Director of Research Centre Imarat (RCI) Dr Satheesh Reddy’s home in Banjara Hills may belie his humble beginning, but the moment he speaks, you know he still has the same passion to work for the betterment of the country as he did as a boy.
That is probably also what has earned him the Silver Medal from London’s Royal Aeronautical Society, making him the first Indian (from India) to get one in the Society’s century-long tradition of giving out medals. Dr Satheesh says, “This medal proves that the world is recognising India is capable of advanced aeronautical research.”
Dr Satheesh, who began working with the Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL) in 1986, specialising in navigational systems, had the opportunity to develop the navigational components for India’s first indigenous missile system, Prithvi. “That’s the right opportunity for a scientist to join, since we were doing everything from scratch,” he says.
Working day and night — without breaking for weekends at times — the team finally created a navigation system that was test ready. But Dr Satheesh remembers one big problem: it weighed about 50 kg, making it hard to transport. “I had to carry it from Hyderabad to Sriharikota, but I wasn’t able to take it on the train because it was so big! That same navigation system now weighs about 200 gm.”
A few years later, in 1988, Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam started the RCI, and Dr Satheesh began working under him. “When he used to come to the lab, he would first talk to the youngsters and then go to the seniors and talks about their plans,” he says of the late President.
In his 30 odd years at the RCI, Dr Satheesh grew as a scientist and leader, and landed his first job as project director to develop India’s first guided bomb in 2011. He says that building RCI into what it is now was extremely satisfactory, especially when he worked on the BRAHMOS missile system, a joint venture with Russia.
“We proposed our avionics, particularly our navigation system,” says Dr Satheesh, “And they were saying, ‘No, your system cannot work’. We had to put ours along with theirs in the first missile just to show them that it could work, and better too!”
After becoming the RCI’s director in 2013, he says none of it would have been possible if it wasn’t for his supportive family, friends and the teachers he had growing up in the village of Mahimaluru, Nellore. “S.L. Narasimham, my math teacher in school, was a real inspiration. We had not just a good student-teacher relationship, but also great respect for each other.” Friends in college too, while he did his B.Tech at JNTU — Anantapur, helped him develop a drive to always excel.
As the current scientific advisor to the defence minister of India, Dr Satheesh says that India can now start innovating ahead of the world: “We started as a very primitive research team, where we had nothing in our hands, to a stage now where we don’t have to import any avionics-based materials. We now need to concentrate on futuristic research for the coming decade.”
