Date of Birth June 22, 1953

(c) Contributions to Education

Dr.Ashok Jhunjhunwala recognised that the key to strengthening India is imparting of wide-scale high-quality education to students around the country. Realising the crying need for demystification and providing a learning tool for fibre-optic communications, Dr.Jhunjhunwala and his colleagues developed a fibre-optic experimentor, which is now being used widely in engineering colleges throughout the country and in many colleges of the world including USA, Singapore and Australia. The product was awarded Best Product Prize at Elecrama’96 exhibition in Bombay in January 1996. Dr.Jhunjhunwala participated in the development of a similar educator kit on Digital Modulation Techniques and more recently that of a Computer Networking Educator. The latter aims to enable students to learn and implement various networking protocols in a variety of network topologies. All the three kits are being manufactured commercially today.

Dr.Jhunjhunwala has participated in and organised over the years a number of short-term courses for industry personnel, and teachers of engineering colleges, in the area of fibre-optics, wireless communications, computer networking and telematics. Besides offering such courses in several parts of India, he has also helped organise a couple of courses in Malaysia and a course in Vietnam under the sponsorship of International Centre for Science and High Technology (ICST). He played a key role in the formation of Joint Telematics Group (JTG) of the five IITs and IISC, about 14 years back. This group has been organising short-term courses every six months in the area of Telematics at different IITs and IISc, aimed specially at college teachers, but also involving a large number of industry participants. The group also developed a set of comprehensive video courses in this area.

Over the last decade, the demand for large-scale engineering education has resulted in the emergence of a large number of private engineering colleges, especially in South India. A large number of students are graduating from these colleges especially in the area of Telecommunication and IT. Unfortunately many of these students, even though they are bright and hardworking, have not received adequate training because of poor-quality teaching and inadequate infrastructure in many of these colleges. Recognising that the industry badly needs trained personnel, Dr.Jhunjhunwala took the initiative in establishing Usha Martin Academy of Communication Technologies (UACT), currently located at IITM. This joint venture between Usha Martin Industries and IITM is a finishing school to provide intensive training over a thousand engineers every year, on sponsorship from industry. Using Internet based education, the group aims to provide quality training to a much larger number of young graduates in future. A similar initiative has been taken up in setting up IITM – Analog Devices DSP Learning Center at IIT Madras. This center plans to train a large number of engineers in programming on Digital Signal Processing the engine of today’s telecom systems.