15 September is celebrated as Engineers Day in India in memory of the legendary Engineer, Statesman and a great nation builder, Bharat Ratna, Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (Sir MV) who was born on this date in 1861 - as per the official records in his passport, some scholars say that he was born on 15th September 1860. The Government of India, in the year 1968, decided to befittingly celebrate the legendary Sir MV’s birth anniversary - 15 September, as the Engineers Day. Ever since, this day is celebrated as Engineers Day to honour and acknowledge the contributions of engineers in nation building, which Sir MV exemplified.
I had the honour to lead the team in Visvesvaraya Museum, Bangalore, when I was posted as its Director, to curate an exhibition on the life and works of Sir MV, entitled ‘Sir MV: The Legendary Nation Builder’. The year 2011 was special. It was the sesquicentennial year of birth of Sir MV and also the fiftieth year of his punyatithi. This exhibition was opened at the Visvesvaraya Museum in August 2011. It received an outstanding media coverage a glimpse of which can be seen in the images which accompany this post. Subsequently, on my transfer from Bangalore to Mumbai, I had the honour to obtain financial support from JSW for publishing a well-researched and a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue, which I had the honour to author and publish in the year 2015. This exhibition was befittingly featured in the prestigious India Science Congress in Mumbai in 2015. Here is a link for downloading the soft copy of this exhibition catalogue.
https://www.nehrusciencecentre.gov.in/pdf/Sir%20M%20Visvesvaraya%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Legendary%20Nation%20Builder.pdf
In the annals of human history very few people have had the honour of celebrating their own birth centenary; from amongst those few who have, there are no parallels to the veritable and a nation building life that Sir M Visvesvaraya lived for all of 100 plus years (died on 14th April 1962). His achievements as a nation builder both as an engineer and as an administrator, were truly incredible. Sir M Visvesvaraya, popularly referred to as Sir MV, was an engineer par excellence, statesman, visionary, a staunch votary for industrialization, proponent of education and women empowerment, a visionary who started the Mysore Bank - which later became the State Bank of India - the man who improved transportation, the father of planned economy etc. Sir MV has made enduring contributions, not just as a civil engineer with the British Government - two plus decades in the Maharashtra province - but also for the development of the state of Mysore, where he worked as the Chief Engineer and the Diwan of Mysore (1912-1918) and for his many other contributions in regions of the sub-continent including Karachi and Hyderabad, which are now in Pakistan and so also in Aden, which is now in Syria. Sir MVs works remain eternally etched in the annals of Indian history. There, are very few fields of thoughts and constructive endeavours, of technical advancement and nation building, in which Sir MV has not made a significant contribution in his nearly eight decades long service to the nation.
It is therefore no wonder that Sir MV was bestowed with the highest national honours, the Bharat Ratna, in the year 1955, which he shared with Pandit Nehru and Bhagwan Das.
Engineers are among those beautiful minds who harvest the applications of science for the benefit of human society, an exemplary evidence of which was demonstrated by Sir M Visvesvaraya. Interestingly ten years after the exhibition was opened in 2011 in Visvesvaraya Museum Bangalore, in the year 2021, suddenly I received invitations to deliver lectures on the life and works of Sir MV from different institutions – Department of Science and Technology, Government of India to deliver lecture on Sir MV during National Technology Day (May11, 2021) and another prestigious invitation to deliver the 17th VN Bedekar Memorial Lecture on 14 April 2021, whose abstract can be found here
http://www.vpmthane.org/VPM/Abstract_Shri.Khened_14.04.2021.pdf
In the same year (2021), I penned a detailed blogpost while commemorating Engineers Day whose link is given below.
https://khened.blogspot.com/2021/09/engineers-day-remembering-sir-mv.html
Here is a link to my talk delivered for DST on 11 May 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUNqr6Feds
Images : Courtesy Nehru Science Centre, Mumbai and Visvesvarya Museum, Bangalore
