Vijay P. Bhatkar - Career & Contributions

Career & Contributions

Dr. Bhatkar is best known as the architect of India's national initiative in supercomputing where he led the development of Param supercomputers. When India was denied the supercomputer by USA, Dr. Bhatkar took the challenge of developing an indigenous supercomputer in a record time of 3 years and delivered Param 8000 in 1991 and went on to develop terascale Param 10000 in 1998, propelling India into the exclusive club of select nations, who possess this strategic technology. Based on the Param series of supercomputers, he built the National Param Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) which has been now made available as a grid computing facility through Garuda grid on the National Knowledge Network (NKN) providing nationwide access to High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. Today, Dr. Bhatkar has once again taken the lead in proposing the National Mission on Development of Exascale Supercomputing Capability, Capacity and Infrastructure on National Knowledge Network. This is one of the largest projects in S&T in India with a 12th Plan budget of nearly Rs.5,000 crores that will not only transform India's computing but will also catalyze India's leadership in Science through Third & Fourth modes of scientific discovery by engaging world's largest number of researchers and scientists across a large number of research labs and universities of India collaborating together.

Dr. Bhatkar is also widely known for bringing ICT to the masses through a wide range of path-breaking initiatives, such as the celebrated GIST multilingual technology covering India's 22 official languages with 10 diverse scripts that has dissolved the language barrier on computers once for all; MKCL's computer literacy programme that made a world mark by creating 7.5 million computer literates within a decade; Education to Home (ETH) initiative for bringing the benefits of ICT to school education, in learning, teaching, administration, governance and communication & collaboration.

In the 80's, Dr. Bhatkar substantially contributed to the ushering of electronics revolution in India. He led the development of several innovations such as India's first fully solid state color television, color TV broadcast during Asiad in 1982, distributed control systems for Indian power plants and process industries, traffic control systems, automation of security systems, defense simulators and the like from the component level upward that contributed to the building of indigenous foundation of India's electronics industry which was to become India's IT industry later.

Faced with the challenges of creating a large number of software professionals in a shortest possible time, Dr. Bhatkar founded the Advanced Computer Training School (ACTS) in C-DAC which during the 90's provided over 10,000 software professionals to India's fast growing IT industry.

Dr. Vijay Bhatkar is credited with the creation of several national research labs and institutions, notably amongst them being C-DAC, ER&DC Trivandum, IIITM-K, TechnoPark, MKCL, IsquareIT, ETH Research Lab and Multiversity. Simultaneously, he has mentored several innovation-based startups.

Ever since he joined as a core member of IPAG Electronics Commission in 1972, Dr. Bhatkar has substantially contributed to shaping of India's path breaking policies in electronics, automation and control, computer and software, ICT, education and S&T and e-Governance over the successive four decades contributing to India's pre-eminence in these fields.

Dr. Bhatkar has served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee to PM, Member of the Governing Council of CSIR. He was also a member of the IT Task Force constituted by PM in 1998. He is Fellow of IEEE (USA) and Fellow of ACM (USA), world's foremost professional societies in Electronics and Computers respectively, besides being Fellow of CSI, INAE, IETE, NASI, MASc, etc. H has served as the Chairman of e-Governance Committees of Maharashtra and Goa.

He was called upon to address the Royal Society of London; he led the Indian delegation to South Africa to formulate India-SA initiative in advanced computing; he was a member of the Indo-Russian Long-Term Programme (ILTP) in S&T, Indo-Hungarian and Indo-French Joint Commissions, substantially contributing to India's international cooperation in electronics, computing and ICT.

Dr. Bhatkar has authored/edited over 12 books and 80 technical and research papers and addressed several university convocations, international and national conferences and conventions and public functions. His ground-breaking articulations have been widely covered by both print and broadcast media. His current research interests are in supercomputing, artificial intelligence, brain-mind-consciousness, and synthesis of science and spirituality.