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We are pleased to publish our interview with one of our most illustrious alumni, Prof. Suhas Pandurang Sukhatme. He has held leading academic and administrative positions with different institutions and organizations. He was honoured with the Padmashree Award in 2001 by the Government of India for his service to our nation. He also received the S. S. Bhatnagar Award for Engineering Sciences in 1983.
Prof. Sukhatme has extensive teaching and research experience in the field of Heat Transfer Engineering and Energy. He was Director of IIT-Bombay from 1995 to 2000. He also served for five years (2000-2005) as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. Based in Bombay, he still continues teaching at IIT-Bombay.
For Chronicle, Yogesh K. Upadhyaya talks with Prof. S. P. Sukhatme about his distinguished career:
For the Full bio-data of Prof. Sukhatme, please click here
.Q-1: Welcome Sir, would you please introduce yourself to our readers?
I was born on November 5, 1938 at Baroda where my maternal grandfather, Mr. S K Deval, who was a civil engineer, worked for the State of Baroda. My father, Dr P. V. Sukhatme was a well-known statistician and served as the Statistical Adviser of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in New Delhi. From the age of three, I stayed in New Delhi and attended the St Columba’s High School. I completed my Senior Cambridge in December 1952 and then did a one-year Pre-Engineering course (equivalent to Inter-Science) at the Delhi Polytechnic. After that I joined BENCO (Banaras Engineering College) in July 1954.
The College of Engineering at BHU was one of the most reputed colleges in India and I spent four glorious years there. I use the word ‘glorious’ because in many ways it was a defining and formative period of my life. Not only did I receive a good technical education in Mechanical Engineering, but I also made a number of very good life-long friends. I stayed in the Limbdi Hostel for my first two years and in the Rajputana Hostel for the remaining two. My stay in the hostels taught me many interpersonal skills which shaped my character. I learnt how to get along with a variety of people and more importantly, I learnt a lot about the diversity of India.
I had a desire to study more and in depth. Because of my good performance at BHU, I was able to secure admission at MIT for my post-graduate studies. I joined there in September 1958 and was a student in the Graduate School there till May 1964. I first obtained my Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering (S. M.) and then my doctorate (Sc. D.) specializing in the area of Heat Transfer. After that I worked for a year or so in a research company in USA before returning to India in 1965.
In India, I joined IIT Bombay as a faculty member in the Mechanical Engineering Department in October 1965 and I have been associated with the Institute since then. Subsequent to my long stint at IIT Bombay, I was appointed as the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board for five years till January 2005. Currently, I am Professor Emeritus at IIT Bombay.
I have been fortunate to receive many awards which recognize my contributions to teaching, research and administration. From BHU, I received the Prince of Wales Gold Medal for standing first in all the branches in 1958. I was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Engineering Sciences in 1983. I was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (1986), Indian National Academy of Engineering (1987), Indian National Science Academy (1995) and National Academy of Sciences (1999). The Government of India honoured me with the Padma Shri in 2001. An honour which I deeply cherish is the award of the degree of Doctor of Science (honoris causa) by my alma mater BHU in 2001. I was also the recipient of the first Lifetime Achievement Award given by IIT Bombay.
Q-2: You had a long academic career at IIT-Bombay.
I had a long and eventful academic career at IIT Bombay. As I said earlier, I joined the Institute in October 1965 as an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department. I was promoted to the post of Professor in July 1970 and remained in that position till I retired in 2000. While serving as a Professor, I also served as the Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department from 1973 to 1975, as the Deputy Director from 1983 to 1985 and finally as the Director of the Institute for five years from January 1995 to January 2000.
In the initial years, we were mainly concerned with teaching and with setting up the laboratories. I was in-charge of the Heat Transfer and Thermodynamics Section and I had to set-up the laboratory experiments from scratch as well as establish facilities for doing research. I remember with great pleasure teaching the subject of Heat Transfer for the first time to the fourth year B. Tech. class in 1966. I had a wonderful set of students, very lively and brilliant. They remember me for the systematic and logical way I taught and the scientific approach which I adopted. Many of them also recall that I introduced them to open book exams, a concept which was totally new to them then. The joy which I got from teaching then is something which has stayed with me all these years. Even today when I take a lecture, I prepare for it with the same care and thought, and derive from it the same pleasure. Of course, over the years, I have taught a variety of subjects like Thermodynamics, Thermal Applications of Solar Energy, Engineering Experimentation, etc. I also wrote two books which are used quite widely in many universities. One was a textbook on Heat Transfer which I wrote in 1970. It is now in its fourth edition. The other was a book on Solar Energy which I wrote in 1984. It is now in its third edition.
The IITs were established with the objective of providing quality education at the undergraduate and post graduate level and to do research in various fields of science and engineering. Thus at IIT Bombay, we started a number of postgraduate programs leading to the M. Tech. degree. We also started research activities in our fields. Funds were rather limited in the early years. So we had to be careful in choosing our research areas. Nevertheless, we made a good beginning. My first M. Tech. student completed his thesis work in 1968 and my first two PhD students obtained their degrees in 1971. Over the years, I guided 19 students for their PhD degrees and more than 50 for their M. Tech. theses. I also published more than 70 research papers in various journals and presented my findings at many conferences.
Apart from my academic work at IIT Bombay involving teaching and research, I was also involved with many committees concerned with the curriculum, the evaluation process, administrative issues and so on. This type of work forms an important part of our activities at IIT Bombay because of the autonomous nature of the Institute. In 1980, I was closely involved in establishing an inter-disciplinary M. Tech. programme in Energy Systems Engineering at the Institute. I was the convener of the programme for more than 10 years. It has now grown into a full-fledged department of Energy Science and Engineering.
As an academic person, it is important to step away once in a while from your routine work and go elsewhere. This helps you to see your work in a better perspective and to get familiar with the outside world. Towards this end, I took lien for one year in 1982-83 and worked as a Visiting Professor at the Iowa State University in USA. I had a very useful stay there. It helped me to read up on some new research areas and to refine my teaching methodology.
As a Professor at IIT Bombay, my services were also sought by many government agencies like the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Department of Space, etc. Being in Mumbai, I have also been closely involved in many ways with the work of the Department of Atomic Energy. And, of course, since the IITs work in close collaboration with each other, I have been associated with them also.
As I mentioned earlier, from 1995 to 2000, I was the Director of the Institute. I am glad to say that it was a period in which IIT Bombay made good progress. Two new schools for postgraduate studies were established. These were the School of Management and the School of Information Technology. We also established close links with our alumni during this period and received large donations for enhancing our academic and campus activities.
Q-3: What is the current situation in the field of engineering education in India?
I passed out of BENCO in 1958, fifty years ago. At that time, there were only a handful of engineering colleges and just one IIT at Kharagpur. The number of students receiving their Bachelor’s degree every year in the whole of India was around five or six thousand, the number of students receiving Master’s degrees in engineering and technology was a few hundred and the number receiving PhDs was negligible. Today the Bachelor’s degree output is around 3 lakhs, the Master’s output is around 20000 and the PhD output is a little over 1000. You can see that the number of educational institutions and the consequently the output has increased many fold. The increase in output is largely due to the fact that in the 1980s, the government permitted private institutions to be set up. While it is heartening to see the increase in quantitative output at all degree levels, it is disheartening to see that the quality has gone down dramatically. This is due to the fact that most of the private institutions have not followed the norms regarding faculty strength, laboratory and class room space, availability of equipment and instrumentation in laboratories and workshops, etc. Also the regulating body, the All-India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) has been unable to enforce the norms. It is indeed a sad state of affairs. The only redeeming feature is that the IITs, some of the NITs and some of the older colleges like UDCT (Mumbai), IT-BHU, Bengal Engineering College, Anna University, BITS, VJTI, College of Engineering in Pune and a few others are still doing a good job.
Q-4: Please tell us about the subject of heat transfer engineering, solar energy and its applications.
Whenever temperature differences exist in a body, they are reduced in magnitude in the course of time by heat flowing from the regions of high temperature to the regions of low temperature. The body under consideration may be a solid, a liquid or a gas. The subject dealing with the rate at which the heat flow process occurs is called heat transfer. The knowledge of the laws governing heat transfer is of importance to the engineer because it enables him to design and fabricate equipment in which the process occurs. Here are some typical problems of interest in heat transfer. (i) Determination of the thickness of insulation to put on the outside of a pipe carrying a hot gas so that the heat lost from the surface of the pipe is reduced. (ii) Determination of the number and length of pipes to be used in a steam condenser so that the steam entering it after expanding in a steam turbine is fully condensed into water. (iii) Calculating the size of an electric furnace which is required to execute a specified heat treatment process. (iv) Designing the cooling system for an array of micro-electronic chips. (v) Designing a passive cooling system for a satellite so that the on-board electrical and electronic systems do not over heat.
The three modes of heat transfer are conduction, convection and radiation, and in my research work I have been involved with developing equations for a variety of situations in which these modes occur. Some of the situations which I have studied are (i) heat transfer by free and forced convection when fluids flow across tubes; (ii) heat transfer mechanisms inside fibrous insulations and the development of transient techniques for measuring the effective thermal conductivity of the insulation; (iii) heat transfer during condensation of liquid metal vapours; (iv) heat transfer during condensation of vapours on low finned tubes; (v) heat transfer during flow of viscous liquids inside tubes containing twisted tapes.
In the field of Solar Energy, I have been primarily concerned with thermal applications. Thus, for example, my students and I have done work in the area of solar refrigeration and also developed cost-effective concrete collectors for providing hot water. In the case of solar refrigeration, we built a complete system consisting of flat-plate solar collectors with booster mirrors, a thermal storage tank and an absorption refrigeration system to cool a cold storage room to a temperature of 5 degrees Celsius.
From time to time, I have also been involved with various industries and done some consultancy work.
Q-5: You were also the Chairman of Atomic Energy Regulatory Board.
Yes, I was a member of the Board from 1996 and after completing my term as Director of IIT Bombay in January 2000, I was appointed Chairman of AERB.
The purpose of the Regulatory Board is to ensure that all specified standards of safety are scrupulously followed wherever equipment using ionising radiation is used in India. Thus for example, if you take the case of a nuclear power plant, the authority wishing to set up a power plant has to take permission from the regulatory body at every stage like site selection, design, fabrication, erection, construction, etc. In order to obtain the permissions, all relevant documents have to be submitted to the Board and systematic hearings and meetings are held before permission is granted at each step. Usually permissions are given with certain stipulations. The Board ensures that these stipulations are met before going to the next stage. Similarly, once the construction phase is complete, permission is needed to start operation. This is also given in stages as specified in various codes, guides and standards. The Committees which work for the Board are headed by very responsible and senior people and at no stage is any compromise made on safety. During operation, also there is continuous monitoring and the power plant in-charge has to report any untoward happening immediately. Because of all these measures, India has an excellent record of running its nuclear power plants. The final authority for all important permissions is the Chairman of the Regulatory Board. At times, his job can be quite taxing.
During my tenure of five years, a number of new nuclear power plants based on Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR) technology were commissioned. In the last few years, the power programme has diversified. Apart from the PHWR which has formed the backbone for the Indian programme so far, the country is adopting breeder reactor technology so that eventually we can tap our large resources of thorium. Based on the experience of running the Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) at Kalpakkam, AERB gave permission for the construction of the 500 MW Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR). This is also being built at Kalpakkam and will be an important milestone for India. In addition, India is importing the two 1000 MW Pressurised Water Reactors from Russia. These are being set up at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu. Because of all these developments, the regulatory work at AERB increased many fold from 2000 to 2005. It will continue to increase with the signing of the Indo-US nuclear deal, which is a very welcome development.
Q-6: Please tell us a little about your college days.
In reply to your first question, I have given you some idea of my years in BHU and how much I cherish them.
I have very pleasant memories of the Maharashtra mess of which I was a member right through my four years. We had a membership of about 20. One of us was the general secretary and by rotation, each of us had to serve as the monthly secretary. The high point was the annual ‘jalebi’ eating competition. Very few people will now believe that one year I ate 50 jalebis. (By the way, the winner ate more than 90!)
I played a fair amount of tennis at BENCO and in my first year, I was the runner-up in the junior championship. I was also the college vice-captain in my final year.
As I said earlier, I made many fine friends. Some of them are Mumbai based and we meet occasionally. My close friends have been Sudhakar Joglekar (who was also my room-mate for the first two years when we had to stay two to a room), Sitaram Shah, Hoshang Dalal and C K Chandnani. Jagmohan Humar who is now settled in Ottawa, Canada also visits Mumbai every few years and we have been meeting then. So also, Bhaskar Rao, who is in USA.
This year it is 50 years since we passed out and our batch mates in Delhi are organizing a golden jubilee get-together in January 2009. I am planning to attend.
Q-7: Please tell us about your personal life.
My wife, Shobha is a medical doctor, an anaesthetist. She worked for many years in the IIT Hospital. At the same time, she looked after house so well that I was free to concentrate on my work. We have two sons, Gaurav and Jai. Both did their B.Tech. from IIT Bombay, Gaurav in Computer Science and Jai in Engineering Physics. Subsequently, Gaurav obtained his PhD at the University of Southern California and is currently a faculty member there. Jai obtained his PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Chicago and is currently at the University of Wisconsin. Shobha and I are proud of their achievements.
I am now 70 years old and as a Professor Emeritus at IIT, I have no formal commitments. Nevertheless, I visit the Institute often and take a few lectures every semester. I am also a member of the Institute’s Advisory Council. IIT Bombay is celebrating its golden jubilee this year and I have been involved in the project of writing the history of the Institute. The book has just been released. So you can see that in a variety of ways, I continue to be active and to serve my Institute. I hope to do so to the very end.
I hope you have not got the impression that I have remained focused only on my professional work all these years. I have many other interests. I read a lot, both fiction and non-fiction. I follow the political scene carefully, watch a little TV and have been an avid fan of cricket all my life. I follow the fortunes of the Indian team with unabated enthusiasm. My wife often says that it is best not to talk to me for a few hours if our cricket team has lost!
Thank you, Sir. Thanks for spending valuable time for the interview.
Prof. S. P. Sukhatme can be contacted at: sukhatme@iitb.ac.in
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Additional Links
1) The Growth of an Institute for Higher Technological Education (History of IITs) - by Professor S. P. Sukhatme
http://www.iitbombay.org/misc/press/iitb_sukhatme.htm
2) AERBites bid farewell to Prof. Suhas P. Sukhatme
http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:KAl84b5XJjMJ:www.aerb.gov.in/cgi-bin/News/AERBNews/detail.asp%3FID%3D18+prof.+sukhatme&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
3) Books on heat transfer and energy by Prof. Sukhatme at BookFinder.com
http://www.bookfinder.com/author/s-p-sukhatme/
4) IIT-Bombay links for Prof. Sukhatme
http://www.alumni.iitb.ac.in/news/republicdayawards.htm
http://www.alumni.iitb.ac.in/foundationday2001.htm
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42nd Foundation Day of IIT Bombay - Prof. S. P. Sukhatme honoured with Life Time Achievement Award
The first ever Life Time Achievement Award of IIT Bombay was bestowed on Prof. Suhas P. Sukhatme, former Director of IIT Bombay and currently the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board on the occasion of the 42nd Foundation Day of the Institute, held on March 12th 2001, "in recognition of his outstanding contributions to this Institute".
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We are publishing the interview with one of our senior most alumni, Mahen Das (Mr. Mahendra Chetan Das) to share his vast experience in Asset Management (see below) of petroleum refineries and process industry in general. After graduating in mechanical engineering in 1958 from BENCO (Banaras Engineering College), as our college was known at that time, he has put 43 years of work in the petroleum, petro-chemical and other processing field in various capacities. He was involved in establishing MERIT (Manufacturing Enhanced Reliability Improvement Team) program at the Shell Technical Headquarters in The Netherlands (Holland). The program has become a de facto standard for Asset Management in petroleum refineries and other chemical process industries around the world.
To read bio-data of Mahen Das, click here. [Chronicle, please link his PDF bio-data here]
I was born in Lahore on October 12 1937 where I got my primary education at Sir Ganga Ram High School. My family from both sides hailed from Dera Ismail Khan, in the erstwhile NWFP. My father was an executive in The Delhi Cloth Mills. In 1946, he was transferred from Lahore to Delhi where I completed my higher secondary education at Sir Harcourt Butler School. Inspired by my grand father, an engineer, I had always aspired to become one. So, off I went to the Inter-Science College at Kamachha, Banaras and then to BENCO.
As part of my “broadening”, in 1963, I was assigned to the Shell refinery in Curacao, Netherlands Antilles. I returned after nearly 5 years of work in all their engineering departments, with a stronger conviction that something needed to be done to break the barriers between the different “departments” if the full potential of the organization is to be achieved for getting the best out of the assets. During this period, I was introduced to and married Madhu, now my wife of 42 years. We have a daughter and a son, both happily married and currently living and working in the USA.
- The top management must be seen to support the review
- The review team must have equal number of members from the headquarters and the client company. This, to help create ownership in the client company for the exercise
- Relevant data will be collected from the client company’s records, as well as by interviewing a number of key relevant personnel selected from its organization. These interviewees will range from the top management to the shop floor and will include contractors
- From this data, the team, working together, will learn the key business processes as they are currently followed
- These will be compared with the known best practices to determine the company’s strengths and weaknesses
- The team will then design remedies for the weaknesses. Full involvement of the local members will ensure that the remedies are fit for purpose, take advantage of the identified local strengths, and are owned by the local company
- Finally, the benefits, costs and a plan for implementation of improvements, with targets and performance indicators will be produced
- These findings will be presented to a large audience by the local team members. The minimum present will be the management team and all interviewees including contractors
- The management will report on the progress of the implementation plan during the annual appraisal by shareholders
This was a huge success. Later, when Shell decided to start selling technical services also to 3rd parties, MERIT was the top selling product. During my tenure from 1993 until 2002, I led MERIT reviews at about 35 companies of the Shell group, and about 20 3rd party companies. These included several outside the petroleum sector, namely, steel manufacture, metal refining, chemical fertilizer manufacture, thermal/nuclear power generation.
- Inspection and Maintenance of the assets to ensure their reliability and technical integrity
- Changes to assets for marginal improvements in performance
- Technological support to Operations and Maintenance
- Logistical support to Operations and Maintenance
The fundamental premises are a) the management must address this business process in a holistic manner, i.e. give ALL aspects the attention they deserve in proportion to the impact they have on the business, and b) that the traditional groups engaged in the above-mentioned activities must work as one team if the objective is to be achieved.
- Maximizing production and value addition
- Minimizing down time
- Maximizing efficiency of execution of all activities
- Elimination of waste of all kinds
A MERIT review scrutinizes the above mentioned aspects of the client’s business, in partnership with the client. This scrutiny reveals shortcomings. The review team then designs remedies for the shortcomings and helps the client to implement the remedies.
I married Madhu in 1966. She is a graduate from Chandigarh. We have a daughter who is a pharmacologist. She and her husband, also a pharmacologist, live near Philadelphia. Our son is an economist, recently married. They live in Brooklyn. I and my wife were very happy living in the Netherlands where we had been since 1993 and considered it home, until our first grandchild arrived in August 2005. That changed our perspective about many things, including our priorities in life. We started asking ourselves what we were doing there away from the children. So, by August 2006, we wound down every thing in the Netherlands and arranged for us to shift residence to East Windsor, New Jersey, U.S.A.
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1) 100 years of Maintenance and Reliability-Book published by Amazon
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(Courtesy: The Time Magazine/Frans Lemmens / Getty)
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Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi 221005, UP