Hot Seat

Building India

With IT maps, plans, awards and at least three phone-lines, one can imagine how busy Avinash Sankholkar, Head, IT and Research & Development at Larsen and Toubro would be. He speaks to Rishiraj Verma about his inspirations and goals.

“Per ardua ad astra” the Latin phrase that translates to “Through adversity to the stars” was the motto of Antonio D’Souza High School, Mumbai, where Avinash Sankholkar studied. He has always tried to follow that motto. He graduated from the school in 1968 and went to St Xavier’s College to study for a year.

After this, he chose to live his dream. “I ranked 54th in the western region in the joint entrance exam for the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). It was a good score even then,” he says, remembering the years of his education. He adds that he found many warm, friendly and intellectual people at IIT Bombay.

The inspiration for IIT

Sankholkar gives a little brief about his family before going into details about why he chose to become an engineer. His father is a retired government officer, mother and wife, both homemakers, and a daughter who is currently studying in Dr Bhanu-ben Nanavaty College of Pharmacy, Mumbai.

He explains that his was a joint family in his childhood days, which included an uncle who was a personnel manager, another who was a doctor and an aunt who taught French. “But I chose to follow the uncle who was an engineer,” he smiles, explaining further that he always thought of himself as afraid of medicine, suturing and blood.

According to him, the reason for aiming at IIT wasn’t his uncle alone. “My father used to hoist the Indian tricolour outside our 5th floor window on every Republic and Independence Day.”

He was brought up in an environment that he calls patriotic. He explains that there were framed pictures of Subhash Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru in their house. “I wanted to do something for the country too,” Sankholkar states.

He had then thought that harnessing nuclear energy would be the key to India’s success. And to ensure being a part of his dream of the nuclear revolution, he joined IIT.

“There was even an interview call from Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, but I didn’t get through,” he says.

The career graph—his prized possession

Sankholkar’s career journey has been more or less steady. “L&T was my first ever job 32 years back and even now, it is my only job,” he says. He joined the organisation through an IIT campus placement and has remained with it ever since.

He knew this company since his student days and he had realised then that the creation of infrastructure was equally, if not more important, than the creation of an atomic bomb.

“Since 1974, I have come across a mental stimulation similar to the one at IIT. It has been more than just a pleasant experience.” He says that he doesn’t regret the fact that he has been with the same company for over three decades.

According to him, what is more important than switching jobs is what one does at the job.

“I started off as a chemical engineer and my first most important project at L&T was something related to fertilisers, which would help the green revolution.”

He says he knew at that moment that he had started contributing to the dream of a developed India. “I had started giving to the big Indian machine as a small cog,” he reminiscences.

When IT beckoned

Incidentally, the times in Sankholkar’s life that he considers changing moments and achievements, seem to be fused together to the day when he joined the IT team at L&T in 1998.

The company wanted an ERP system and there were many doubts as to which one to choose. He was called upon, as help would be needed from the business side. “We evaluated various systems for about six months and finally settled on SAP with the help of Gartner,” he says.

Two years down the line, he had joined the IT team fulltime and was involved in the e-commerce initiative. “This was the time of the dotcom boom in India and we decided to go big on the portals,” he says.

Sankholkar’s team set up an e-commerce portal in six months flat and that was an achievement.

He was also involved in the creation of a knowledge management system—Knownet, which helped people from the organisation share their learnings and come up with newer ideas to better the standing of the company.

Favourite pastimes

Sankholkar isn’t all about work and IT. He says that he is more into static games such as bridge. “I first started playing bridge at IIT.” Chess also forms part of his favourite hobbies. “I also love listening to western pop music,” he points out.

However, Sankholkar does manage to carry his work to his hobbies. He has been a secretary to the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers and plans to work for them longer. He has also been on the chemical engineering curriculum reviewers’ panel for Bombay University.

Thus, it seems that, in some way or the other, he plans to fulfil his dream of a successful, educated and developed nation, by trying to bring changes to the existing format of studies for aspiring engineers.

A dream with a message

From work, to hobbies, to his dream, one thing remains common—the idea of a developed nation.

He follows President APJ Abdul Kalam’s vision of an India in 2020. “I think it will happen, I think we will develop very soon,” says an optimistic Sankholkar.

And what better a conclusion to this, than the man’s message to youngsters of the nation! “We need to build India and for this, we need engineers to stay back and contribute to the country, rather than creating infrastructure strategies for the already developed ones,” is the one sentence that he would like to share with every youngster who aspires to become an engineer.