From a jungle campus that confounded even Shashi Tharoor’s GPS, IIT Hyderabad’s founding generation built something that now refuses to stay small.
Prof. U.B. Desai, Founding Director of IIT Hyderabad and current Vice President of INSA, opened by invoking the institution’s improbable origins. The early campus — a cluster of provisional structures inside the Ordnance Factory at a locality so obscure that even Hyderabad residents drew blanks when the name was mentioned — became the setting for a joke that carried genuine institutional weight. When Shashi Tharoor was invited to speak at IITH during those early years, his driver, instructed only that the destination was ‘IIT,’ delivered him first to IIT Bombay’s Hyderabad counterpart, IIIT. Arriving finally at the correct institution after a lengthy detour through Narsingi, Tharoor declared the campus ‘a jungle’ and refused to lecture, conducting a forty-five-minute Q&A instead that proceeded to electrify the hall. It was, as Desai recounted it, the perfect parable for an institution that had to earn its gravity with no geography to help.
“Buildings can come up. But if you don’t have a great lab inside that building, it will just remain a shell. What builds institutions is people.”
Desai’s central argument was straightforward and, in institutional life, rarely acted upon: the quality of a university is not its infrastructure but its faculty, and the job of leadership is to hire magnificently and then get out of the way. ‘A director is not a munshi,’ he said, using the Hindi term for a clerk — a word that landed with precision. ‘A director should actually trust. They will make mistakes. Be there to help them out so that mistakes are not repeated.’ He credited IIT Hyderabad’s rise to the early faculty who joined a godforsaken location and made it their home, and to the culture of autonomy that allowed them to dream without bureaucratic interference.
He then pivoted to what may have been the session’s most consequential provocation. Looking at the assembled researchers, he urged the Carbon Lab not to confine itself to ‘incremental’ problems but to select the ones that require thirty-year commitments — citing India’s fast breeder reactor programme as a model of sustained national scientific ambition. ‘To have small goals is a crime,’ he said, quoting the late APJ Abdul Kalam. ‘You have to think big. Celebrate every single success that you have.’ The room, full of people who had spent fifteen years on carbon materials, received this not as flattery but as a challenge to the next fifteen.
The Founder’s Reflection: Prof. Chandra Shekhar Sharma
Prof. Chandra Shekhar Sharma, founder of the Carbon Lab and the summit’s presiding intelligence, delivered the welcome address with a blend of emotion and rigour that set the tone for everything that followed. The lab, he recalled, ‘did not begin as a grand vision. It began with a simple idea: to ask meaningful questions and to build something that lasts.’ What they had in those early years of uncertainty was, he said, ‘belief, curiosity, and the courage to begin.’
The metrics he presented — 180+ publications, citations approaching 6,000, h-index of 43, 23 patents (six granted), one technology transfer, 21 PhD graduates including five now faculty at premier institutions — were recited not as trophies but as evidence that something living had been built. More significant, he suggested, was what could not be indexed: students who arrived with curiosity and left with confidence; alumni now ‘carrying the Carbon Lab spirit across the world.’
His forward declaration was the summit’s organising commitment: ‘If the first 15 years were about building a foundation, the next phase must be about scaling the impact.’ This meant, he insisted, designing research with translation in mind from the outset — not as an afterthought but as a founding principle. ‘Because ultimately the success of science lies not just in what we discover but in what we enable.’
Dr. R. Vijay (Director, ARCI): The Velocity Imperative
Dr. R. Vijay, Director of ARCI (International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials, Hyderabad) and the day’s Chief Guest, brought to the platform a practitioner’s impatience with the gap between laboratory discovery and market reality. ARCI’s mandate — translational research, scaling proof-of-concept to industry-ready technology — has made it the natural institutional counterpart of academic laboratories like Carbon Lab, and Vijay spoke from the vantage point of someone who has watched promising chemistries stall at the commercialisation threshold. His defining formulation: ‘Invention to innovation requires speed. If you don’t do it very fast, you will be lost or overtaken. To achieve that speed, the mantra is collaboration.’
He noted that the genealogical connection between ARCI and Carbon Lab — both operating under the broad intellectual umbrella of Prof. Ashok Sharma of IISc — gave the two institutions a shared language that makes genuine collaboration possible. This was not mere diplomatic sentiment; ARCI and Carbon Lab have co-executed projects on candle-soot carbon for lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors, scaling material synthesis to TRL level 4 with a functional prototype.
Dr. Tata Narasinga Rao (Vice Chancellor, SVU Tirupati): The Cooker Problem
Dr. Tata Narasinga Rao, former Director of ARCI and now Vice Chancellor of Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, offered a culinary metaphor that became the session’s most-quoted line. Addressing the structural vulnerability of India’s battery technology ecosystem — where materials science advances but manufacturing infrastructure remains import-dependent — he said: ‘You can cultivate your Basmati rice, but if you import the cooker and make biryani, it doesn’t make sense. You have to make the equipment in India as well.’
The metaphor crystallised an argument that would recur throughout the day: India’s research institutions have developed competitive competence in advanced materials synthesis but remain hostage to imported precision manufacturing equipment. Until that loop is closed — until the instruments required to scale from milligrams to tonnes are fabricated domestically — the sovereignty promised by materials research cannot be fully realised.
— Kalyan S Maramaganti
