Ashok Jhunjhunwala


Ashok Jhunjhunwala is Institute Professor at Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Early life

Ashok Jhunjhunwala was born in Kolkata on 22 June 1953 in a Marwari family. His grandfather was a Gandhian and a close associate of Vinoba Bhave, working with Mahatma Gandhi.
He studied in St Lawrence High School in Kolkata in India, completing the Higher Secondary examination in 1970. He did his B.Tech degree from IIT Kanpur and MS and PhD from University of Maine, USA and was a faculty member at Washington State University. He began teaching at IIT Madras in 1981. In 2017– 18, he was Principal Advisor to Minister of Power, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, and Indian Railways, Government of India, New Delhi while on sabbatical from IIT Madras.

Contributions in technology innovation and adoption

In mid- 90s Professor Ashok Jhunjhunala led the group at IIT Madras to develop India's first wireless loop technology. The wireless brought down the cost of technology to affordable level and India's telephones shot up from less than 8 million in 1995 to almost a billion for a decade. He also worked to ensure that telephony and Internet reaches all the villages and is used to help education, healthcare, livelihood and financial inclusion.
From around 2004 as a Board member and Chairman of Technology, Committee of the State Bank of India and as a Board member of IDRBT he worked on getting all the banks obtaining digital computerization, like the banking transactions and made Internet banking possible. He was later Founder Chairman of Mobile payment Form of India, which brought in mobile banking and payments in India.
The solar DC systems designed by his group provide power to close to 50,000 homes today in difficult terrains such as mountains & deserts in Rajasthan, Manipur, Assam and Ladakh, where power grid is either absent or unreliable. This has played a major role in Indian Prime Minister's goal to deliver Electricity to every home by Dec 2018. The solar DC technology was awarded as Technology of the year in service of society in 2017 by IEEE spectrum.
As a Chairman of technology committee of SEBI and Committees of BIS-LVDC, IEEE-LDVC, White space, TAG, EM, Technology Advisory group for Electrical Mobility he has been leading technology and policy. He advises several technology companies and government agencies in India

EV Leader

Since 2016, Prof Jhunjhunwala is leading the efforts of bringing EVs in the country. He believes that youth can make an important contribution in maintaining the GDP of Automobile sector of India and must be promoted to come up with innovative ideas. He nurtures several startups and groups to develop new batteries and EV models.
His current passion is to make electric vehicles affordable in India, so that by 2030 Indian vehicles are fully electric. This would help India considerably reduce its import bill and make significant dent in city pollution. He has come up with various innovations such as significant enhancements in energy efficiencies of EVs by reducing size of batteries, battery swapping, using environment friendly zero – affluent recycling of spent Li-ion batteries. He believes that manpower is the strength of India and large number of engineers either employed on projects or by incubated companies working with him, develop a variety of innovative technologies, which one takes all the way to market.

Awards and Honours