Dwaipayan Banerjee will deliver a lecture on ‘Building the First Machine: TIFRAC and the Promise of Computing in Independent India’. It will be chaired by Ravi Sundaram. Prathama Banerjee would be the discussant.
ZOOM ID: 892 9620 4901 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
India produces world-class tech talent and Silicon Valley leaders, yet captures only a fraction of the global tech industry's profits, mostly by providing skilled but inexpensive labor for Western corporations. This talk traces the history behind that paradox: India's ambitious but thwarted drive to build a self-reliant computing industry from the 1950s to the 1980s. After independence, scientists and policymakers at institutions such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research saw computing as central to national sovereignty, and pursued it through the TIFRAC computer and the expulsion of IBM. These initiatives met Cold War politics, trade imbalances, US corporate monopolies, and the choices of a technocratic elite who favored profitable technical services over costly research and manufacturing. Technological independence, the talk argues, requires addressing political and social structures rooted in colonial legacies, and these same historical pathways continue to shape today's struggles over AI chips, data centers and technological sovereignty.
Dwaipayan Banerjee is Associate Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US. His work centers the lives and creative visions of technological practitioners in South Asia, challenging scholars to reorient how we understand the past and future of science, technology, and medicine. He is the author of Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi (Duke University Press), Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India (Cornell University Press, with Jacob Copeman) and Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India's Lost Technological Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2026).
Prathama Banerjee and Ravi Sundaram are Professors at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 23 October 2026, 8 pm IST, Zoom https://bit.ly/4AIqQlM
