Lalkaka’s leadership role

Died: Rustam Darub Lalkaka, 86, world renowned meteorologist who was a founder-director of M. N. Dastur and Company (MND), Calcutta, on November 9, 2014 in New York, USA after a cerebral hemorrhage and hospitalization for six months.
As director of the United Nations (UN) Fund for Science and Technology, managing a $100 million fund for UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organisation), Lalkaka’s work took him to Germany, Turkey, Thailand and finally to New York where he ultimately settled down. Among his responsibilities was sanctioning grant funds for promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship in developing nations. He was also associated with the United Nations Development Programme as director, science and technology.

Some colleagues from the UN, friends and family members spoke warmly of Lalkaka’s life after his last rites were performed by Ervad Pervaze Patel at the Fox Funeral Parlour in Forest Hills, New York. Dr Peshotan Kotval, a one-time Nagpurian like Lalkaka, reminded the listeners that today Indians and Indian companies have many engineering achievements in the international arena, which are recognized worldwide. But in the early 1960s when an Indian engineering outfit, MND built a plant in Germany, and Lalkaka had a leadership role in that achievement, it was a remarkable milestone. It is through beginnings such as these that India today has acquired international respect for its engineering knowhow.
Lalkaka was a consultant respected for his expertise on business and technology development strategies. He was also a pioneer in introducing the "Incubator System” in developing countries, while he was with UNIDO. This helped start-up entrepreneurs and industries with finance, know-how and a roadmap, during the first few years of their set-up.
Other than his work, it was his unbounded energy, his passion for travel and his interest in people and things around him that made him an extraordinary personality. He always had a fund of tales at his command and a natural gift for interaction. As a friend wrote to the family, "I write not to mourn his death but to celebrate a life, richly lived.”
"Rusi” as he was fondly known by family and friends studied at the S. F. S. School and the Institute of Science, Nagpur before he went to Stanford, USA to earn his Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Science degrees. He was in Calcutta for many years before joining the UN. During his international sojourns he had little opportunity to be a practising Zoroastrian in the sense of visiting an agiary and following rituals but he would visit the Nagpur agiary whenever he visited his hometown. He had pride in being a Parsi and expressed a wish for Zoroastrian funeral prayers when he knew the end was near.
Lalkaka’s wife Phiroza, 78, passed away on December 7, barely a month after him. He is survived by his son Dinyar, and sisters Shereen Xerxes Anklesaria and Dilnavaz Edul Bhagwagar.