Engineers Day: The story of M Visvesvaraya, India’s pioneering civil engineer

Having played a role in major public works projects across the nation, he later served as the 19th Dewan of Mysore and wrote two books on the Indian economy. Here is a look at his life and his legacy.

A government-issued stamp on the 100th birth anniversary of M Visvesvaraya. (Via Wikimedia Commons)

6 min readNew DelhiSep 15, 2023 03:54 PM IST First published on: Sep 15, 2023 at 03:11 PM IST

September 15 is marked as the birthday of Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (1861-1962), credited for his role as a civil engineer and administrator in colonial India.

Born on September 15, 1861, in the Muddenahalli village of Karnataka, Visvesvaraya completed his school education in his hometown and later on went to study Bachelor of Arts at the University of Madras. He then pursued a diploma in civil engineering at the College of Science in Pune. Having played a role in major public works projects across the nation, he later served as the 19th Dewan of Mysore and wrote two books on the Indian economy. Here is a look at his life and his legacy.

Early life

After completing his engineering from the Poona College of Science, Visvesvaraya accepted an offer to work as an Assistant Engineer in the Public Works Department (PWD) of the Government of Bombay. He was 22 at the time and one of his first projects was to construct a pipe syphon across one of Panjra river’s channels. On November 15, 1909, he joined the Mysore service as Chief Engineer, ultimately assuming the position of the 19th Dewan of Mysore.

However, he took voluntary retirement in 1918 because he did not agree with the proposal to set aside state jobs for the “non-brahmin” community. After his retirement, he presided as chairman or became a member of various committees including the Bombay Technical and Industrial Education Committee, Bombay University Committee for Promoting Chemical Industries and the Cauvery Canal Committee.

M Visvesvaraya’s significant works

Some of his significant works include the introduction of the block system of irrigation in the Deccan canals in 1899, solving the problem of the “muddy and discoloured” water in the city of Sukkur located on the banks of the Indus river and inventing automatic gates meant to regulate the flow of water in reservoirs, which is patented.

According to Vigyan Prasar, “The objective of the Block System of Irrigation was ‘to distribute the benefits of an irrigation work over a large number of villages and to concentrate the irrigation in each village within blocks of specified limits and in selected soils and situations'”. The Krishnaraja Sagar Dam in Karnataka was the first to install these gates in the 1920s.

He also travelled abroad a few times and sought to understand aspects of other countries’ systems. In Italy, he studied for two months the soil erosion problem and their irrigation and drainage works. While there, he also took a trip to the sewers of Milan, accompanied by the Chief Engineer responsible for the Milan Drainage Works and asked him some particularly “large questions” which the officer was confused about, since he thought that British officers would be responsible for all such “higher work”. To this, Visvesvaraya responded that Indians’ services were appreciated and utilised if they had the necessary qualifications and worked hard.

In a speech delivered on March 16, 1912, at Central College Bangalore, Visvesvaraya said: “As compared with Europe, our climate and traditions all pre-dispose us to a life of inaction and ease. We are influenced either by religious sentiment, class patriotism or belief in kismet, whereas the activities of Western nations rest on an economic basis. While they think and act in conformity with economic necessities, we expect to prosper without acquiring the scientific precision, the inventive faculty, the thoroughness, the discipline and restraints of modern civilisation.”

On another occasion, he said: “Progress on modern lines is a necessity. We cannot afford to ignore scientific discoveries which have almost vivified material nature. Past ideals were for past times. We must adopt ourselves to the everlasting conditions of existence or be content to be left behind in the race for material prosperity.”

Visvesvaraya pleaded for a “self-examination not moral or spiritual, but secular – that is, a survey and analysis of local conditions in India and a comparative study of the same” with those in other parts of the globe.

His books, “Reconstructing India” and “Planned Economy of India” were published in 1920 and 1934, respectively.

On Education

During his three-month visit to Japan in 1898, Visvesvaraya realised that education largely determines the health of an economy. In his, “Memoirs of Working Life”, which was published in 1951, he noted that while in Japan there were some 1.5 million girls in school, there were only over 400,000 of them in Indian schools, “notwithstanding the vastly greater population in our country”.

Visvesvaraya was instrumental in the setting up of the University of Mysore in July 1916, as he was the Dewan of Mysore at the time. He believed that the aim of an educational institution should be in line with the “state of the country’s civilisation and of its material prosperity”, and that the conditions inside a university should not be very different from the ones a student has to encounter in real life.

After taking a voluntary retirement from state service in 1918, he continued work including on the Mysore Iron and Steel Works and established the Sir Jayachamarajendra Occupational Institute in Bangalore in 1943, which was later renamed Sir Jayachamarajendra Polytechnic. This institute was meant to impart special training to technicians keeping in mind the impending industrial development of India.

This is an updated version of an earlier explainer, which you can read here.