Singapore/New Delhi: Metro India columnist and author Dinesh C Sharma has been named winner of the Computer History Museum Book Prize for his book, The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution.

The prize given by the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) was presented to Sharma at the annual meeting of the society in Singapore on Sunday. The award, which includes prize money of $1000, comes from an endowment established by the estate of Paul Baran, a computer technology pioneer known for his contributions to packet-switched networking.

The Computer History Museum Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding book in the history of computing broadly conceived, published during the prior three years. Sharma’s book, published by MIT Press in 2015, is a panoramic history of development of software and information technology in India spanning almost half a century.

The book is “well-grounded in sources and interviews” and “full of fascinating stories on the beginnings of computing in India”, the award committee noted. “Sharma does an excellent job contextualising this story within broader Indian history and the history of computing in the West,” the citation said. The prize committee for 2016 consisted of Joseph A November (University of South Carolina), Joy Rankin (American Academy of Arts and Sciences) and Christophe Lécuyer (University of Paris).