Meet a woman powering the Agni, Tessy Thomas

While India was celebrating the launch of Agni-V, Tessy Thomas smiled quietly and contentedly.

In the male bastion of India’s defence arena, she was one woman who not only worked her way up the Defence Research and Development Organisation, but also came to be one of the project heads of India’s most successful defence projects, the Agni missiles.

“From last 20 years I was working for the Agni programme and now I have taken up as a project director,” she says.

Now known as India’s agni putri, she is a homemaker who also leads a team of 400 scientists at the DRDO where she has been working for past 21 years.

After a B Tech from Thrissur Engineering College, Tessy, a native of Allapuzha, Kerala joined the DRDO where she headed the Agni-IV project, a milestone that led up to the test-firing of the Agni-V on 19 April.

An expert in solid system propellants, she is credited with developing the technology for re-entry vehicle system.

But how does the 48-year-old mother manage work and home? Her son Tejas very proudly answers that, “I feel she has managed it really well. Whenever work needed her she was  there, whenever I needed her she was there.”

When asked about how she feels amongst the sea of men at DRDO, she says, “Science is science. It doesn’t have any gender.”

This is what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said about her in January this year: Ms Thomas is an example of a “woman making her mark in a traditionally male bastion and decisively breaking the glass ceiling”.