BRIDGING A FUTURE: D.K. Sharma, chief engineer of Mumbai’s Bandra-Worli Sea Link project being executed by Hindustan Construction Company (Pic by Satheesh Nair)

India remains oblivious to the accomplishment of this quiet engineer from Kodhwad, near Coimbatore, who used to study in the moonlight during his school days. Kodhwad had no electricity then, and the experience fuelled his burning ambition to reach the moon.

It wasn’t an easy dream to follow. Anna Dorai never made it to one of the world-renowned Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) — which were established in the 1950s and 1960s to create India’s nation-builders. He graduated from Coimbatore’s Government College of Technology; curiously, 95 per cent of the 200 engineers in Anna Dorai’s team came from similar, humble educational backgrounds.

This trend is visible across the country. As IITians migrated to the US in droves over the past couple of decades to seek better opportunities, bright young engineers from lesser-known institutes stepped up to fill the engineering talent void. While some picked up the gauntlet for the public sector — in critical areas such as defence, space research and scientific research — others went to steel plants and colliers, quietly contributing to companies’ bottom lines.

Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (from Madras Institute of Technology), the father of India’s indigenous missile programme, was one of them; R.N. Agarwal (Madras Institute of Technology), the man behind India’s first inter-continental ballistic missile, Agni, was another; E. Sreedharan (Government Engineering College, Kakinada), the man leading the landmark Metro rail project in Delhi, is another.

The recognition accorded to most of them was slight compared to their accomplishments. But that is changing. With infrastructure investment being hailed as the magic bullet to combat the country’s economic slowdown, there is growing appreciation for the thousands of engineers from ‘second-tier’ institutes who are building the roads, dams, ports, power plants and airports essential to India’s growth.

The line-up of projects headed by them is impressive: Mumbai’s new-age suburban trains; Mumbai’s Bandra-Worli Sea Link; the 4,620-MW power project at Mundra, Gujarat; and the auto engineering marvel, the ultra-low-cost Nano from Tata Motors.

Flashback: The Brain Drain
In the early 1990s, IITians were coming into the global limelight as information technology entrepreneurs. In his book The IITians, Sandipan Deb writes, “The success stories of people like Vinod Khosla, Suhas Patil, Kanwal Rekhi on the west coast (of the US), Gururaj ‘Desh’ Deshpande in Boston, and Vinod Gupta in Nebraska inspired hundreds of IIT alumni to dream entrepreneurial dreams.”

According to one estimate, between 1990 and 1998, around 10 per cent of all start-ups in Silicon Valley were led by Indians. Their talent captivated America, to the extent that even the immensely popular cartoon strip Dilbert created a character, Asok, a brilliant IIT graduate who professed that he was “mentally superior to most people on Earth”, and that he was trying “not to frighten ordinary people with any gratuitous displays of mental superiority” such as by no longer reheating tea “by holding it to my forehead and imagining fire”.

Also, civil engineering was losing its sheen in the 1990s. “Since I graduated during those times, one of my considerations was to go for a PhD, in order to beat the downturn,” says D.K. Sharma, chief engineer of Bandra-Worli Sea Link project being executed by Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), and a civil engineer from Zakir Hussain Institute of Engineering and Technology, Aligarh.

By then, economic liberalisation and the opening up of financial markets had created options for engineers to become investment bankers and fund managers. “IITians long stopped coming to the site (to execute civil projects),” says R. Shankar Raman, executive vice-president of finance at Larsen & Toubro.

The tide turned in 2000, when the dotcom boom crashed. “In the past three years, there is increased preference for civil engineering as the area of specialisation,” says K.G. Narayankhedkar, director of Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) in Mumbai.

That has been a boon for the country, with students and alumni of these so-called tier-II institutes working on major infrastructure projects. “The time has come when the second-and third-level (technology) institutes should be given more resources and attention,” says Anil Gupta, professor at IIM-Ahmedabad.