E. Sreedharan
Given six months to rebuild a cyclone-wrecked bridge, he did it in 46 days, then built India's metros on time
Elattuvalapil Sreedharan was born in 1932 in a village in Palakkad district, Kerala, and took a civil engineering degree at Kakinada. He joined the Indian Railways engineering service in 1954 and spent his early years on track and bridge work. In December 1964 a cyclone swept away large sections of the Pamban Bridge that joins the island of Rameswaram to the mainland. The railway allowed six months to restore it; his superior cut that to three. Sreedharan, put in charge on the ground, had trains running again in 46 days.
He planned the Calcutta Metro, the first in India, in the 1970s, and was sent to Cochin Shipyard in 1979, where a first ship had been delayed for years; it was launched in 1981. In 1990 he was asked to build the Konkan Railway down the west coast, 760 kilometres through the Western Ghats with about 2,000 bridges and 90 tunnels, on a route earlier engineers had called impossible. It opened in 1998.
From 1997 he ran the Delhi Metro. Its first sections opened in 2002, ahead of schedule and within budget, in a city where public works were expected to do neither. His rule was that every day of delay had a cost, and he kept a countdown clock on the wall.
He retired from the Metro in 2011, aged 79, and was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour by France and awarded the Padma Vibhushan.