Industrial psychology was a neglected branch of applied psychology in India.

After the
Second World War and particularly after Independence, it got special recognition from Indian
psychologists. With the establishment of various universities, centre and institutes in India,
research in industrial psychology has been accelerated after 1950's. In 1970's, the division of
industrial psychology was renamed as the division of industrial and organizational
psychology. An eminent industrial and organizational psychologist of India Professor
Durganand Sinha (1971) has made a valuable survey of the important topics of research in
industrial psychology in India.

Psychology, as an independent subject at post graduate level, was first started in India in 1916
in Calcutta University under the direction of Dr N.N. Sengupta, who received his doctoral
training under Hugo Munsterberg at Harvard. The undergraduate course at Calcutta
University was added in 1920. Calcutta University Section of Applied Psychology was the
only pre-war attempt at setting up institutional facilities for conducting research on guidance
and mental testing problems in the field of education. In 1947, the last year of the British
occupation of India, only three universities out of the twenty-one had independent
departments of psychology. Since 1947, however, university teaching in psychology has
expanded. Today, industrial psychology forms part of the training programmes of every
Indian university offering psychology courses.

Industrial/Organizational Psychology in India: Psychology was quite established as an

empirical science in the West, both in the USA and in Europe, by 1950. However, in India it
was still a part of the discipline of philosophy. Organizational psychology was even slower to
start since the economy was primarily driven by the public sector, which lacked the
motivation to be profitable and efficient. Industrial psychology made its appearance in India
in the post-independence (1947) period. The reason was the priority accorded to
industrialization by the government of the newly independent country. The rapid
industrialization of the 1950s and 1960s created the need for better understanding of the
psychology at the workplace. Areas that received attention at this time were job attitudes,
work incentives, absenteeism, and job satisfaction (Ganguli, 1961). A survey by Sinha (1972)
showed that while only 25 studies were done in the field of industrial psychology until
independence in 1947, as many as 508 studies were done from 1948 to 1969. The early 1960s
saw the beginning of formal management education in India with the setting up of two Indian
Institutes of Management, at Ahmedabad, and Calcutta, which provided the impetus for
organizational psychology. The latest survey found the focus of I/O psychology shifting to
motivation, leadership, and human performance (Kanungo & Misra, 2004).