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We are pleased to publish this interview with Mr. Pramod Joshi, who has over 25 years of experience in the High-Tech and IT industry, about half of which was acquired while living abroad. Till 2005, he was the Managing Director, Syncata (India) Pvt. Ltd., now a subsidiary of Snap-On, a USD 2 Billion plus company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. He voluntarily gave up this position to devote his energies to counseling, mentoring and educating India’s youth in his own small way. He has visited hundreds of college campuses across India to share his experiences and to assess, guide and motivate young professional students trying to find their career paths.
Mr. Joshi is Co-Founder and Director of Career Plan North India and The Winning Mantra, both firms based in NOIDA, near New Delhi, where he lives and works. He is also on the Advisory Boards of some educational institutions and software companies. He is one of the Founding Members of the North East Technical Education Society, involved in improving access to higher education for students of North Eastern India.
His most recent remarkable work is involvement in setting up the NETES Institute of Technology and Science (NITS) at Mirza, a small town near Guwahati Airport in Assam. NITS Mirza is an All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) approved Institute affiliated to Guwahati University, and starts its academic session with its first batch of 240 B.E. students across 4 disciplines from this year (2009-2010).
Yogesh K. Upadhyaya from Chronicle interviews him to know more about his multi-faceted professional career and passion for providing higher education to the remoter parts of India:
(Pramod Joshi)
To view his profile, please click here Pramod Joshi.pdf
Q-1: Welcome, Sir. Please introduce yourself to our readers.
I come from what can be called an average middle class Indian family. My father, the eldest son to a retired Army Havaldar, gave up his studies to join the Indian Air Force in order to support his parents and siblings, and worked there till his retirement. My mother was his constant companion in the routine struggle of life. My only sibling, a younger brother, who could not do well in his studies and career, now lives with them post-retirement in a small town Haldwani in Uttarakhand. I live in NOIDA with my wife Hemangini and two daughters, Nidhi and Pallavi.
I was born at Chakeri, Kanpur on June 25, 1958 and spent my first 7 years there. My early childhood memories include a visit by Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India, to a neighbourhood factory, the two wars India fought in 1961 and 1965 and my father’s time away to postings in other cities and Canada to train as an aircraft engineer. You could say that I developed a nationalistic and patriotic streak through those early days, though this was never overtly displayed or flaunted. My schooling continued in schools in Madras (now Chennai), Bombay (now Mumbai) and Bangalore (now Bengaluru) and I completed by All India Higher Secondary Certificate with distinction in 1974 from Kendriya Vidyalaya, Hebbal in Bangalore.
In 1974, having obtained an All India Rank of 277, I opted for the Electronics branch at IT-BHU and began my journey in higher studies. I graduated in 1979 and went on to IIT Kanpur to complete my M. Tech. degree. Then I chose to stay on at IIT Kanpur as a Research Engineer, working for 4 years on a Government funded project for the design, development and testing of a Low-Power, Low-Frequency Communication Device for coal miners. In 1985 I moved to IIM, Bangalore to do my Post Graduate Diploma in Management and entered the corporate world in 1987 after completion of the same.
I joined Tata Burroughs (later Tata Unisys, then Tata Infotech and now part of TCS) through a campus placement offer and worked with them till 1996, for nearly 10 years. This was indeed a very rewarding experience, as I traveled to projects in France, Mexico and USA in my early career, and later also moved across various functions within the company – technical consulting, HR and Training, Finance and Business Support and Sales & Marketing. In 1996, I left Tata Unisys to join another IT-BHU alumnus, Ujj Nath (Metallurgy 1979) and his brother Aloke Nath’s firm in Los Angeles – NetBase Computing. I moved back to India in 1998 to help strengthen its India Development Centre in NOIDA. I assumed the position of Managing Director in 2000 and stayed on till 2005 until leaving to start a new phase in my career.
Q-2: Please tell us about your profession career.
My professional career could be broken into periods of 4-5 years, during each of which I made some interesting career moves, without necessarily changing my job. The first period was pure research as an engineer, when I worked at IIT Kanpur. This was a period of complete freedom, when we worked in the lab at all odd hours. We had a small team, guided by Prof. R. Raghuram, a gem of a person to work under. We made prototypes, designed and fabricated the casings and field tested the units in the coal mines of Bihar. It was fun going down deep in the belly of the earth to test if a trapped miner could communicate with the rescue team base station on the surface of the earth using Very Low Frequency (VLF) Through the Earth communication. Since the only power source available to a miner is the Headlamp battery, we had to have a very low drain current feeding the communication system. In the process I also learnt a lot about the lives of people living in the coal belts of eastern India.
The next period was after my MBA when I joined Tata Burroughs in 1987. I did the usual projects as a Lead Technical Consultant. We helped a bank in Bordeaux, France move a banking application from an IBM Mainframe environment to a Burroughs Mainframe environment. Then I moved to Mexico City after a 3 day break in India, where we worked for the Home Ministry of Mexico and moved their applications over to the Unisys (new name after the merger of Burroughs and Sperry) mainframe environment. I got an excellent opportunity to mingle with the local people and picked up some Spanish, just as I had picked up some French in my previous project. Mexicans are one of the most-friendly people on earth, and love to eat, sing and dance. Being Indians, we were a little circumspect at first but soon melted with their warm, friendly hospitality.
After these short projects of 3-4 months each, I was asked to join a large project team in Minneapolis, USA. I got bumped up into a design team which was redesigning the entire application suite of one of the largest healthcare maintenance providers in the US – United Health Care. This was a long project of over 18 months and full of challenges. I finished this project and moved back to India in Dec 1989, got married in 1990 and decided to stay on in India to raise a family. This decision also led to another phase in my career, when I decided to move away from a technical role into an HR management function. We were setting up a new development centre in the NOIDA Export Processing Zone (NEPZ) at that time and the charter was to hire and grow the strength in the centre. We grew from about 30 people to about 150 in a year at this centre. There was lots of interviewing to be done at campuses and in the office and coordinating with the head office in Mumbai. We trained people for an important project in Japan, and conducted Japanese language training. In the process I picked up some working knowledge of Japanese too.
In 1992, after the birth of my first daughter Nidhi, I lifted the self-imposed embargo on foreign travel and moved to Philadelphia, USA to provide Finance and Business Support to our North American operations. Then after 2 years or so, I took charge as the Regional Manager, Sales & Marketing for Tata Unisys, covering East USA and Canada.
The next period of my career involved my move from Tata Unisys to NetBase Computing. This was a little bit of a career risk, since I was moving from a well established company to a start-up operation which was just a few years old. I moved to Los Angeles from Philadelphia and began building business for offshore delivery, almost from scratch. In 1998, I made another self-intentioned switch, this time of countries, and moved to India. Those were the days when returning to India from the US was not a trend, like it is these days, and many of my friends and batch-mates in the US thought I would come running back after a year or two. However, I was determined to be part of the India growth story and stuck on. We developed an offshore business delivery platform and also entered the Indian Retail Point-of-Sale market. We survived the post 9/11 slump without firing a single employee. After being renamed Syncata in the US and India, we continued to build our business both in US and India. Despite being a small firm, we had clients from the Fortune 1000 list – Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Intel, TransAmerica, IBM, BPCL, Sony, etc.
Finally the latest phase of my career was the move from the corporate world of Information Technology to a small attempt at changing the way young people build their careers and shape their dreams. In partnership with Arvind Kumar, an alumnus of IITK and IIMB, I founded Career Plan North India, and later The Winning Mantra. Both firms are into teaching, training and consulting at different levels – targeting engineering students, MBA students, faculty members, working professionals and senior managers in the corporate world. We have recently started outbound and adventure based training as well. Being a full entrepreneur is never easy, and given our motives of making an impact through behavioural skill transformation, this has been quite challenging. Our business really comes through word of mouth when one Institute/college recommends us to another. Our team of trainers/facilitators is drawn from industry and academia and is among the best in their fields. We also help some major IT Services firms in their HR Selection process design and implementation. More recently, I also got involved in helping set up the NETES Institute of Technology and Science in Assam, which was the dream of one of my M. Tech. classmates at IITK, Dr. Anup Gogoi. More about that later!
Q-3: Please state your involvement in various professional activities.
When I was in the corporate world, I was a big believer of self-driven action. Every professional must take ownership of his/her development and drive change. I tried implementing this philosophy in myself and in the organizations I was a part of. After I left the corporate world, I have tried to instill this sense in students, faculty, working professionals and others who approach me for counseling. I have been a mentor to many students in Engg. Colleges and B-schools, and some of them have gone on to IIMs, ISB, XLRI and then to top notch companies. Their success inspires me further. I often go and address students in B-grade colleges and motivate them to develop their professional attitude and skills, so that they can make a more meaningful impact in the companies they join or the career path they choose to pursue. I am on the corporate advisory board of a few educational institutions such as GLA Group, Mathura, IMS, NOIDA as well as companies such as All e Technologies, NOIDA.
Interviewing and people assessment has been a favourite activity of mine and I have been part of people assessment/development workshops, where I was invited by companies to judge the managerial skills and leadership potential of senior managers at the level of GMs and VPs. I also helped design and develop a Competency based Selection Framework for a top B-School in Greater NOIDA, for the selection of their intake of MBA students. I have been a trainer facilitator in workshops on “Analytical Problem Solving and Decision Making” done for senior executives of companies such as BHEL, EIL and LG Electronics. I was also invited by some colleges to train and motivate their Faculty members to align themselves with the Vision, Mission and Core Values of the Institute.
I have been an invited speaker at industry forums such as Delhi Management Association, NOIDA Management Association and Consultancy Development Corporation to speak on a variety of subjects, ranging from eCRM to eGovernance. Usually, I learn more at each such interaction, since the gathered audience is a rich source of knowledge and wisdom.
More recently, I addressed a group of some 25 engineering students at NITS Mirza, drawn from a variety of colleges across the country, who were attending a month long free workshop on Robotics and their applications. I stressed the need for creative, out-of-the-box thinking as well as for social interaction skills that we often find missing in today’s engineering students, hooked as they are to the impersonal world of computers and the internet.
Q-4: You are also involved in the field of higher education.
I have always been interested in the field of education, and was fortunate to have spent almost 13 years of my life on educational campuses (5 years at IT-BHU, 6 years at IIT Kanpur including 4 years of research, 2 years at IIM Bangalore). Good quality education is an imperative for India, as it is for any nation that wants to be a future superpower. Our governments at the Centre and States have spent a lot of time and energy on everything else but education! No bold initiatives, no creative solutions, no non-traditional methods have found their way from the drawing board to the real world. This has indeed resulted in a pathetic waste of a colossal asset – our young human resource pool. If India is to grow at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 9-10%, we shall need a drastic overhaul of the creaking education system we currently have.
In my opinion, we need to make our education more practical and value-based, imparting to the student better life-skills and a more resilient attitude. We are too exam and results driven and forget the real raison d’être of education. Hopefully we shall see a sea change in the years to come, as the country comes to grips with all kinds of challenges. Only a well educated and highly motivated youth can save our country from chronic ills such as social inequity, corruption, environmental degradation, etc. Our education system, both at the basic and higher levels, needs to incorporate these changes in it. Of course, that is not a very well-researched opinion, but something I have come to realize in my few years of interaction with the education sector.
Q-5: Provide more details about NETES and NITS College at Mirza Assam.
As I mentioned earlier, I got involved in NETES (North East Technical Education Society) at the invitation of Dr. Anup Gogoi, who was my classmate back during the M. Tech. days at IIT Kanpur. We had been in touch about the need for quality education in the remoter parts of the country. I myself hail from the hilly regions of Kumaon (part of the state of Uttarakhand) and know that despite having many good quality schools, the region is bereft of good quality higher education. The result is that students have to relocate to other locations like Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc. at significant cost to their parents. Then after graduation, many of them move out to cities where there are jobs and rarely return to their home state. On the flip side, since there are no good colleges in such regions, industry also does not show much interest in setting up plants and offices in these states, despite good tax benefits offered by the state. This turns into a vicious self-perpetrating cycle. Anup and some like minded friends from academia and industry joined hands to form NETES in 2005 to break this cycle. Anup is one of the founder faculty members of IIT Gauhati and is from the region, having done his B. Tech. from Assam Engineering College (AEC) and M. Tech. and Ph.D. from IIT Kanpur. Another member of this non-profit Society is Dr. Arup Misra, a well-known Chemical engineer and scientist who believes passionately in the power of good education. Others in the ten member society are respected professionals from the Oil and Petroleum industry in the region.
NETES started operations from a small office in the heart of Guwahati and the first few months were spent in giving R&D support to students in the region. Dr. Anup Gogoi has pioneered the “Remote Lab” concept, for which he invited some bright students and professionals to work in the NETES Lab. In parallel, we started planning for the setting up of a full-fledged Institute for engineering, science and management education in the region. We wanted it to be a fully residential campus and looked around for suitable land. The NETES team zeroed in on Mirza, a sleepy hamlet just a stone’s throw away from the Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport at Guwahati. Surrounded by exceptional greenery and verdant hills, the place seemed perfect for placing an educational campus in its midst. Land acquisition started with funds collected from the members, their friends and supporters of the cause. Mr. Raj Barooah, a friend and classmate of Dr. Gogoi, with a flourishing business in electrical transmission and plant maintenance, chipped in with some funds and expertise. A Civil Engineer member of NETES took up the onus of supervising the construction. A US based friend of Dr. Gogoi chipped in with some funds as well. Finally there was enough corpus to approach the NEDFI (North East Development Finance Corporation Ltd.) for a loan. The collective dream began to take shape!
AICTE hearings, inspections and approval followed. Finally, after the usual hurdles and bottlenecks that are common in any grounds up endeavour, we were able to inaugurate NITS Mirza on Sunday, June 14, 2009 in the august presence of the Chief Minister of Assam, Shri Tarun Gogoi. We are starting NITS Mirza with a B.E. programme in four disciplines (www.nitsmirza.com), 60 students to each discipline. Admission forms are available online from the website and also from three locations in the region. The criteria are laid out transparently and we shall go strictly by merit of the applicants. We are taking 65% of the students through the State Entrance Exam as stipulated by the state government, while the balance 35% would be through the marks of the AIEEE system. In a marked departure from usual practice of using a 15% quota of seats for Management (called Management Quota) to fill in such seats with a premium fees, NETES has decided to only opt for 10% of seats (24 in all, 6 to each of the 4 departments) to be offered under the Management Quota. None of these seats would be offered at a premium, and we shall choose meritorious (high marks in Board exams but poor ranks in entrance exams due to extraneous reasons) but needy students for admission to these seats. We may even offer scholarships to such special students, thus achieving our social objectives in some way.
We intend to start Basic Sciences programmes, B.E. programmes in specialized areas like VLSI design as well as PGDM/MBA programmes in the future. The founder Director of NITS Mirza, Dr. A.K. Baruwa, is a seasoned veteran of academia, research and industry. He has held various posts in the past, including Head of Department of Chemical Engineering, AEC, Gauhati; Director, Assam Science Technology and Environment Council and others. We also have the services of a senior ex-Professor Emeritus of IIT Bombay, Dr. D.K. Chakrabarty, who shall be teaching students Chemistry in the first year.
We are looking to give the students not just good quality education, but also a set of core values they can carry forth into their future careers. For example, we intend to have the students mingle with the local villagers to see what kind of day to day problems could be solved using their knowledge of science and technology as well as their empathy and compassion for the disadvantaged. The river Brahmaputra is another resource of the region that needs to be better understood and leveraged. NITS Mirza intends to play a pro-active role in developing solutions that better achieve these holistic objectives.
Q-6: Please describe your college days
Now this is my favourite part! Life at school and college was a dream come true. Thanks to the balanced approach to life my parents, and especially my father, taught me early in life, I had a ball wherever I went. When I landed up at IT-BHU, it was the first time I was staying away from my parents. At 16 years of age, there is still a lot of innocence left in a person. I was like any middle class kid, trying to get by on a monthly allowance and hoping he would never have to trouble his parents by asking more. I largely escaped the notorious ragging of those days at IT-BHU by a combination of strategies – by acting dumb, by using my calligraphy to copy copious amounts of notes for “Daad” seniors and by quickly getting active in sports. I made it to the Institute Volleyball team in my first year and immediately got the “protection” of some well-known seniors who were star players! By the 2nd year, I was made the captain of the Institute Volleyball team. I also played football, cricket, table tennis and many other sports, though not at the Institute level.
I also was fortunate to be allotted one of the best hostels at that time (at least in my opinion) – Sir C. V. Raman Hostel. Advantages? Well, for one, it was right behind the famous Vishwanath Temple on campus, so one could easily hop across to escape ragging or spend some quality time with oneself. Secondly, it was bang next to the swimming pool, so a dip in the summer was minutes away. I made some lifelong friends at IT-BHU and the spirit of brotherhood still survives after all these years. Lots of good food and sweets, lots of sports and games, good friends and occasional sine dies, these are some of my fond memories of those days.
IITK was different in many ways. Here I was a post graduate student (or a Phud in local parlance) and then doing research. Yet I quickly became known for my extra-curricular interests, which included sports, cultural affairs, music, writing, etc. I made it to the IITK Volleyball team in my 1st year and then became captain of the Institute team in 2nd year. I recall that at the Inter-IIT Sports Meet that IITK hosted in Dec 1980, we beat IIT Madras in the finals under my captaincy and broke their record of 11 successive volleyball titles at the Inter-IIT Meet! Here at IITK, I also got interested in the SPICMACAY movement and attended concerts by almost all the stalwarts of music, dance and other cultural pursuits.
Since I continued to stay in a hostel even when I was working as a Research Engineer, I had the best of both the worlds. I got paid a Lecturer’s salary and my expenses were that of a student! Made some good friends here too and gathered more memories. One of those was a 15 day trek four of us from Hall Four undertook in the Kulu Manali region. What fun it was to lug 25 kg plus backpacks at heights of 9000-1000 feet and walk 20-30 kms each day! We even got thoroughly lost one night and spent a shivering eight hours in a shepherd’s hut, along with an Israeli couple who had also lost their way on the snowy slopes there.
IIM-Bangalore was another unique experience. Getting management gyan was quite a change agent in my life. I got to see things from a newer, less dogmatic perspective. I was involved in naming and organizing the very first Marketing Fair to be held by IIMB, by the name NEXUS. Our batch started the first Tuck Shop on campus. I was elected Vice President of the batch in my first year and represented the Institute at some events. I also took part in almost all Sports and Cultural events that were held at the Inter-IIM Meets in those two years. I was fortunate that these were held at IIMA and IIMC, so that I got to see both campuses at government expense!
There were many highpoints about my life at IIMB, and one among them was being chosen “The Man of the Batch” by my peers. Officially, I was awarded the IOC Gold Medal for Best All Round Performance at the Convocation ceremony in 1987.
Q-7: Please tell us about your personal life
Well, I am a man of ordinary means and ordinary tastes. I eat all kinds of food, read all kinds of things, play all kind of sports and love to interact with all kinds of people. I love travelling and had I made a lot more money in life than I did, I might have perpetually been on a monoplane hopping across landscapes. My wife Hemangini is herself an electronics engineer, who forsook a career in Indian Engineering Services to travel the world with me and raise my two daughters, Nidhi and Pallavi. Nidhi is now in Class 12th and preparing for the IIT-JEE herself. Pallavi is in class VIIth and just a fun-loving kid who cannot say no to TV and chocolates.
I am also fond of reading and writing poetry, both in Hindi and English. I am a big fan of Sir P.G. Wodehouse, Seinfeld, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno. Humour is my sweet spot. I do not have any philosophy of life, except to live it to the full, help others as much as possible and keep reinventing oneself. My father is a great influence on my life, as I saw him work diligently and manage people with a heart of gold. I am not as generous, but I would like to think that I have tread on very few toes in my life and helped a few people find their full potential in life.
I am very pained by all the hatred, violence and bigotry we see around the world. I keep imagining small kids trying to make sense of this senseless world. I wish all adults rediscovered their childhoods and fought their fights with the innocence of a child, not the barbarism of an adult.
Pramod, it was nice talking to you.
Having been the editor of a few college rags, I know how difficult it is to collect material, edit and publish it on time. More recently, I have been active in AIBA, the Association of IT-BHU Alumni. The annual Souvenirs have been one of my responsibilities along with Mr. Arun Bhutani (Mechanical 1977) and I am aware of the legwork required to do this once every year; and the fact is that the Chronicle team does it every month. Thanks for giving exposure to NITS Mirza, one of my small dreams of late! Cheers, and long live the IT-BHU Alumni community!
Pramod Joshi can be contacted at: pramodkjoshi@gmail.com
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Education of Pramod Joshi
* B. Tech, Electronics Engineering, Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU), Varanasi in 1979
* M. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1981
* PGDM in Marketing and Information Systems from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, in 1987
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1) Syncata
http://www.syncata.com/
Syncata.com
2) NETES Institute of Technology and Science at Mirza, Assam
3) NITS Mirza in the news
* NITS Mirza inaugurated by Hon’ble Chief Minister of Assam, Shri Tarun Gogoi
* A range of Mid-tech and Hi-Tech Technology Solutions unveiled at NITS Mirza
* Free Robotics Workshop launched for future engineers at NITS Mirza
4) North East Technical Education Society
http://netes.org.in/
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(if you having troubles, try posting your comment on this page or send an email to chronicle @ itbhuglobal.org)Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi 221005, UP