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.

Trials And Tribulations
But it has not been smooth sailing for many. Take for instance, Subrato Trivedi of Adani Power, who heads the Mundra power project. Trivedi feels his academic background (Ravishankar College, Raipur), has no correlation to his corporate performance. “Acceptability on the shop floor depends on delivery and communication,” he says. However, he recollects that in his earlier stint with power major NTPC, the R&D functions were often given to IITians, while the shop floor functions went to the other engineers. An NTPC official denies this: “We recruit close to 1,000 engineers every year. All engineers — regardless of whether they are from IIT or not — join as trainees and are subsequently assigned roles based on their individual capabilities.”

Then there are companies such as Nasdaq-listed PTC, which provides product lifecycle management, content management and publishing solutions. Today, its 1,000-member R&D team of Indian engineers has a blend of IITians and non-IITians. “We recruit engineers with at least 2-3 years of experience,” says Taposh Chakravarty, general manager for HR at PTC. “As a policy, we don’t discriminate on salaries or designations based on academic backgrounds.”

CORE PROJECTS: (clockwise from top left) Jaipur-Delhi NH8, Mundra Port, Mumbai suburban trains and Agni III missile — were all built by non-IITians (Pic by Tribhuwan Sharma, Subhabrata Das & AP)

But for every Sharma, Trivedi or Anna Dorai who are heading prestigious projects, there are several others who are caught in a rut. For want of getting that crucial ‘break’, they have got stuck in smaller organisations. Says Trivedi, “I agree, the initial years are a struggle. But then, higher energy levels and perseverance helps you catch up.” It is sometimes all about getting that one chance to prove one’s mettle. And this, Sharma says, “could be a matter of luck”.

Coming Up To Speed
Today, close to 600,000 engineers pass out of 1,600-odd engineering colleges every year, of which close to 7,000 graduate are from 13 IITs, according to Ma Foi Randstad, an HR consultant. While there is a move on to increase the number of IITs to 16, a new trend is emerging: around 60-odd engineering colleges are being treated on a par with IIT. Says K. Pandia Rajan, managing director of Ma Foi Randstad, “Broad banding is the new trend, where the tier-I and tier-II institutes are being treated on a par (with IITs)”. Graduates from these institutes — such as National Institutes of Technology, UDCT (University Institute of Chemical Technology), Mumbai and Punjab Engineering — are being given same designations and ‘almost’ same salaries as their IITs peers by companies.

This new-found recognition is a result of quality work being done by their alumni, which has made companies confident enough to return to these institutes time and again.

Take for instance, Siemens’ S. Keshava Prasad, 48, an electrical engineer from University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE), Bangalore. If you are one of those who commute by the new high-tech trains in Mumbai’s suburbs, you have Prasad to thank. When Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation (MRVC) contracted with Siemens in 2004, its list of to-dos was rather long and daunting: move the western and central suburban railway system from dated technology (DC) to state-of-the-art (AC) allowing more trains to ply per hour; accommodate four times more people in a train than European standards; introduce fresh air in cars; regenerate energy; provide flood-proof under-slung equipment (thanks to constant flooding of tracks); and so on.

But Prasad and his team of 40 engineers executed the Rs 925-crore project successfully in 18 months. Says Prasad, “Unlike other projects, where the core technology is usually provided by the head office in Germany, most items in this project were developed by the Indian team.” Naturally, these days, when Prasad travels by train and finds lesser Mumbaiites on the footboard, he can’t resist a smile.

THE IIT TAG: (From top) Arun Sarin (ex-CEO Vodafone); Raghuram Rajan (economic advi- sor to the Prime Minister) ; Vinod Khosla (one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems); Rajat Gupta (McKinsey)

Many other engineering institutes are also sprucing up their act. Kongu Engineering College (KEC) from Erode, Tamil Nadu, for instance, has had its students applying for patents. “Seven of them have been awarded till date,” says M.A. Veluswami, dean for R&D of the institute. “One of the projects is about a solar panel, which would face the sun at all times, helping extract more solar power.” K. Prasanna, a student of KEC has a healthy respect for IITians and says, “I knew that if I studied with the same spirit as an IITian, I would do as well.”

Then, VJTI’s Rameez Pojee and four of his classmates have invented a way of moving the cursor of a computer with a finger sans keyboard or a mouse. And no, there is no touch screen involved either. Says Pojee, “The idea was to develop a machine-user interface that implements finger gesture recognition using simple computer vision techniques.”

However, one area where IITs clearly score higher is entrepreneurship, thanks to incubation cells and linkages to financing from venture capitalists. “There is a clear correlation between the amount of exposure students have to entrepreneurship while on campus, and their tendency to take up entrepreneurial careers — either on their own, or by working in a start-up,” says Laura Parkin, executive director of NEN & Wadhwani Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation founded by Romesh Wadhwani, an IT entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, California.

The Middle-Class Dream
Today, more than 300,000 students battle for nearly 7,000 IIT seats every year. The scale of the competition drives some to even take coaching classes 2-5 years before the entrance exam.

Some wait even after they fail in the first attempt. According to estimates, 50 per cent of students who make it to IIT manage it at their second or third attempt. Says Praveen Tyagi, founder of IITian’s PACE, a Mumbai-based coaching class for IIT entrance examination (JEE), “I know of many students who with a little more effort could have done it in their second attempt.” He adds that while they manage to convince some to do an encore, others move on.

Akhil Jindal, the 38-year-old director of Welspun Group, is one such. When he found his JEE scores would not allow him to get into mechanical, electronics or electrical engineering, he was hugely disappointed: “So much effort had gone into it I felt like having missed the bus.” Jindal, however, did not take another shot at IIT. Instead, he enrolled into Zakir Hussain Institute of Technology, specialising in electrical engineering. In the process, he also met his future wife.

Subsequently, he got into Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore, where the fact that some of his batchmates were JEE top scorers made him uneasy. “First, there was admiration for them,” he says. “Very soon I realised it is individual hard work and common sense that matters. This gave me a lot of confidence to perform under pressure.” IIM-A’s Gupta asks, “Will a few marks in JEE scores make such a tremendous difference in quality?”

DREAM ON WHEELS: Girish Wagh gave shape to Ratan Tata’s dream of making the Rs 1 lakh car for masses (Pic by Subhabrata Das)

But reputations built over the years are hard to dislodge. There are many who feel IIT graduates are a notch above others. “I don’t think there is much difference between a student who makes it to an IIT and another who misses JEE cut off by a whisker, but definitely there is a difference when both pass out,” says B.K. Mathur, IIT Kharagpur’s chairperson for placements. “It is the value addition that a student at IIT gets that sets him apart from the rest.”

With all this talent, why is our country’s physical infrastructure in such bad shape? Anuj Puri, chairman and country head of real estate consultant Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj, pins the blame on the government, and not the lack of good quality engineers. At the same time, he believes India would have been better off if IITians had not migrated to US in such huge numbers or branched off to non-engineering jobs. “Obviously, their presence could have made a difference to the country immensely,” he says.

While there is no saying what could have been, what is certain is that India, in these times of uncertainty, is banking in no uncertain terms on the skills of its engineers, IITians and non-IITians alike, to help execute world-class infrastructure projects, and lift the country out of a deepening sense of gloom.

For inspiration, they need look no farther than words from John F. Kennedy:
Let us go forth to lead the land we love,
Asking His blessing and His help,
But knowing that here on Earth,
God’s work must truly be our own

'muthukumar dot kailasam at abp dot in'