Engineering a Nation  (English, Hardcover, Ramnath Aparajith)

In his time, Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (1861-1962) achieved much fame as an engineer. He was the most famous Indian engineer of the twentieth century. And that was singularly unusual. Indians of his generation won worldwide fame as mystics, poets, and political leaders—Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi—rarely as technologists or engineers. And yet he was also much more. Many decades after his death, much in India bears the imprint of Visvesvaraya’s work—as civil engineer, of course, but also as public administrator, constitutional analyst, and economic thinker. Students in Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science and Mumbai’s Institute of Chemical Technology, cultivators in and around Pune, residents of Hyderabad whose drinking water is supplied by the lakes Himayat Sagar and Osman Sagar, picnickers in the Brindavan Gardens alongside the Krishnarajasagar dam near Mysuru and many others are in essence experiencing Visvesvaraya’s legacy. He was also a pioneering proponent of economic planning and Indian industrialization, which he believed was essential for national development. In Engineering a Nation, Aparajith Ramnath consults a variety of sources to paint a complete picture of someone who has come to be regarded as a national icon. Given that Visvesvaraya’s life mirrored the emergence of the modern Indian nation, a deep dive into his life is in many ways to understand many aspects of the emergence of the Indian nation itself.