The Godrej group and friends, family and students of the late Professor C. V. Seshadri have initiated an endowment at IIT Bombay for an Annual Institute Distinguished Lecture in Chemical Engineering, in memory of Professor Seshadri. Mr. Jamshyd Godrej, CMD, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Co. Ltd., has very kindly initiated this corpus with a generous contribution through the Pirojsha Godrej Foundation.
About Professor C. V. Seshadri
The late Professor C. V. Seshadri (CVS) was a distinguished Chemical Engineer. He did his Ph.D. from the Carnegie Mellon University, USA, followed by a Research Associateship at MIT. He joined IIT Kanpur as a young Assistant Professor in 1965. While there, he wrote the famous best-selling text-book: C. V. Seshadri and S. V. Patankar, Elements of Fluid Mechanics, Prentice Hall of India, New Delhi, 1971.
CVS left IIT Kanpur in 1974 to join Kasturi Paper Food and Chemicals Ltd., Bangalore, where he set up India’s first fodder yeast plant. In 1976, he joined the Shri A. M. M. Murugappa Chettiar Research Center in Madras as the founder Director, an institute emphasizing appropriate technology, the forte of CVS. It was here that CVS really blossomed and helped develop several appropriate technologies, including that for Spirulina Algae.
For his efforts in this direction, CVS received the prestigious Jamnalal Bajaj award for S&T for rural development (1981). As Rajni Bakshi1 sums up, “CVS’s youthful zest and enormous energy made it easy to forget the linear dimension of this mortal frame. Yet this is all the sea snatched away. The man’s bequest remains, awaiting the nurturing care of fellow-travellers in this and other times.” CVS received enormous support and encouragement for his efforts from Mr. M. V. Murugappan, with whose vision the Research Center was set up.