Chandrayaan-3 was launched to the Moon on July 14, 2023. The day before, a team of ISRO scientists visited the Venkateswara temple at Tirupati. They took a miniature model of the spacecraft with them. ISRO’s chairman, S. Somanath, prayed at the Sri Chengalamma temple.
Patel’s Birthday
On October 31, 2013, Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, laid the foundation stone of the Statue of Unity, a statue of Vallabhbhai Patel. It was the 138th anniversary of Patel’s birth.
On October 31, 2018, Modi, now Prime Minister, inaugurated it. At 182 meters, it is the tallest statue in the world.
Level 5
The Capability Maturity Model of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute rates how mature a company’s software processes are. Level 5 is the highest. In January 2003, Business Today counted 78 companies in the world assessed at Level 5. Fifty-four of them were Indian companies or the Indian operations of multinationals.
In December 2001, CIOL reported that Wipro Technologies was the first company in the world to reach Level 5 of the People CMM, a version of the model for managing people.
The Mysore Campus
Infosys trains its new engineering graduates at its Global Education Center in Mysore before they start work. The center can train close to 15,000 trainees at the same time. By 2012, more than 100,000 graduates had completed its Foundation Programme there. Infosys calls it the world’s largest corporate education program.
Not Six Sigma
The dabbawalas of Mumbai carry lunch boxes from homes to offices. They are often said to hold a Six Sigma rating. The claim goes back to a Forbes article of 1998. Ragunath Medge, the head of their association, told Forbes they made a mistake “almost never, maybe once every two months.” The reporter turned this into one mistake in 8 million deliveries.
The author, Subrata Chakravarty, later said: “Forbes never certified the dabbawalas as being a six-sigma organization.” He added: “six-sigma is a process, not a statistic.”
In 2010, Harvard Business School added a case study on them, The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery, Every Time.
One Voter in the Forest
Mahant Bharatdas was the only voter at Banej, about 20 kilometers inside the Gir forest in Gujarat. From 2007, a full polling station was set up for him at each election, with a presiding officer, two polling officers, a peon and an armed policeman. An election official cited the guideline that “no voter should travel more than two kms from his residence to reach a polling booth.”
The Longest Constitution
The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution of any sovereign country. At its adoption, it had 395 articles in 22 parts and 8 schedules. Its framing took 2 years, 11 months and 18 days.
The original is handwritten. Its calligrapher was Prem Behari Narain Raizada, and artists from Shantiniketan decorated each page.
The Deming Prize
In 1998, Sundaram Clayton became the first Indian company to win the Deming Prize for total quality management. In 2010, Business Standard reported: “India has the largest number of companies, outside of Japan, that have been recognised for excellence in quality.”
Failure-Based Design
In 2019, the lander of Chandrayaan-2 crashed on the Moon. Before Chandrayaan-3 was launched in July 2023, ISRO’s chairman, S. Somanath, explained what had changed. “Instead of a success-based design, we are doing a failure-based design in Chandrayaan-3,” he said. “What all can fail, and how to protect it? This is the approach we have taken.”
Chandrayaan-3 landed near the Moon’s south pole on August 23, 2023.
The Golden Peacock
In September 2008, Satyam Computer Services won a Golden Peacock award for corporate governance, in the category of risk management and compliance. It had won a Golden Peacock governance award before, in 2002.
On January 7, 2009, its chairman, Ramalinga Raju, admitted in a letter to the board that the accounts showed “inflated (non-existent) cash and bank balances” of 50.40 billion rupees. The award was withdrawn.