In 2001, a year after Azim Premji and N R Narayana Murthy were named technology pioneers at the World Economic Forum, Vinay L Deshpande, the chairman and managing director of a small technology company in Bangalore, figured in the WEF technology pioneers’ list.

While the chairmen of Wipro and Infosys, now 63 and 62 years old respectively, are firmly entrenched as legends of Indian IT folklore, Deshpande, 62, considered by many as one of the founders of the Indian ‘Silicon Valley’, is yet to receive the kind of recognition his contemporaries command.

Best known for being the engineering face of the world’s first low cost computer — the much heralded but minimally adopted Simputer of 2002 — Deshpande, now heads Encore Software, a technology products and engineering company. He has been associated with technology in Bangalore since 1973 when he returned with a Masters’ Degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. “You can say we were among the pioneers of the export oriented technology business. The big software services companies were yet to come up. We had to educate the Department of Electronics about computers too,” says Deshpande.

Credited with the creation of hundreds of technology products including popular computer processors of the 1970s called the Action Stations — at one of India’s first technology companies, PSI Data Systems, which he co-founded in 1976, Deshpande has had a ‘so near but yet so far’ tryst with large-scale commercial success.

The Bangalore police who used donated Simputers extensively for traffic law enforcement five years ago finally decided to plump for Blackberries when it came down to buying hand held devices for traffic policemen.

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