- Mr Sunil Hali, IIT Roorkee, the Indian media expert from New York who launched Radio Zindagi – the first coast to coast India-focused FM radio station and The Indian Eye newsweekly – considered the most hi-tech digital print publication
- Dr Udaya Dharmalingam, IIT Guwahati, the legendary designer of the Indian Rupee logo. As well as the main emblem of the IIT Alumni Council
- Mr Sunil Khullar, IIT Bombay, the visual communication expert who has evolved the overall unifying Brand strategy for all the initiatives of the IIT Alumni Movement, including development of the IIT Font
- Mr Sanjiv Goyal, IIT Delhi, the digital marketing expert, highly acclaimed angel investor and PanIIT USA Board Member from Silicon Valley
Our Bureau
New Delhi
IIT Alumni Council announces institutional strengthening of PanIIT Institute, an independent and autonomous partner alumni organization engaged in the development of an end-to-end deeptech Research Ecosystem in India – through the appointment of Life Fellows across all the key areas of Applied Science and Engineering – starting with Martech.
“We have learnt from the IT and BPO services sector that branding is an integral and critical part of the Country’s strategy to build a new sector like Research. Given that the government has done most of the heavy lifting and investment in terms of setting up outstanding academic institutions like the IITs and deserving scientific institutions such as the CSIR laboratories – the most critical push needed now is in Global Branding, perception creation and image management. And it is for this reason that we are announcing the first four Life Fellowships in the Research oriented PanIIT Institute in the area of Martech” said Ravi Sharma, President and Chief Volunteer of the IIT Alumni Council.
Dr Udaya Dharmalingham has a PhD in design from IIT Bombay and has spent the last few years as a faculty member at IIT Guwahati. He is best known as the designer of the Indian Rupee symbol. Dr Dharmalingham has helped visualize a very unique identity for the IIT Alumni Council and its partner organizations in terms of its emblem. ”I am indeed honored to be associated with the design of the IIT Alumni Council logo,” added Dr Udaya Dharmalingham
“My involvement was at two levels – first was to develop the overall branding strategy which helps evolve a unified look for all the Branding collateral across the IITs and IIT Alumni bodies whilst letting them retain their legacy logos and emblems. The second was to help evolve a font called the IIT Sans font which can be used to unify individual logos and emblems to create a cohesive-consistent identity not just from the parent IITs but individual entities like departments, alumni funds etc.” added Sunil Khullar, an IIT Bombay alumnus.
Mr Sanjiv Goyal has been actively associated with Martech in Silicon Valley for over fifteen years. He has been an active angel investor in the domain and one of his investee companies has done a lot of meaningful pro bono work for the IIT Alumni Movement using digital marketing. His work in the US for global companies like Kellogg, Heinz and Gallo Wines is considered path breaking and highly innovative by Silicon Valley standards. “I am humbled and honored with recognition and acceptance in the Life Fellowship of the PanIIT Institute. An IIT Alumni Council initiative. In the new normal, our world has shrunk and more connected than ever. I want to impact a billion lives by harnessing the power of innovation and entrepreneurship” added Sanjiv Goyal, an alumnus of IIT Delhi.
“In my own unique way, I have tried to disrupt both print and conventional media like radio to bring in a solid integration of the legacy platforms with a highly personalized online platform. Radio Zindagi is the first coast to coast India focused radio network. The Indian EYE newsweekly integrates personalized video in a mass distributed print file. We quickly built a combination of terrestrial, digital, social platforms along with apps on iOS, Android, Alexa and live streaming with Facebook to deliver functionality and reach which neither new media or old media could provide on its own” added Sunil Hali, a IIT Roorkee alumnus and Chairperson of the New York Chapter of the IIT Alumni Council.
IIT Alumni Council is the largest global body of alumni, students and academicians across all the twenty-three IITs and partnering Institutes of the India Innovation Network (I2Net). The IIT Alumni Council aspires to catalyze India’s technological renaissance. For this it catalyzes the creation of rapid response short term initiatives like the C19 Task Force and perpetual strategically planned initiatives like MegaFund, MegaIncubator and I2Net.
Through such initiatives, IIT Alumni Council intends to act as a network and as a bridge between various providers of knowledge, wealth, information, wisdom, ideas, expertise and entrepreneurship to promote appropriate technological solutions to known social challenges at the national level. As a demonstration, the six-month C19 Task Force set up in March 2020 conceived of large start-up initiatives like the NSCI Dome, COVID-19 Test Bus, MegaLab and MegaTx – by aggregating over 10 million hours of 20,000+ volunteers, all of it on a pro bono basis. The Council is continuing to rally the considerable resources – both financial and technological – of the global IIT alumni ecosystem to catalyze global scale interventions in the social sector.
Sunil Hali
Sunil Hali is a leading torch-bearer of India in the USAs since 1992. With an unmatched understanding and goodwill within Indians diaspora, he was featured in “Jewels of India in 2013” and “Roshni Media in 2014”. In last two decades, Sunil as head of Maya Consulting Group has emerged as a pioneer in South Asian media, marketing and management in the US. Publisher of Indian Express and Bhaskar in USA, Sunil has now launched his own newspaper with the name Indian Eye. He has been one of the leading guiding force behind Radio Zindagi since its launch from California in 2012, the first South Asian 24×7 radio network with a 1st of its kind deal with CBS Broadcasting. The radio is today the biggest media platform reaching 2.4 million South Asians across US in nine states: Silicon Valley to Big Apple to Capitol Hill. He also launched Global Punjab TV, the in-language Punjabi TV channel in 2013 with International quality content yet maintaining Punjabi ethos.
Sunil has produced mega events for brand India since 1999. This includes “Building India Excellence Awards” (2016); “Indian American Achiever Awards” (2007); “Zee Gold Bollywood Awards” (2000); “Zee TV Miss India Worldwide” (1999) and “Zee Gold Six Nation Cricket Championship” (2001). These events were presented to global Indian audience on television and as a live event at most prestigious venues across USA. He has since launched several Indian brands in the USA including Jet Airways, Make my trip, Godrej properties, etc.
A double Gold medalist in engineering, and a Graduate from IIT Roorkee, Sunil is the first Indian to be featured on the cover of The New York Times in 1995, Metro Section, for Mausam-Seasons, a 52-part Indo-American soap opera, his maiden venture in media and entertainment as a Producer. The New York Times, once again, favorably reviewed his second project as a Producer-The Music Festival of INDIA, the largest South Asian event ever held in the US to celebrate India’s 50th anniversary of Independence in 1997.
Udaya Kumar Dharmalingam
Udaya Kumar Dharmalingam is an Indian academic and designer noted for his design of the Indian rupee sign. His design was selected from among five short listed symbols. According to Kumar, the design is based on the Indian tricolor. As of December 2019, he is the Head of the Department of Design at IIT Guwahati, Assam. Kumar attended La Chatelaine junior college in Chennai. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in architecture (B.Arch.) from the School of Architecture and Planning (SAP) at Anna University, Chennai in 2001. Subsequently he received his master’s degree, an MDes in Visual Communication, from the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) of IIT Bombay in 2003. He also did his doctoral studies at the IDC, receiving his PhD in 2010. His areas of interest include graphic design, typography, type design and design research with special focus on Tamil typography (the subject of his doctoral research).He has also designed a Tamil font named “Parashakti” as a mini project at the IDC, under the guidance of Prof. G. V. Sreekumar, who is one of the few font experts in the country. During his MDes project he wrote and designed a book on Tamil typography, which is the first attempt at bringing such a subject to a Tamil audience. In this book, Kumar also created new Tamil terminology for many typographic terms where English words were used.
Kumar conceptualized the design for Rupee symbol for Indian currency. The symbol is designed using the Devanagari letter र ‘Ra’ and Roman capital letter ‘R’. The letters are derived from the word Rupiah in Hindi and Rupees in English, so the symbol is meaningful to both Indians and international users. The symbol also uses the Shiro Rekha, the horizontal top line which is unique to Indian Devanagari script. The two horizontal lines form an “equals” sign, which also evokes the tri-color Indian flag. Ambika Soni approved the new rupee symbol on 15 July 2010.
Sunil Khullar
Sunil Khullar has a BTech from IIT Bombay in Civil Engineering and a Master of Design in Design and Visual Communications from the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay. He has over thirty years work experience in Managing UX Design Process, software product design, Software Interface design, management of teams involved in various activities including pre-sales, client interaction; mentoring development and QA teams; functional and design documentation, product presentations, corporate presentations, customer support team building.
His areas of expertise include UX Design, User Experience Design, Interface design, Mobile App Design, Web App Design, Typedesign and digitization, Content Management System, Advertising management System, Digital Asset Management Systems, Non-Roman Scripts, Training, mentoring & team building
Sunil has been an active volunteer in the branding group of the IIT Alumni Council and has been instrumental in developing the overall unified rebranding strategy for the global media plan for revitalizing Brand IIT and the IIT Alumni bodies. He was part of the task force that evolved the design manual for the logos and various Brand Collateral in addition to leading the team that developed the IIT Sans Font.
Sanjiv Goyal
Sanjiv Goyal is the Chair of the IIT2020 Virtual Summit and a Board member of PanIIT USA, a non-profit alumni body in the US which is the organizer of the “Future is Now” Virtual Summit which is likely to be the largest virtual conference ever with over 20,000 attendees.
Sanjiv Goyal is a leading futurist driven to solve the world’s biggest business challenges through innovation and digital transformation. A forward-thinker, Sanjiv sees our inevitable horizon upon us – the integration of artificial intelligence and dynamic learning are becoming ever-present in today’s economic and social markets. Sanjiv propels businesses forward by providing proven strategies that promise long-term value in industries across the globe. As an entrepreneur, Sanjiv has started over eight companies in the areas of food tech, digital marketing and innovation, digital advertising, venture capital, education, and another emerging tech. Sanjiv is transforming the industry by inspiring CEOs, industry leaders, brands, and retailers alike to embrace new and innovative ways of solving long-standing challenges. Pioneering creative solutions, Sanjiv implements strategies to maximize ROI, promote team-based productivity, and cultivate new forms of consumer engagement.
With a Master’s Degree in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi, India, Executive education in Innovation from Stanford University, USA. Sanjiv is an advocate of the importance of artificial intelligence in our forward-driven world. Throughout his career, Sanjiv demystifies smart technologies and contributes profound efforts towards humanity’s emergence into its limitless possibilities.
Sanjiv is a well-known alumni leader. He has been awarded as Life Fellow in Martech by the PanIIT Institute.
Ravi Sharma, President of IIT Alumni Council
A distinguished Alumnus of IIT Roorkee, former Corporate leader and now full time Philanthropist – Ravi Sharma plays an active role in global revitalization and unification of IIT alumni across countries, across IITs and across age groups. He is the President and Chief Volunteer of the IIT Alumni Council and also leads the Institute Outreach & Branding initiatives. The main deliverables of the Council are facilitating alumni networking, fortifying Brand IIT and Brand India, catalyzing alumni participation in nation building and accelerating technological developments in key areas of our economy including start-ups, manufacturing and digital transformation. The Council has six operating missions – Alumni Networking, Research Mentorship, Social Venture funding, CSR Platform, a policy Thinktank and a Mega Incubator. The IIT Alumni Council is now actively engaged in solving the corona crisis and had formed the C19 Task Force with participation of over 20,000 alumni. The India Innovation Network includes Mumbai University and ICT Mumbai as institutional partners. C19 Task Force initiatives being taken forward include the 12.5 million tests per month MegaLab and the 50K liters harvested blood per month MegaTx.
