A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Led the SLV-3 Team That Put Rohini Into Orbit in 1980, Headed India's Five-Missile Development Programme, and Won the 2002 Presidential Election With 89.58 Per Cent of the Electoral College Vote

The SLV-3 rocket put the Rohini satellite, RS-1, into orbit from Sriharikota on 18 July 1980, and ISRO says the flight made India the sixth member of the club of space-faring nations. Rashtrapati Bhavan’s official profile of A. P. J. Abdul Kalam names him as project director of that vehicle, India’s first indigenous satellite launcher.

Kalam went on to head the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme, which the Ministry of Defence says began in 1983 and was completed in March 2012. With the Department of Atomic Energy he worked on the Pokhran-II nuclear tests of May 1998, and in between he received the Bharat Ratna in 1997. On 25 July 2002 he took the oath as the 11th President of India. What follows takes his career in dated steps and marks the places where sources disagree.

A newspaper seller who trained as an aeronautical engineer

Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, is where Kalam was born on 15 October 1931, to Jainulabdeen and Ashiamma. Roddam Narasimha, a colleague who wrote his obituary in the journal Current Science, describes them as parents of modest means and says Kalam helped the household income by selling newspapers as a young boy. In 1950 he went to Tiruchirappalli, and in 1954 he took a BSc in physics at St Joseph’s College.

Physics was not for him, Narasimha writes, and jobs for physicists were scarce. So Kalam spent three years on aeronautical engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology and then trained on the shop floor at Hindustan Aeronautics in Bangalore. A pilot’s career was what he wanted, and he just missed selection by the Indian Air Force. Instead came a post at the Directorate of Technical Development and Production in Delhi, and three years later a posting to the Aeronautical Development Establishment in Bangalore.

At that establishment he designed and operated the country’s first ground effect machine, a hovercraft. Defence Minister V. K. Krishna Menon praised a flying prototype, and the project was shelved, a decision Narasimha calls inexplicable. M. G. K. Menon, then director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, noticed Kalam’s ability on a visit, and that led to Vikram Sarabhai hiring him as a rocket engineer at the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station near Thiruvananthapuram.

Thumba, NASA training and an old church full of rockets

Thumba’s space programme was still small, Narasimha recalls, and its assets, including Kalam and some sounding rockets (small rockets that carry instruments up to probe the atmosphere), sat in an old church building the Bishop of Trivandrum had handed over. Sarabhai’s committee is covered in the article on Vikram Sarabhai and the birth of Indian space research.

In 1963, according to Narasimha, Kalam went to the United States for six months of training in launching sounding rockets. NASA’s history newsletter lists three sites: Langley in Virginia, Goddard in Maryland and the Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island. Back home, the first sounding rocket went up from Thumba on 21 November 1963, the same newsletter records.

A painting at Wallops caught his eye: Tipu Sultan’s army firing rockets at the British. NASA’s newsletter quotes his autobiography: “I was happy to see an Indian glorified by NASA as a hero of warfare rocketry.” What British officers recorded of that rocket corps is in Tipu Sultan’s rocket corps as British officers recorded it.

SLV-3: the failure of 1979 and the orbit of 1980

Sarabhai died in 1971, and in 1972 Satish Dhawan took over a reorganised ISRO. ISRO describes the SLV-3 as an all-solid, four-stage vehicle weighing 17 tonnes and standing 22 metres tall, built to place payloads of about 40 kg in low Earth orbit. Kalam’s appointment to lead it surprised some people, Narasimha says, and members of the scientific community doubted both the project and Kalam’s suitability. Dhawan had seen enough of Kalam to conclude that he delivered what he promised. Narasimha’s obituary calls Kalam both “project manager” and “project director” of the SLV-3; the Rashtrapati Bhavan profile says project director.

ISRO says the first experimental flight, in August 1979, was only partially successful. Narasimha describes what followed: Kalam wanted to resign, Dhawan persuaded him to stay and faced the press himself, and in a long meeting on the causes of the failure Kalam formally took responsibility. Dhawan closed the meeting by saying, “I am going to put Kalam in orbit!”

A second flight, on 18 July 1980, placed Rohini in orbit, and this time Dhawan asked Kalam to speak to the press. ISRO lists two more SLV-3 launches, in May 1981 and April 1983, each carrying a Rohini satellite with remote sensing instruments. Engineers came to see the 1979 failure as a first step to success, Narasimha adds, and what later became known as the “ISRO culture” was born in the project.

Kalam then became director of ISRO’s launch vehicles. Rashtrapati Bhavan’s profile credits him with the evolution of ISRO’s launch vehicle programme, particularly the PSLV configuration, the rocket family that carried 104 satellites on one flight in February 2017.

Five missiles in one programme, 1983 to 2012

DRDO, the Defence Research and Development Organisation, sought Kalam from ISRO to head its laboratory in Hyderabad. Dhawan agreed reluctantly, Narasimha writes, and with encouragement from Defence Minister R. Venkataraman, Kalam and the Scientific Adviser V. S. Arunachalam planned a “quiver” of five missiles.

On 27 February 2008 the Ministry of Defence told the Rajya Sabha that the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme had been launched in 1983 and was headed by Kalam. A Lok Sabha reply of 13 August 2012 from Defence Minister A. K. Antony said it had been sanctioned to develop Prithvi, Trishul, Akash, Nag and a technology demonstrator for the Agni missile, and gave the results. Prithvi had been inducted, Akash was in production and induction, and Nag’s carrier vehicle had undergone a cross-country trial. Agni’s re-entry demonstrator was completed successfully and its technology was used for the Agni series. Trishul ended as a technology demonstrator, which the reply attributes to delays in new technology and a change in the armed forces’ requirements.

CSIS Missile Threat records the first Agni demonstrator flight as 22 May 1989, after two cancelled launch attempts. A solid booster from the SLV-3 formed its first stage, and a modified Prithvi body its upper stage. In 1992 Kalam became Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister and head of DRDO as Secretary of the Department of Defence Research and Development, a post he held until December 1999 according to the Rashtrapati Bhavan profile. By then the media were calling him the Missile Man, Narasimha notes.

Day to day, Narasimha recalls, Kalam declined a spacious director’s bungalow at the Hyderabad laboratory and took a room in the guest house. Around him he built a national network of scientists who could help with any problem.

Early flights are where the sources differ. Narasimha writes that the first flights of both Prithvi and Agni failed, that Prithvi was fixed and flew successfully a few weeks later, and that Agni took a little longer. CSIS lists the 22 May 1989 Agni demonstrator flight as a success.

Pokhran-II and the argument over its largest device

From July 1992 to December 1999, the Rashtrapati Bhavan profile says, Kalam led the weaponisation of strategic missile systems and the Pokhran-II tests, in collaboration with the Department of Atomic Energy. At the press conference on 17 May 1998 he was introduced as Secretary of the Department of Defence Research and Development. Asked when the scientists were told to go ahead with the tests, he answered, “T[est] minus 30 days,” according to the transcript published by the Acronym Institute.

Speaking in 2011 to probationers at the National Academy of Direct Taxes in Nagpur, as PTI reported, Kalam said that Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao had asked him in May 1996 to prepare for a nuclear test and to share the details with Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The tests came in May 1998, under Vajpayee. Yields of the devices, and the lower estimates from seismologists, are set out in the article on Pokhran in 1974 and 1998.

One dispute involves the largest device. K. Santhanam, a former defence scientist who had represented DRDO’s team at Pokhran-II, said in August 2009 that the thermonuclear test’s yield was much lower than claimed. R. Chidambaram, then Principal Scientific Adviser, told The Hindu that anyone questioning the yield should back the charge with scientific evidence, and cited post-test radioactivity measurements from which BARC had calculated a yield of 50 kilotons, give or take 10.

Cabinet rank, Technology Vision 2020 and the books

Kalam was Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, with the rank of Cabinet minister, from November 1999 to November 2001, the Rashtrapati Bhavan profile says. As chairman of the Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council he led 500 experts in producing Technology Vision 2020. Narasimha sat on the project group; it framed projects in 17 areas and produced 25 reports, he says, and the summary became the book India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium, written by Kalam with Y. S. Rajan. From November 2001 Kalam was professor of technology and societal transformation at Anna University in Chennai.

His autobiography, Wings of Fire, written with Arun Tiwari, was published by Universities Press in Hyderabad in 1999. Honours from the state were the Padma Bhushan in 1981, the Padma Vibhushan in 1990 and the Bharat Ratna in 1997. In April 2009, NASA’s history newsletter reported, he became the first Asian to receive the Hoover Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Also in 2009, Narasimha adds, he won the von Karman Wings Award at the California Institute of Technology and gave the cash prize to Caltech for an annual Kalam Prize for its best master’s student.

Critics existed too, Narasimha records. At almost every stage of Kalam’s career some people doubted his abilities, and an early-1980s CV listed the projects he had delivered but no publications, which left some academy councils unsure how to judge him. Dhawan, asked for his view at one such discussion, said, “The old man [C. V. Raman] would have taken him.” Kalam was elected.

Five years at Rashtrapati Bhavan

Counting in the July 2002 presidential election ended on 18 July. According to The Tribune, Kalam received the votes of 4,152 electors with a value of 922,884, against 459 electors and a value of 107,366 for Lakshmi Sahgal. Its figure for his share was 89.58 per cent, which matches those two values (922,884 of 1,030,250). Kalam’s term ran from 25 July 2002 to 25 July 2007.

Kalam’s farewell address of 24 July 2007 gives his own tally. He said he had met more than fifteen lakh (1.5 million) young people and more than 6,000 farmers who visited the gardens of Rashtrapati Bhavan. A schoolgirl from Darwa village in Haryana asked him on 22 May 2006 why India could not become a developed nation before 2020, he said, and he promised to take her question to the highest institution of the nation. He described a rural-development model called PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas), a complex covering 65 villages and about 3 lakh people near Thanjavur, and said the country needed 7,000 such complexes. At the Pan African Parliament in Johannesburg on 16 September 2004 he proposed a satellite and fibre network linking 53 African countries, at an estimated cost of US$100 million. Three experiences with the armed forces made his list: a visit to the Army’s Kumar position on the Siachen Glacier at 17,000 feet, an underwater trip in the submarine INS Sindhurakshak, and a flight in a Sukhoi-30 fighter in which he experienced 2.5 g.

Two decisions of those years went to the courts or back to Parliament. On the night of 22 May 2005 the Union Cabinet recommended dissolving the newly elected Bihar assembly before it had met. Kalam was visiting Moscow, and the Supreme Court’s judgment records that the fax reached him at 1.52 am IST on 23 May and that his approval came back at 3.50 am. By its judgment of 24 January 2006 the Court held the proclamation unconstitutional but declined to restore the assembly, because elections were already under way. Kalam’s press secretary S. M. Khan said later, in a talk reported by PTI, that Kalam felt he should have rejected the Cabinet’s decision and had considered resigning, and that he decided against it because it would have raised constitutional problems.

In the second case, Kalam sent the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Amendment Bill, which concerns offices of profit held by legislators, back to Parliament for reconsideration. Parliament passed it again without changes, and The Tribune reported that he gave his assent on 18 August 2006.

27 July 2015 and what followed

Kalam died as he had just begun to address students at the Indian Institute of Management in Shillong, Narasimha records. That evening the Ministry of Home Affairs announced that he had died at Bethany Hospital, Shillong, at 1945 hours, and declared state mourning from 27 July to 2 August 2015. He was 83.

Burial took place at Pei Karumbu in Rameswaram on 30 July 2015, with full military honours and a 21-gun salute, the Assam Tribune reported. Its headline called him the People’s President and the Missile Man.

On 26 July 2017 the Prime Minister’s Office announced that Narendra Modi would open a memorial at the burial site the next day, and described it as designed and built by DRDO.