Sir M.V.: Remembering the quintessential planner, engineer of Karnataka Premium

“He wasn’t keen to take the job,” says Arun Pai, the co-founder of Bangalore Walks, who recently delivered a lecture on this eminent statesman and nation builder on September 15 to mark Engineer’s Day. Visvesvaraya finally agreed, but he had a condition: the state should focus on industrialisation and also invest in technical education. “We have the most engineering colleges in this country today, probably in the world, but there was not a single one in 1909,” Pai recounts at the illustrated talk at The Bangalore Room, Indiranagar.

The year was 1909. Sir M. Visvesvaraya, who had been working in the Bombay Presidency, had finally agreed to return to his home turf at the invitation of the Dewan of Mysore V.P. Madhava Rao and become the princely state’s Chief Engineer.

“He wasn’t keen to take the job,” says Arun Pai, the co-founder of Bangalore Walks, who delivered a lecture on this eminent statesman and nation builder on September 15 to mark Engineer’s Day. Visvesvaraya finally agreed, but he had a condition: the state should focus on industrialisation and also invest in technical education. “We have the most engineering colleges in this country today, probably in the world, but there was not a single one in 1909,” Pai recounts at the illustrated talk at The Bangalore Room, Indiranagar.

The Dewan seems to have accepted his condition, and Sir Visvesvaraya was back in his home state. Interestingly, that very same year, another significant development took place in the Mysore State. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) was set up in Bengaluru. Pai goes into why this city was chosen among several contenders, including Mumbai. According to him, Bengaluru had several things going for it, as outlined in a report written by Sir William Ramsay in 1900. The Scottish chemist (he eventually won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for the discovery of noble gases) had been invited to India to study the proposal for the new research institute and make final recommendations, including his suggestion for where the institute should be established.

He (Ramsay) offered three major reasons for why Bengaluru should be IISc’s home, says Pai. For starters, the city was not far away from the Shivanasamudra Falls where a hydroelectric power station was to come up; it had access to gold, thanks to the Kolar Gold fields some 100 km away; and most importantly, the Kingdom of Mysore was willing to give land for the project, which made it viable.

“Viability was everything, so IISc came to Bangalore in 1909,” says Pai, who thinks of it as an “incredible fate” that both the institute and Sir Visvesvaraya land up together at the same time and place. “Over the next 40 years, they’re going to work together and change everything,” he says, listing some of the key outputs of this long collaboration, including the government sandalwood oil factory, government soap factory, Mysore sugar company, among others. “Today, we talk about academics and manufacturing not collaborating enough. How fortunate we were that IISc and Sir M.V. came to the city at the same time,” says Pai.

Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya was born in Muddenahalli, a village 7 km from Karnataka’s Chikkaballapura, in the same year Mark Cubbon left India: 1861. He was born to a family that had been once been wealthy but whose fortunes had been considerably altered by the fall of Tipu Sultan in the 1799 Battle of Srirangapatna and its subsequent ramifications. “After the war, Chikkaballapura was dissolved and absorbed into Mysore,” says Pai. The change in politics, he adds, resulted in the family losing their land and possessions, and by the time he (Sir Visvesvaraya) was born, they were deeply in debt and courting penury. “He was born in this very poor situation.”

This slight-built boy — so slender that a relative once remarked that he was unlikely to reach 30 — was brought up by his mother since “his father was spiritual and had no time for the son,” remarks Pai, showcasing an early picture of Sir Visvesvaraya outside his ancestral home, dressed in black with an immaculately-tied turban. He did his early schooling in nearby Chikkaballapura  before moving to Bengaluru, where his maternal uncle, H. Ramaiah, lived.