V C Kulandaiswamy

V C Kulandaiswamy (born 14 July 1929) is an Indian academician and renowned author. He is currently the Chairman of Tamil Virtual University [http://www.tamilvu.org/coresite/html/cwchreng.htm His profile at the Tamil VU site] ] . He has received the Sahitya Akademi Award for a Tamil literary work, Padma Shri (1992) and Padma Bhushan (2002) for distinguished service in the fields of education and science. [http://www.chennaionline.com/chennaicitizen/2000/kulandai.asp Multi-faceted personality] on Chennai Online.] He has also received an honorary doctorate from Jaffna University (Sri Lanka) in 1980 in recognition of his contributions to Tamil literature. He served as the Vice-Chancellor of Anna University (Chennai) from 1981 to 1990 and of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) (New Delhi) from 1990 to 1994. He was born in Vangalampalayam village in Karur district.

He has authored six volumes of poems and seven of prose essays which earned him the prestigious Thiruvalluvar Award by Tamil Nadu government in 1999. He also holds the post of Vice-Chairman of the Institute of Asian Sudies, Chennai, an institute working on an encyclopaedia which would throw light on the more than 75,000 palm leaf manuscripts in Tamil which have found homes in museums in India, Europe and South-East Asia.

He obtained his Master of Technology degree from IIT Kharagpur and obtained a Doctorate in hydrology and water resources from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (United States). He is widely acclaimed in hydrologic literature as the propounder of "Kulandaiswamy model", a mathematical model for the rainfall-runoff relationship based on a general equation developed by him. Kulandaiswamy was a member of the UNESCO planning group (1978) for the preparation of the second six-year plan (1981-86) of the International Hydraulic Programme (IHP). He has authored more than 60 research reports and papers in the field of hydrology.

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