Shouted ‘Quit India’ as a schoolboy; studied Milky way galaxy through Hindi poem: This Indian scientist, inspired by Gandhi, later built two of the world's most powerful radio telescopes

Built two of the world's most consequential radio telescopes using designs that no one had tried before, Govind Swarup spent nearly six decades at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research turning India into a name in global astronomy that the field could not ignore.

As India marks 80 years of independence on 15 August 2026, his is a story worth telling again. Not because it fits neatly into a celebration, but because it captures something specific about what India has been capable of when given the chance, and what it cost individuals to make that happen.

Also read: Independence Day 2026: Meet the ‘Edison of India’ who studied science from magazines and shocked the British with his inventions


Swarup was born on 23 March 1929 in Thakurdwara, a small town in Moradabad district in Uttar Pradesh, about 200 kilometres northeast of Delhi. He died on 7 September 2020, at the age of 91. In the years between, he built instruments that astronomers across the world still use today.

Govind Swarup and India's Independence Movement

The connection between Swarup and Indian independence was not just symbolic. In August 1942, as a schoolboy in Moradabad, he joined every student in his school in a procession shouting Quit India, in support of the movement Mahatma Gandhi had launched. He later recalled reading Gandhi's autobiography and articles, which he described as a deep source of inspiration.

Five years later, on the midnight of 14 to 15 August 1947, Swarup listened at Anand Bhavan in Allahabad to the radio relay of Jawaharlal Nehru's Tryst with Destiny speech as India attained independence. He was 18, studying science at what was then one of the country's finest universities, and the country he was about to spend his life building up had just become free.

Early Life and Education of Govind Swarup

Swarup grew up in a family rooted in the Moradabad region for generations. His great-grandfather had established a cotton spinning mill in Moradabad in 1907. His father built a cinema theatre in Delhi and owned a farm where Swarup spent his vacations.

After completing school in Moradabad, his mother wanted him to pursue engineering. His father, aware of his interests, sent him to Allahabad to study science instead.

At Allahabad University, one of India's oldest institutions, Swarup came under the influence of Professor K.S. Krishnan, who had been a research student of C.V. Raman and a co-author on the discovery paper of the Raman Effect. Krishnan mentored Swarup for years and set him on the path to radio astronomy. Swarup completed his MSc from Allahabad University in 1948.

After his MSc, he joined the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi, where Krishnan had been appointed as founding director. Krishnan asked the then 22-year-old Swarup to build an apparatus for observing electron spin resonance at 3 cm wavelength using war surplus radar equipment and whatever else was available locally. Swarup got it ready in 18 months.

How Govind Swarup Discovered Radio Astronomy

Two years into his time at the National Physical Laboratory, Krishnan returned from a radio sciences meeting in Sydney having heard about extraordinary new discoveries in radio astronomy being made by scientists at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia. At a colloquium where Krishnan described these developments, Swarup decided radio astronomy was where he needed to be.

Krishnan arranged a Colombo Plan fellowship for him. Swarup spent two years in Australia from 1953 to 1955, working with four different experimental groups led by some of the leading radio astronomers of the era. It was during this period that he developed the habits of improvisation and innovation under resource constraints that would define his entire career.

After Australia, Swarup moved to the United States, first to Fort Davis Observatory in Texas, where he made his first significant scientific discovery, and then to Stanford, where he completed his PhD under Ronald Bracewell. His thesis was on solar microwave emission. During his time at Stanford he was also appointed as an assistant professor.

He had offers from institutions across the United States after his PhD. He declined all of them. Homi Bhabha had made him an offer to return to India and build a radio astronomy programme at TIFR. Swarup accepted.

Ooty Radio Telescope: India's First World-Class Astronomy Instrument

Swarup arrived at TIFR in Bombay in April 1963 with his wife Bina and their two young children. Within years of joining, he had conceived the Ooty Radio Telescope, an instrument that required solving a problem no one had solved before on this scale.

Parabolic cylinders are far cheaper to build than parabolic dishes but can only rotate about a single axis. Tracking a celestial source normally requires rotation about two axes. The only way around this constraint is to make the rotation axis parallel to Earth's own axis, known as an equatorial mount. Swarup realised that the low latitude of South India made it geometrically possible to build such a cylinder along a hillside whose north-south slope matched the site's latitude. A survey found exactly that hill at Muthorai village on the outskirts of Udhagamandalam, known as Ooty, in the Nilgiri Mountains.

The result was a 530 metre long, 30 metre wide offset parabolic cylinder with a reflecting surface made of 1,100 stainless steel wires, built along the natural slope of the hill. Mechanical design was handled by Tata Consulting Engineers.

Building it in India in the 1960s meant sourcing or fabricating nearly everything locally. Even a standard coaxial cable connector was not available in the country at the time, and foreign exchange was too scarce to import it. Swarup had it developed locally from conceptual designs in published literature.

The first observations with the Ooty Radio Telescope were made on 18 February 1970. Shortly after commissioning, the main shaft broke. The team repaired it, added safety features, and the telescope has operated continuously since. It remains one of the largest steerable radio telescopes in the world.

Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope: India's Gift to Global Astronomy

In the early 1980s, at the urging of the then TIFR director B.V. Sreekantan, Swarup conceived a second and significantly more ambitious project. The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, built near Narayangaon about 80 kilometres north of Pune in Maharashtra, is an array of 30 fully steerable parabolic dish antennas, each 45 metres in diameter, spread across a region roughly 25 kilometres wide.

The central engineering challenge was transporting broadband signals from antennas tens of kilometres apart to a central correlator. The Very Large Array in the United States used waveguides, which would have been prohibitively expensive and impractical in India. A letter from an Australian colleague mentioning optical fibre as a possibility gave Swarup his answer. The fibre optic system for the GMRT was designed entirely in-house, and the order placed for the optical fibre was among the largest in India at the time.

To reduce antenna costs further, Swarup devised a concept he called SMART, for Stretched Mesh Attached to Rope Trusses. Wire ropes formed the basic parabolic shape. Wire mesh was stretched between them to form the reflective surface. This eliminated the need for heavy backup structure and cut costs dramatically.

All 30 antennas were fabricated on site, assembled on the ground, and winched up onto their concrete mounts by hand-operated winches. Scientific observations began by early 2000. The GMRT is today used by radio astronomers across the world and is widely credited with triggering a renaissance in low frequency radio astronomy.

Swarup's ashes are buried at the GMRT site, where a small memorial stands. At the internment, people from nearby villages came alongside scientists to pay their respects. They remembered how Swarup had worked with them through every step of the land acquisition process, decades before.

Govind Swarup's Legacy on Independence Day 2026

Beyond the telescopes, Swarup was the founder director of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics in Pune. He played a central role in establishing the Joint Astronomy Programme, a collaboration between research institutes in Bengaluru that has been running for more than 50 years. He contributed to the groundwork that eventually led to the creation of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, of which there are now nine across the country.

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991. His honours included the Padma Shri, the S.S. Bhatnagar Award, the TWAS Prize in Physics, the Grote Reber Medal, and the Herschel Medal.

Those who knew him remembered him as much for how he treated people as for what he built. Lab technicians recalled him teaching them the importance of precision. Graduate students recalled him appearing in the NCRA canteen in his eighties to ask about their work. A young astronomer who had collaborated with him on GMRT observations of Venus recalled how Swarup had helped him through a period of discouragement when he was ready to give up his PhD.

He remained mentally active until the end, working on a biographical paper for the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the days before his final hospitalisation. That paper was published posthumously.

The schoolboy who once marched through Moradabad shouting Quit India spent the rest of his life building something the country could keep.