September 15 is a memorable day in the annals of the engineering fraternity in the country in general and of 'The Institution of Engineers (India) in particular as on this day 147 years ago, Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, the towering personality in the history of Indian engineering, was born.

Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya- The Great scientist of India

Honours While he was Diwan of Mysore, Visvesvarayya was knighted by the British for his myriad contributions to the public good. After India attained independence, Sir M. Visvesvarayya was given the nation's highest honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1955.

The Knight Commander Of The Indian Empire medal The Bharat Ratna medal

Sir M.V. was honoured with honorary membership of London Institution of Civil Engineers C.I.E. (Companion of Indian Empire); was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire etc,.

He was born in 1861 to a Sanskrit scholar Srinivasa Sastry and hiswife Venkachamma in Chikkaballapur.

After completing his early education in Chikkaballapur,he came to Bangalore for higher education. This period was fraught with hardship as he lost his father at the age of 15. Finances were strained, and there was a time when his mother failed to dispatch the fees money in time for an exam.

The young Visvesvaraya showed his resilience when he walked 55 kilometers to his hometown and somehow managed to get enough money.He then worked as a tutor to earn his way through college.

His beginnings were humble

Bharata Ratna Sir M. Visvesvaraya, was without doubt one of the most influential makers of modern India. He was a rare combination of intellect, integrity, discipline, culture and vision who will continue to inspire young professionals, centuries after his time.

The Engineer On completing his BA in Central College, Bangalore, he moved

to Pune to obtain an engineering degree from the College of Science (Now Government College of Engineering).

He emerged in 1883 ranked first in L.C.E (equivalent to todays BE degree) and went on to become one of the finest Civil Engineers of his time. He devised innovative techniques that were well ahead of his time.

One of his earliest contributions was the Block System of Irrigation designed to optimize, control and evenly distribute water supply to agricultural lands over a large number of villages.

The supply was rotated within blocks in each village to curtail misuse and waterlogging. This system, devised in 1899, is still used in Deccan Canals.

The Engineer Another early innovation was the collector well that he

implemented in Sukkur in Sindh province (present day Pakistan).

The project had multiple challenges the area was hot and arid, and they had to manage with minimum funding. An initial plan to pump water from river Sindhu to a hill nearby, filter it and supply the water to the town through pipes had been adopted by the municipality. However they did not have enough money for the filters.

Visveswaraya solved this ingeniously by digging wells in the river bed itself close to the river bank to obtain spring water through percolation. Thus filtering was achieved without having to install filters.

To increase the supply of water, a tunnel was driven from the bottom of the well under the flowing river. This was a technique rarely seen in those days, but is now standard textbook material under the heading Collector Wells.

The Engineer Most notably, he designed and later patented the Automated

Floodgates, which permit flood water to enter a reservoir without the water level exceeding the full reservoir level, thereby reducing the risk of submerging surrounding land.

The gates are automatic because they open and close at the rise and fall of water in the reservoir. This was the first time that thought was given to using reservoirs for flood control, not just irrigation and power generation.

Visvesvaraya used 48 cast iron automated gates at the Krishnarjasagar Dam, incidentally manufactured at the Bhadravathi Iron and Steel Works, a factory that he established.

Having established his credentials as the ablest of engineers, he went on to design water supply schemes for a number of towns in Bombay Presidency, Hyderabad and later as Chief Engineer of Mysore State.

The Statesman When it came to large scale engineering projects, Sir MV was known to think

beyond engineering. He would take up these projects only if he was convinced that it was feasible economically, and that it served a social purpose.

As Dewan of Mysore State, he was instrumental in galvanizing the state into progress. He established a number of rural industries and set up basic education for small shop owners in the fields of book-keeping and commerce.

Agricultural schools were opened to help with modern agricultural practices that reduced farmers overdependence on rain and good luck. A number of industrial workshops and training institutes were set up. Public libraries were established.

The Kannada Sahitya Parishat was formed, and many books on science were published in Kannada. The University College of Engineering (now known as University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering) and Maharanis College for Women came into being.

In fact, he established the Mysore University, as until then, all the colleges in Mysore State were under the Madras University. Interestingly, he had a tough fight on his hands to achieve this. His clinching argument was If Australia and Canada could have universities of their own for a population of less than a million, cannot Mysore with a population of not less than 6 million have a University of its own?

The Statesman Pandit Nehru was well aware of Visvesvarayas extraordinary abilities

both as engineer and statesman. In fact, economist Vinod Vyasulu highlights the legacy that Nehru inherited from Visvesvaraya, comparing his achievements in the princely state of Mysore to those of Nehru on a larger canvas fifty years later.

Nehru had keenly read Visvesvarayas proposals for nation building that the latter had submitted to the Congress members of Bombay legislature in 1936.

As President of the Indian Economic Association, and member of the Planning Commission, Visvesvarayas abilities were utilized towards nation building. He presided over the first session of the Indian Science Congress in 1923, and the Indian Economic Conference a year later.

His 1934 book, Planned Economy for India talks about the importance of estimating national income and achieving a society with a minimum level education, healthcare and opportunities for productive work. And he saw Industrialization as a means to achieve this.

Achievements and Efforts To this end, he established the Bhadravati Iron and Steel

Works, The Sandal Oil Factory, the Soap Factory, the Metals Factory, the Chrome Tanning Factory.

He was also associated with the Tata Group of companies, helping them in the management Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO).

He stared the Bank of Mysore (Now State Bank of Mysore) and The Mysore Chamber of Commerce. He provided a list of 36 industries to be established in the country in industrial engineering and applied chemistry.

A very noteworthy aspect of Sir MVs professional dedication is that he would go to great lengths to gain firsthand knowledge. In 1925, when the Bhadravati Iron factory was in danger of being shut down due to dismal performance, he toured Sweden, England, America and Germany, most times at his own cost, to understand the iron manufacturing process firsthand.

Engineers Day He used the knowledge to modernize the plant, reorganize

departments, and make their heads accountable. This led to steady improvement in output and profits, and soon the Works became a national asset. Legend has it that when on tour on official business, Sir MV carried a set of candles bought with his personal money, and used them for personal work like reading etc in the night after he was finished with official work. This may or may not be true, but it indicates the high reputation he had for personal integrity.

This is a very brief glimpse into the life and works of this extraordinary man. There are innumerable other ways in which he has shaped modern industrialized India, and no profile can fully chronicle the far reaching and lasting nature of his contributions. At the end of this reading if one is left with the feeling, Wow, One man did all this?, then the chroniclers mission is accomplished.

As a tribute to his genius, not only as an engineer but as an administrator, statesman and planner, the Institution of Engineers (India) celebrates 15th September, his birthday, every year as Engineers Day. The Mysore centre of the Institution has even a Navaratri approach to the celebration by sponsoring technical lectures and other programmes over nine days leading up to his birthday.

He once said:

"Remember, your work may be only to sweep a railway crossing, but it is your duty to keep it so clean that no other crossing in the world is as clean as yours."

Prafulla Chandra Roy Founder of Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals, India's first pharmaceutical company.

Praful laChandraRoyTheGreatScientist of India

Life Sketch Prafulla Chandra was born on August 2, 1861 in Raruli-

Katipara, a village now in the Khulna district of Bangladesh.

Educated in Calcutta, he inherited his love for literature from his parents especially Harish Chandra, his erudite father and friend.

He was much influenced by reformers and nationalists like Keshab Chandra Sen and Surendranath Banerji who taught him in school and college.

At that time chemistry was a compulsory subject in the first arts course (FA). Prafulla Chandra studied it in Presidency College since his own college, Metropolitan Institution (now Vidyasagar College), did not have the facilities.

The chemistry lectures of Alexander Pedler fascinated him - 'I began almost unconsciously to be attracted to this branch of science'.

Education In 1881, he won the Gilchrist Scholarship in 1882 and

proceeded to study science at Edinburgh University.

Alexander Crum Brown - a distinguished chemist, a linguist and a man of vast erudition - became his favourite teacher and guide. After completing B. Sc in 1885, he became a D. Sc in inorganic chemistry in 1887 working on double sulphates

In-between he found time to write critical patriotic articles like 'India Before and After Mutiny' and 'Essay on India'. He won the Hope Prize, became the Vice President of the University Chemical Society and continued his research work for one more year before returning home in August 1888. The Edinburgh experience made him 'passionately fond of chemistry '.

Discoveries The pioneering work by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray

in the early twentieth century in Kolkata was responsible for the great turn of events in chemistry in the Indian subcontinent.

The discovery of a stable mercurous nitrite composed of two relatively unstable ions, unfolding of the interesting chemistry of hypo nitrite ion, synthesis of a large number of organic sulphur compounds, coordination chemistry of heavy transition metal ions, iridium, platinum and gold are some of the notable contributions of Prafulla Chandra Ray.

He established the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works in 1902 to manufacture mineral acids and pharmaceuticals through his own earnings and this forms the earliest entrepreneurial endeavour of Research and Development in the country.

Other Interests A lover of literature, history and

biography, one who read half-a-dozen languages,

Prafulla Chandra claimed that he 'became a chemist almost by mistake'. In practice he became the initiator of chemical research in India and the all-inspiring guru of the first research school of chemistry in the country.

He is the author of A History of Hindu Chemistry from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century (1902).

He published the first volume of his autobiography Life and Experience of a Bengali Chemist in 1932, and dedicated it to the youth of India.

A History of Hindu Chemistry

He became a celebrated historian of antiquarian chemistry, a champion of chemical industry and much more. Yet he remained a symbol of plain living.

In Gandhiji's words, "it is difficult to believe that the man in simple Indian dress wearing simpler manners could possibly be the great scientist and professor'.

The scientist and professor was, in the same breath, a patriot and a social worker given to ceaseless service, an ascetic and a philanthropist who gave away his all in charity. A bachelor, a small man in feeble health, a confirmed dyspeptic, his was a case of the mind far overtaking the body.

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122nd birthday of Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (7th Nov. 2010)

(7 Nov. 1888 21 Nov. 1970) In 1928, C.V. Raman and K.S. Krishnan observed that if monochromatic light is passed through a transparent medium, the scattering light is accompanied by other colours. He was the first Indian scholar who studied wholly in India received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930. He was the first scientist to explain the blue color of the sea. He was elected as FRS in 1924. The discovery was later termed as "Raman Effect". He was awarded with Bharat Ratna in 1954.

The 1930 Physics Nobel prize winner Sir C.V. Raman explains a point to a group of scientists

Sir C V Raman delivering the convocation address on 3rd Convocation (30 July 1966) at IIT Madras

Sir C.V. Raman (second left) with other Nobel Laureates of 1930, (back row) M. Svedberg, M. Euller, M. Dahlein, Hans Fischer, (front row) Sir Clair Lewis, S. Lagerlof, Karl Landsteiner and M. Barany, after the presentation of the prizes in Stockholm.

Dr. C.V. Raman, Nobel Laureate, opening the

Centenary Science Symposium, Madras University, Chennai, 1957 (Inset : The Historic Senate House completed in 1873