In 1983, Dr Chandramouli Gaddamanugu joined a small team working on Akash, an ambitious effort to build India’s indigenous supersonic surface-to-air missile (SAM) system. The project was just an idea on paper, with only one other scientist on the team when he arrived. Over the next three decades, Chandramouli helped turn it into a complex air-defence system involving missiles, radars, launchers and control systems, while building the technologies and teams needed to make them work together.
Touching the skies
To understand what Chandramouli spent much of his working life building, it helps to look beyond the missile itself.
Akash is an air-defence weapon system designed to detect, track and destroy aerial threats. The missile is only one part of it. Radars detect and track targets; command and control systems process information and direct the response; launchers fire the missiles; and communications, mechanical, electrical and electronic systems have to work together for the network to function.
Building all of this indigenously was an enormous undertaking. Chandramouli joined the project as a young scientist, with Dr Prahlada Rama Rao as project director. He would eventually spend more than three decades watching the system evolve from an idea into an operational defence capability.
One of the toughest challenges was the missile’s integral ramjet propulsion system. The missile had to be boosted to about Mach 2.2 and then sustain supersonic speed for nearly 30 seconds.
For nearly 13 years, Chandramouli and his team worked through repeated design iterations and setbacks. Each attempt took months to manufacture and test.
“We faced several setbacks because this was the first time we were learning to design a surface-to-air missile system by ourselves. Each time, it took about eight months to make the liner, a specialised composite layer inside the missile’s propulsion and motor casings, and conduct the static test. If the results were positive, we proceeded with a flight test.”
The repeated failures began to affect the team’s confidence.
“If we didn’t succeed in the propulsion system, there was no future for the project,” Chandramouli recalls. “But every failure gave us something to work with. We had to regain our confidence through multiple successful small tests and then a full-fledged propulsion system flight.”
It was during this difficult phase that APJ Abdul Kalam, who was then heading five missile projects, including Akash, visited the team. He did not arrive with a technical solution. Instead, he asked about their problems, design reviews and the support they needed. Then he offered advice that had less to do with propulsion than with the people trying to build it.
“Keep a cool mind. Be patient. Listen.”
Kalam reminded the team that Akash could succeed only if specialists from different disciplines learnt to work together without allowing professional egos to get in the way.
“If you hurt their egos, then you cannot work in an integrated fashion,” Chandramouli remembers him saying.
The lesson stayed with him. Building Akash, he understood this was not simply about making a missile. It was about bringing people, technologies and systems together to make something that had never existed in India before.
From paper to flight
Before joining the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Chandramouli had worked in the asbestos-cement manufacturing industry as an engineer trainee. A graduate of REC Warangal, now NIT Warangal, he came across a Union Public Service Commission advertisement for scientific posts in DRDO and applied.
“When I joined the project, only one person was working, Dr Prahlada Rama Rao. He had been appointed the project director, and I was posted as a Scientist B. That’s how my journey started in Akash,” he recalls. “I found out later that the project was scheduled for a 14-year development cycle.”
There was no ready-made blueprint to follow.
“The project involved developing several technologies, designs and systems, including the missile, launcher, radar and control centre. Integrating all of them into a single weapon system required repeated iterations and testing,” Chandramouli says.
His own role extended across that system. As a mechanical engineer, he worked on missile hardware and ground systems, including launchers, and remained closely involved with the technicians and designers who turned drawings into hardware.
T Balakrishna Rao, who worked with Chandramouli from 1983 until his retirement as a senior technical officer, saw this first-hand. Though Rao specialised in electronics and Chandramouli in mechanical engineering, the two worked closely through years of flight trials.
“He used to interact with people right from the technician to the top man,” Rao recalls.
Rather than directing people from an office, Chandramouli would go to the shop floor himself, find out what was wrong and trace the problem back to the design if necessary.
“He used to come to the ground floor and check with the technician. If he found a problem, he would go to the designer, identify the problem, and arrange a meeting to solve it.”
For Rao, this was one of Chandramouli’s defining qualities.
“He used to look after so many ground systems also, like launchers.”
The work demanded long hours. Rao remembers the team working seven days a week, often from around 9am to 9pm and sometimes late into the night to prepare hardware for flight trials.
Then came the flight that changed the team’s confidence.
In 1994, after years of setbacks and redesigns, Chandramouli was the vehicle director for the first full-duration successful flight. He was responsible for the integration and testing of the missile, which had to withstand vibration, acceleration and shock while its propulsion system operated.
“I had to take a lot of precautions, from mounting each screw to every unit,” he says.
After extensive testing, the missile finally took flight — and worked.
“It was an extremely happy and satisfying moment. Along with me, all the other team members were overjoyed.”
The flight did not mean the project was finished. But it proved the team could move forward.
“We started the designs from paper. From there came drawings, manufacturing, assembly, testing and flight trials. It was a mind-boggling exercise for so many components.”
A team that worked as one
The success was never Chandramouli’s alone.
“Everybody was free to suggest, even to a senior. There was no egoistic environment. All of us worked like one person,” he says.
That approach mattered on a project involving specialists from different disciplines and organisations. Chandramouli wanted people to question decisions, raise problems and suggest alternatives regardless of hierarchy.
The teams stayed with the programme through years of testing and development. Their relationships also became part of Akash’s legacy. Several younger scientists who worked alongside Chandramouli eventually became project and programme directors themselves.
“I learned from Dr Kalam and Prahlada and all those things, and yet they also learn from me and others. So this is how it is, a continuing legacy of learning for a highly competitive defence project.”
The life behind the work
The demands of Akash did not stop at the laboratory door.
Chandramouli married Seeta in 1984, just as his journey with Akash was beginning. She was building her own career as an associate professor while also managing their home, children and extended family.
Flight trials could keep Chandramouli away for long periods. His return journeys to Hyderabad were often late, sometimes ending well past midnight.
“Most of his returning flights to Hyderabad were midnight and used to be sometimes very late, giving me sleepless nights,” Seeta recalls.
Yet she did not want the family’s worries to become another burden for him. “Even though he would be away from home for longer durations during flight trials, we never interrupted his work or disturbed him.”
She also had ambitions of her own. Despite securing top ranks in entrance examinations, including for an MTech programme in biotechnology, she says family responsibilities made it difficult to pursue further qualifications.
Chandramouli is quick to acknowledge what that support made possible. “Along with my journey, my wife also has contributed,” he says. “She has really taken care of the whole home front along with her and my son and daughter.”
He extends that acknowledgement to the families of the wider Akash team. “Their dedication and their hard work and commitment not to disturb us during all our very difficult times and also long number of days of absence... it is a wonderful contribution by the family members of our teams.”
Then, simply: “Without them, we would not have really done such a great job for the country.”
For Seeta, however, the scientist working on missiles was never quite the man people might imagine. “At home, one would never feel he is a scientist working on missiles to save our country. Rather, he is Mr Jovial. He is a very jovial person, a down-to-earth person, always seen with a calm and smiling face and never showed his work stress at any point of time.”
From project to capability
By 2009, production of Akash had begun. In 2015, the system was inducted into the Indian Army and Indian Air Force.
For Chandramouli, it marked the culmination of a journey that had begun with a handful of people and an idea on paper. The project had moved from drawings to manufacturing, from individual components to integrated systems and finally into operational service.
But its significance, he believes, goes beyond the missile itself. Akash helped build capabilities across laboratories, manufacturing organisations and industry, while creating a generation of scientists and engineers who would go on to lead other defence projects.
Many of those who worked alongside Chandramouli eventually became project and programme directors themselves, carrying forward what they had learnt on Akash.
That continuing chain of knowledge is one reason Chandramouli chose to document the programme in his book, The Unprecedented Success Story of the First Indigenous Supersonic Multi-Target Surface-to-Air Missile System, Akash, launched by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in 2026.
“Without ignoring anyone’s name or contribution, I wanted to write a book and tell the outside world that these people worked on this project and this is how they worked,” he says.
A shared recognition
In 2026, after Akash proved its mettle against the enemy forces during Operation Sindhoor, Chandramouli was honoured with the Padma Shri.
He turned to Seeta. They hugged each other and cried.
“We cried for some time because decades of hard work, not only mine but also my teams’, had been recognised with this award. Of course, the award comes with respect to a person, but it is actually representing the work of so many people,” he says.
The award may carry one name. Chandramouli sees the achievement differently.
Today, Akash represents far more to him than the project he joined in 1983. Its journey, from an idea on paper to an operational air-defence system, is also a story of indigenous capability built patiently over decades. “Making a surface-to-air missile system of this class, a supersonic, multiple-target-handling, automated air defence system, and demonstrating its capability in an intense battlefield like Operation Sindoor is a remarkable achievement by the country,” he says.
For Chandramouli, the legacy is not only that Akash works. It is that the people who built it passed their knowledge on, creating an ecosystem capable of taking the work further.
The missile may be what the world sees in the sky. Behind it are decades of drawings, testing, redesigned components, technicians on shop floors, engineers solving problems, scientists learning from one another and families waiting at home.
That, perhaps, is the larger story of Akash.