M. Visvesvaraya

Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya was born in 1861 in Muddenahalli, a village in the Kingdom of Mysore, to a Sanskrit scholar with little money. He walked to Bangalore for his schooling, paid his way by tutoring, took a degree at Madras and then a civil engineering diploma at Poona in 1883, coming top of his year.

He joined the Bombay public works department and spent two decades on water: pipelines, drainage and irrigation. At the Khadakvasla reservoir near Poona he designed automatic gates that lifted themselves when the water rose, storing more without risk to the dam, and patented them. In 1908 the river Musi burst through Hyderabad and killed thousands. He was called in to design the drainage and flood protection that kept the city safe afterwards.

In 1909 he became Chief Engineer of Mysore and in 1912 its Dewan, or chief minister. He built the Krishna Raja Sagara dam across the Cauvery, then the largest reservoir in Asia, and used its water to irrigate the plains. He founded an iron works, a soap factory, a bank, a university and an engineering college. He resigned in 1918.

He kept working into his nineties and was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1955. He died in 1962 aged 100. His birthday, 15 September, is Engineers\' Day in India.