- Lived:
- 12 August 1919, Ahmedabad — 30 December 1971, Kovalam, near Thiruvananthapuram; the life ran on a shuttle between Ahmedabad's mill compounds and a fishing village on the Kerala coast
- Field:
- cosmic-ray physics; founder of India's space programme — and of more first-rank institutions than any other Indian of his century
- The Big Idea:
- A poor country has more reason to master advanced technology, not less — provided every rupee of it is aimed at the real problems of its people. He called it leapfrogging, and built India's space programme as the proof.
- In their words:
- "…no ambiguity of purpose." (from his best-known statement on why a hungry nation should go to space, late 1960s)
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who put India in space never built a rocket to beat anyone. He built it so a farmer in a village without a school could learn from the sky — and the programme he designed to that blueprint is now the one the world watches.