PIB News Update: Former Atomic Energy Commission Chairman and Secretary to the Govt. of India, Dr. Sekhar Basu passed away this morning (24 September 2020) at a hospital in Kolkata. Dr. Basu was undergoing treatment for COVID-19.
Dr. Basu was Secretary to the Government of India, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) from October 2015 to September 2018. Prior to his assumption of charge as Secretary, DAE, he was holding the position of Director, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) from June 2012 to October 2015. Earlier he worked as Project Director of Nuclear Submarine Programme and later as the Chief Executive of the Nuclear Recycle Board in the same institute. Dr.Basu, a dynamic engineer of exceptional abilities, played major role in establishing India as a lead country in various domains of nuclear science and engineering.
Dr. Basu accelerated the pace of Nuclear Power deployment, Uranium Exploration and Mining, Healthcare and Mega science projects. He played a key role in obtaining government approvals for 10 Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) and Two Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs). This is a major boost towards increase of installed capacity of nuclear power stations.
Dr. Basu, born in 1952 at Muzaffarpur in Bihar, did his schooling from Ballygunge Government School, Kolkata and graduated in Mechanical Engineering from VJTI, University of Mumbai in 1974. After completion of one year of BARC Training School programme in Nuclear Science and Engineering, he took up the responsibility of the development of nuclear submarine propulsion plant and was responsible for achieving success in the same. Subsequently, he took up activities related to India’s Nuclear Recycle Plants. Under his leadership, the plant operations were streamlined and based on operational experience he took up a very major challenge of design & construction of Integrated Nuclear Recycle Plant, which is first of its kind in India. His untiring efforts in this field have brought perfection in technology and given major boost to the programme.
Dr. Basu is remembered as an extremely competent technologist with an ability to integrate multidisciplinary activities and develop multiple state of the art technology systems. He was awarded Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2014. One of the last projects in which he had taken keen interest was to develop the technology of cyclotron for medical isotope production.