Transferable Expertise: Sir M. Visvesvaraya’s Career as Engineer-Turned-Economist in Late-Colonial India

Sir M. Visvesvaraya (1861-1962) was one of the most prominent engineers in late-colonial India, becoming the face of iconic irrigation projects, industrial enterprises, and technical institutions. But he is arguably best known as an evangelist for industrialization and economic planning. Following a stint as Dewan (prime minister) of princely Mysore in the 1910s, Visvesvaraya built a pan-Indian reputation as a thinker on economic development in the interwar years. This seminar explores the link between Visvesvaraya’s careers as a civil engineer and economic thinker. Drawing on archival research alongside an analysis of secondary sources and Visvesvaraya’s published writings, Aparajith Ramanath asks: how did his professional background as an engineer influence his views as a policymaker? And how did he convince the public that he possessed the expertise to pronounce on economic planning and national development? He shows that Visvesvaraya’s Victorian-era education and his work as a colonial public works engineer contributed to his belief in large-scale irrigation, commercial farming, and market solutions as the remedy for famine; his deep interest in the maintenance of statistical data; and his faith in the ability of technical experts to drive social and economic change. His foreign tours, undertaken at a time when engineering was emerging as a global profession with claims to universal applicability, convinced him that rapid industrialization, à la Japan and the West, was key to India’s progress; these travels also gave him the credentials to speak on development issues. Finally, the political context of interwar India and Visvesvaraya’s strong links with moderate nationalists and indigenous industrialists helped set the stage for his rise to prominence as an economic thinker.

Aparajith Ramnath is a historian of science, technology and business, and serves as Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. He is the author of two books: The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State, 1900-47 (OUP, 2017); and Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (1861–1962) (Penguin/Viking, 2024), which won the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize and the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (Books, Non-Fiction). In addition to his scholarly work, Aparajith has written for general audiences in publications such as Scroll, The Wire, The Hindu, FiftyTwo.in, and India’s World. Aparajith has been an International Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology, a Sangam House Writing Fellow, a Charles Wallace grant awardee, and a recipient of the Young Historian of Science Award (2018) from the Indian National Science Academy.