgive us."

The early years were improvised and audacious in equal measure. With no domestic market to speak of, Kohli cultivated a relationship with Burroughs Corporation and in 1973, TCS completed its first offshore software delivery for the US company opening the door to contracts from the City of Detroit, and the State University of New York, and eventually a financial accounting package for UK building societies that is widely regarded as the first offshore software services deal of consequence.

In lockstep with TCS’s rising fortunes, other brilliant IT entrepreneurs emerged. Men like Shiv Nadar, Azim Premji, and N.R. Narayana Murthy were visionaries in their own right, but barring Infosys, a software native from birth, every major Indian IT company started by assembling hardware, with limited success.

It was the Y2K scare in the West and a respected market leader that had never abandoned its software convictions that pointed the way forward. Infosys, HCL, and Wipro had the agility to pivot to software services. Dozens of others that didn't are footnotes in the story of India's most successful industry.

Meeting him at his office in the Air India building at Nariman Point was one of the pleasures of early IT reporting. Tall and well-built, with a prominent moustache, he would listen carefully in a meeting and push back gently when he disagreed. Tea, along with cookies, was mandatory, and as the meeting wound down, he would press a few cookies into your hands for the drive back.

Prior to 1999, TCS was not quite the favoured child of the Tata group. Growth required internal accruals rather than hoping for investment from a parent wrestling with legacy businesses in steel and power. When it finally came to market in July 2004, five years after Kohli had retired as deputy chairman, having handed over the CEO role to S. Ramadorai in 1996, the scale of what had quietly been built came as a surprise. India's first billion-dollar public offer by a private sector company was valued at $10.4 billion on listing, dwarfing every other Indian IT firm.

Kohli spent his retirement years working on adult literacy, water purification, and computing in Indian regional languages, turning the same missionary conviction on newer and harder problems. He died on 26 November 2020, quietly, leaving behind a country that barely knew his name but owed him more than it would ever fully reckon.