A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, known around the world as A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, was an Indian aerospace engineer and science administrator who served as the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007.^[1] Born on 15 October 1931 in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, he spent four decades working mainly at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and he is popularly called the "Missile Man of India" for his work on ballistic missile and launch vehicle technology.^[1][3] He also played a key organisational, technical and political role in the Pokhran-II nuclear tests of May 1998.^[1]

He was elected President in 2002 with the support of both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Indian National Congress, and during his term he became widely known as the "People's President", the first scientist and the first bachelor to hold the office.^[1] India honoured him with the Padma Bhushan (1981), the Padma Vibhushan (1990) and the Bharat Ratna (1997), the country's highest civilian award.^[1][3] After leaving office he returned to teaching and to speaking with students, and his autobiography Wings of Fire (1999) remains one of the most widely read Indian books of its kind.^[1]

Kalam died on 27 July 2015, at the age of 83, after collapsing while giving a lecture at the Indian Institute of Management Shillong.^[1] On 15 October 2026 India marks his 95th birth anniversary, which is observed in the country as World Students' Day, and Tamil Nadu also commemorates the day as Youth Renaissance Day.^[2][5][7]

Kalam was born on 15 October 1931 into a Tamil Muslim family in Rameswaram, a pilgrimage town on Pamban Island in the Madras Presidency, now part of Tamil Nadu.^[1] His father, Jainulabdeen Marakayar, owned a boat that carried Hindu pilgrims between Rameswaram and Dhanushkodi and was the imam of a local mosque, and his mother, Ashiamma, was a housewife.^[1] He was the youngest of five siblings, and his family, who had once been wealthy traders and landowners, had lost most of their fortune by the 1920s after the opening of the Pamban Bridge ended their business, so that he grew up in poverty and delivered newspapers as a boy to help his family.^[1]

His father taught him to respect other faiths, and Kalam later recalled that in the evenings his father, the head priest of the Ramanathaswamy temple and a church priest would sit together over tea and discuss the issues of the island.^[1] At school he was an average student, but his teachers described him as bright and hardworking, with a keen interest in mathematics.^[1] He went to Schwartz Higher Secondary School in Ramanathapuram and graduated in physics from St. Joseph's College, Tiruchirappalli, in 1954.^[1]

In 1955 he moved to Madras to study aerospace engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology, where, as the story goes, the dean once threatened to withdraw his scholarship unless he finished a project in three days, and Kalam met the deadline.^[1] He narrowly missed his dream of becoming a fighter pilot, placing ninth in the Indian Air Force selection when only eight places were available.^[1] He graduated in 1960, and he has credited three teachers, Vikram Sarabhai, Satish Dhawan and Brahm Prakash, for shaping his idea of leadership.^[1]

After graduating, Kalam joined the Aeronautical Development Establishment of DRDO as a scientist and worked on the design of a small hovercraft, though he was not convinced that he had chosen the right job.^[1] He then joined the Indian National Committee for Space Research under Vikram Sarabhai and was recruited into ISRO, and in 1969 he became project director of India's first satellite launch vehicle, SLV-III, which successfully placed the Rohini satellite in near-earth orbit in July 1980.^[1][8] He later contributed to the SLV-3 and the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) efforts, both of which were successful.^[1]

In the 1970s he directed two classified projects, Project Devil and Project Valiant, which sought to develop ballistic missiles using the technology from the SLV programme.^[1] Their success led the government to start a larger programme, and with the support of the defence minister R. Venkataraman, Kalam was appointed chief executive of the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP), under which missiles including the Agni and the Prithvi were developed.^[1] The work earned him the nickname "Missile Man of India".^[1]

From July 1992 to December 1999 he served as the chief scientific adviser to the Prime Minister and the secretary of DRDO, and in this role he played a key organisational, political and technical role in the Pokhran-II nuclear tests of May 1998, serving as chief project coordinator together with Rajagopala Chidambaram.^[1] The tests made him the country's best-known nuclear scientist, though the director of the test site, K. Santhanam, later criticised a report on the thermonuclear device as incorrect, a claim that Kalam and Chidambaram rejected.^[1] In 1998 he also worked with the cardiologist Bhupathiraju Somaraju to develop a low-cost coronary stent, known as the Kalam-Raju stent, and in 2012 the pair designed a tablet computer for rural healthcare workers.^[1]

On 10 June 2002 the ruling National Democratic Alliance announced its intention to nominate Kalam as President, and he was also backed by opposition parties, including the Samajwadi Party and the Nationalist Congress Party.^[1] He won the election with 922,884 electoral votes against 107,366 for the freedom fighter Lakshmi Sahgal and was sworn in on 25 July 2002.^[1] As President he called for a Uniform Civil Code in 2003, imposed President's rule in Bihar in 2005 and described signing the Office of Profit bill as the toughest decision of his term, but he was also criticised for taking no decision on 20 of the 21 mercy petitions that reached him.^[1] In June 2007 he decided not to seek a second term, and in 2012 he again declined to contest the presidency.^[1]

After leaving office, he returned to teaching and became a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Management Shillong, an honorary professor at Anna University and an honorary fellow of the Indian Institute of Science, and in 2007 he became the first chancellor of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram.^[1] In 2011 he supported the Koodankulam nuclear power plant, which drew protests from some locals, and in May 2012 he launched the What Can I Give Movement for young people with a central theme of defeating corruption.^[1]

Kalam remained a bachelor all his life and was close to his elder siblings and their families, to whom he regularly sent small sums of money.^[1] He was known for his integrity and simple lifestyle, was a teetotaller and a vegetarian, enjoyed writing Tamil poetry, played the veena and listened to Carnatic devotional music every day.^[1] He never owned a television, and his personal possessions included a few books, a veena, clothing, a CD player and a laptop, and he left no will.^[1]

Faith was important to him. He was a practising Sunni Muslim who prayed daily and fasted during Ramadan, but he was also well versed in Hindu traditions, learnt Sanskrit and read the Bhagavad Gita.^[1] He considered the Hindu spiritual leader Pramukh Swami Maharaj his ultimate spiritual teacher after meeting him eight times over fourteen years, and he later wrote about this in his book Transcendence.^[1]

Among his books are India 2020 (1998), which set out a plan to make India a developed nation by 2020, Wings of Fire (1999), Ignited Minds (2002), Turning Points (2012) and Transcendence (2015).^[1] He set himself a target of meeting 100,000 students in the two years after he stepped down as scientific adviser in 1999, saying that he felt most comfortable with young people.^[1]

On 27 July 2015 Kalam travelled to Shillong to give a lecture titled "Creating a Livable Planet Earth" at IIM Shillong.^[1] He collapsed after about five minutes and was declared dead of cardiac arrest at 7:45 p.m. at Bethany Hospital.^[1] The government declared seven days of state mourning, and on 30 July 2015 he was buried at Pei Karumbu ground in Rameswaram with full state honours in the presence of more than 350,000 people.^[1] A memorial built by DRDO at the site was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July 2017.^[1]

His legacy continues to grow. His birthday is observed as World Students' Day in India, although the United Nations does not recognise the day, and in 2012 he ranked second in Outlook magazine's poll of the greatest Indians.^[1][7] Delhi's Aurangzeb Road was renamed Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road in August 2015, the missile test site on Wheeler Island was renamed Abdul Kalam Island, and a Himalayan peak, a bacterium found on the International Space Station, a plant species, a deep-sea fish (2022) and a tardigrade (2023) have all been named in his honour.^[1] Films such as I Am Kalam (2011) and Soorarai Pottru (2020) have featured him, and he is portrayed in the series Rocket Boys.^[1]