F. C. Kohli
Co-founder 1969Background
Faqir Chand Kohli was born March 19, 1924, in Peshawar, British India, and trained in electrical engineering at Queen's University in Canada and MIT before joining Tata Electric Companies in 1951. Brought into the newly formed Tata Consultancy Services on deputation in 1969, when it employed just 10 consultants managing punch-card operations, Kohli pioneered treating software development as an industrial, assembly-line process rather than an artisanal craft, building the training and delivery model that let TCS scale into a global technology-services company. He stepped down from executive responsibility in 1996, by which point TCS-trained programmers numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and he is widely credited as the Father of the Indian IT Industry, earning India's Padma Bhushan honor in 2002. Kohli's success at TCS made him a sought-after advisor across the Tata Group, and he later helped establish India's Department of Electronics, extending his influence on Indian technology policy well beyond TCS itself. He died in 2020 at age 96. Kohli early advocacy for computerizing Indian industry, at a time when many viewed automation as a threat to jobs in a labor-abundant economy, required considerable political and social persuasion beyond pure technical argument.