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Careers 360
|April 2017
Dr. Vijay Kumar Saraswat, Member NITI Aayog and former Secretary Defence R&D who knows the pulse of India’s defence research shares the journey of his life with Harshita Das…
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Q. You have received Padmabhusan, Padmashri and so many national and international awards. Can you take us through your life’s journey?
A. Right from Day-1, some of the buzz words indoctrinated to me by my father were that one has to excel in education, acquire good education and that too with an emphasis on ethics, honesty, integrity, and self-reliance. The decision to get into engineering was based on my desire as a child to do something after I knew about the first satellite being launched and Yuri Gagarin went to space. I was in sixth or seventh grade. I had to decide after my B.Tech whether I should join a conventional job or go for higher education. I was interested in doing things related to Aerospace. That’s how I landed in Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. After that I had to decide whether I should join industry or a research laboratory. When DRDO team came to campus I got excited because they were working on missiles. I took up DRDO’s offer. I had decided that I will be a propulsion man and that’s how I chose this field of liquid propulsion.
Q. Under the guidance of Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, you developed DEVIL, the first liquid propulsion engine and worked on several projects. How was your experience?
This story is from the April 2017 edition of Careers 360.
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