India’s infrastructure story is often told through kilometres of highways, soaring bridges, expanding metro networks and tunnels through some of the country’s toughest terrain.

Less visible are the engineering decisions behind them.

A railway through the Himalayas. A bridge across Mumbai Bay. A metro system built beneath a crowded capital. A 182-m-high structural landmark. A new generation of high-speed highways. Each demanded years of design, testing, coordination and problem-solving, often in conditions where there was little room for error.

This Engineers’ Day, we look at five engineers whose work and leadership have been closely associated with some of India’s most challenging infrastructure assignments.

E. Sreedharan

The engineer who changed India’s urban mobility story

Project: Delhi Metro
Role: First Managing Director, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation

When Delhi Metro was taking shape, India was embarking on a new era of urban rail. E. Sreedharan became DMRC’s first Managing Director in 1997, bringing with him decades of railway experience, including his leadership of the Konkan Railway project. DMRC has described him as having played an iconic role in implementing the Delhi Metro project.

Under his leadership, the organisation developed a reputation for disciplined project execution and professional management, helping establish a model that would influence metro development across the country.

Legacy: Delhi Metro became a benchmark for urban rail development and demonstrated how complex public infrastructure could be delivered through engineering discipline and institutional leadership.

Sandeep Gupta

The railway engineer who took on the Himalayas

Project: Udhampur–Srinagar–Baramulla Rail Link
Role: Former Chief Engineer and Chief Administrative Officer, USBRL
Organisation: Indian Railways

For more than a decade, Sandeep Gupta was closely involved with one of India’s most difficult railway projects. An Indian Infrastructure profile identifies him as a 1989-batch Indian Railway Service of Engineers officer with more than three decades of experience in the planning, surveying, design and construction of tunnels and bridges in Himalayan terrain. It also credits his involvement with the Chenab Bridge and India’s first cable-stayed railway bridge.

The USBRL project ultimately delivered the 1,315-m-long Chenab Bridge, rising 359 m above the river, as well as the Anji Bridge, India's first cable-stayed railway bridge.

Gupta’s own account of the project offers a sense of the conditions in which the engineering was undertaken. Early surveys involved engineers travelling through remote terrain on horses and mules, while construction demanded years of work in difficult Himalayan conditions.

Legacy: USBRL demonstrates how engineering expertise, persistence and adaptation can overcome some of India's most difficult terrain.

 

Dr S. H. Robin Sham, CBE

Engineering India’s bridge across the sea

Project: Mumbai Trans Harbour Link — Atal Setu
Role: Engineer and Team Leader, General Consultant
Organisation: AECOM-led General Consultant consortium

Atal Setu spans 21.8 km, including approximately 16.5 km over the sea, connecting Mumbai with Navi Mumbai.

MMRDA project documentation identifies Dr S. H. Robin Sham as the Engineer and Team Leader of the General Consultants for the project. His role placed him at the centre of the technical oversight of a project involving marine construction, structural engineering, foundations, navigation requirements and multiple construction packages.

The scale alone made the assignment formidable. But the challenge was also one of coordination — bringing together different engineering disciplines, contractors and technical requirements into a single functioning infrastructure system.

Legacy: Atal Setu represents a significant step forward in India’s ability to plan and execute large-scale marine bridge infrastructure.

S. Sekaran

The engineer who helped make the impossible stand

Project: Statue of Unity
Role: Deputy Project Director – Statue of Unity
Organisation: Larsen & Toubro

At 182 m, the Statue of Unity presented a structural challenge unlike a conventional building project. S. Sekaran was part of the L&T team entrusted with delivering it.

L&T’s own engineering publication identifies Sekaran as Deputy Project Director – Statue of Unity and describes the assignment as one of the toughest projects undertaken by the company. Sekaran joined the Statue of Unity project in 2015 after a career spanning several major L&T construction assignments.

The project demanded precision in structural engineering, fabrication, construction planning and execution on Sadhu Bet in the Narmada. L&T was responsible for the design, engineering, construction, operation and maintenance contract for the monument.

Legacy: The Statue of Unity demonstrated the ability of Indian engineering and construction teams to deliver a structure of exceptional scale and complexity.

Mudit Garg

Engineering a new generation of highways

Project: Delhi–Mumbai Expressway — Sohna section
Role: Project Director, PIU-Sohna
Organisation: National Highways Authority of India

The Delhi–Mumbai Expressway represents a shift towards access-controlled, high-speed highway infrastructure, with greater emphasis on safety, pavement performance and technology.

Mudit Garg served as Project Director, NHAI, PIU-Sohna, and was closely associated with the Sohna–Dausa section of the expressway. In an interview with Mobility Outlook, Garg discussed the engineering and safety features that set the corridor apart, describing it as a project intended to establish standards for future expressways.

His inclusion here is specifically for his role on the Sohna section — not as the sole engineer responsible for the entire Delhi–Mumbai Expressway.

Legacy: The expressway reflects India’s transition towards a new generation of high-speed, access-controlled transport corridors.

Beyond the names

These five engineers offer individual windows into a much larger engineering story. Behind every landmark project are multidisciplinary teams working across structural, civil, geotechnical, transportation, construction and project-management disciplines.

Much of that work becomes invisible once a project opens. Calculations disappear beneath foundations; engineering decisions become part of steel, concrete and asphalt.

Yet as India takes on larger bridges, deeper tunnels, complex urban infrastructure and increasingly demanding transport corridors, that expertise will become even more critical.

The projects may carry the names of cities, governments or institutions. Their physical form may be measured in kilometres, metres and tonnes.

But behind every such measure is an engineering decision — and behind those decisions are people turning ambition into infrastructure.