Vijay Bhatkar: The Engineer Behind India’s First Supercomputer

In the late 1980s, the United States refused to sell India a Cray supercomputer. Vijay Bhatkar had never even seen one in person. Three years later, his team built one anyway, and it beat most of the world’s machines.

Built From Being Denied One

SciTech0094

11 Oct 1946

Born, Akola District

Ph.D. from IIT Delhi, 1972

Mar 1988

Founds C-DAC

After the US denies India a Cray

Jul 1991

PARAM 8000 Completed

5 GFLOPS, world’s 2nd-fastest

2017–2023

Chancellor, Nalanda University

After chairing IIT Delhi, 2012–17

Padma Bhushan, 2015: Selected by PM Rajiv Gandhi, Bhatkar led PARAM despite never having seen a supercomputer before.

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Timeline

• 11 October 1946: Born in Muramba, Akola district, Maharashtra.
• 1972: Completes a Ph.D. in Engineering at IIT Delhi.
• March 1988: Founds and leads the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), after the US denies India a Cray supercomputer.
• July 1991: C-DAC completes PARAM 8000, India’s first supercomputer, in under three and a half years.
• 1998: Leads development of the PARAM 10000, C-DAC’s next-generation supercomputer.
• 2012–2017: Serves as Chairman of the Board of Governors, IIT Delhi.
• 2015: Receives the Padma Bhushan.
• 2017–2023: Serves as Chancellor of Nalanda University.

Must Know

• Vijay Bhatkar led the team that built PARAM 8000, India’s first supercomputer, completed in July 1991.
• He founded the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in March 1988. This came right after the United States refused to sell India a Cray supercomputer, citing technology-embargo concerns.
• Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi selected Bhatkar to lead the project. He accepted, despite never having seen a supercomputer in person.
• PARAM 8000 was benchmarked at 5 GFLOPS. At the time, this made it the second-fastest supercomputer in the world, at a fraction of a Cray machine’s cost.
• PARAM 8000 launched the PARAM series of supercomputers, which continues today, and was exported to countries including Germany and Russia.

Good to Know

• Bhatkar earned his early engineering degree in Nagpur, an M.E. from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1972.
• He later led development of the PARAM 10000 in 1998. In 2002, its successor, PARAM Padma, became India’s first supercomputer to cross the teraflop barrier.
• Under Bhatkar, C-DAC also helped develop ISCII, a character-encoding standard that let Indian-language scripts be used on computers.
• Beyond PARAM, Bhatkar has served as Chairman of IIT Delhi’s Board of Governors (2012–2017) and Chancellor of Nalanda University (2017–2023).
• He has received India’s Padma Shri (2000) and Padma Bhushan (2015), along with Maharashtra’s own Maharashtra Bhushan award (1999). As of 2026, he continues working on India’s National Supercomputing Mission, steering its move toward exascale computing.

Test Yourself

Please wait…

1. C-DAC was founded in 1988 to build an indigenous supercomputer after which country denied India a Cray supercomputer?

United States

United Kingdom

Soviet Union

Japan

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Great to Know

• PARAM’s descendants are still expanding India’s computing base today. See this companion question on PARAM Kanchenjunga, a modern supercomputer in the same lineage Bhatkar started.
• Being denied a technology outright, and choosing to build a working alternative in three years rather than negotiate for access, is an unusual response. It set a pattern India has repeated in other sectors since. A denied import became a reason to build domestic capability, not just a setback to work around.