The Metro Man

In the last days of December 1964, a violent cyclone swept in from the Bay of Bengal and struck the southern tip of India. The sea rose over the little town of Dhanushkodi and destroyed it. A passenger train crossing towards it was swept away, and many people lost their lives.

Out in the water, the Pamban bridge, the long railway bridge that joined the island of Rameswaram to the mainland, lay broken. Most of its spans had been torn from their piers and thrown into the sea.

For the people of the island, and for the pilgrims who came to its temple, the railway was the lifeline. Now it was gone.

Forty-six days

The Railways set a target of six months to rebuild the bridge. Then the target was cut to three. The engineer put in charge of the work on the ground was a quiet man of thirty-two named E. Sreedharan.

He studied the wreck and saw a chance. Many of the fallen girders were not ruined. If divers could find them on the sea bed and lift them out, they could be repaired and used again, which would save months of waiting for new steel to be made.

So that is what his team did. They raised girders from the water, mended them and set them back in place, working through the days and into the nights with whatever cranes and boats they could get. The bridge reopened to trains in forty-six days.

It was the first time much of India heard his name. It would not be the last.

A boy from Palakkad

Elattuvalapil Sreedharan was born on 12 June 1932 in a village in the Palakkad district of Kerala. He studied civil engineering at the Government Engineering College in Kakinada, in what is now Andhra Pradesh, and after a short time as a lecturer he joined the Indian Railways as an engineer.

Those who worked with him over the years described the same habits. He rose early, kept his life simple, and was strict about time, money and honesty. He would not accept gifts. He expected the same discipline from everyone around him, beginning with himself.

In the decades after Pamban, he helped plan India's first metro railway, in Calcutta, and later led the Cochin Shipyard. In 1990 he retired from the Railways, at fifty-eight. Most people would have stopped there.

A railway through the mountains

Instead, he was asked to lead one of the hardest railway projects India had ever attempted: the Konkan Railway.

For more than a century, engineers had dreamt of a line along India's western coast, between the Arabian Sea and the steep hills of the Western Ghats. The country there is cut by rivers, ravines and soft, shifting soil. A railway would need thousands of bridges and dozens of tunnels.

Sreedharan led the company that built it, and raised much of the money through bonds sold to the public. The work was dangerous and slow. Tunnels flooded and collapsed, and the monsoon washed out what had been built. Workers lost their lives on the project.

But the line was finished, and in 1998 trains began to run along its full length, about 740 kilometres from Maharashtra to Karnataka. Journeys along the coast that had taken a day or more by road could now be made in hours.

The Delhi Metro

In 1995, Sreedharan became head of a new company with a huge task: to build a modern metro railway for Delhi, one of the most crowded cities in the world.

Many people did not believe it could be done on time. Big public projects in India were known for running years late and far over budget. Sreedharan set out to prove otherwise. It is widely reported that clocks in the company's offices counted down the days left until each deadline, so that no one could forget them.

The first section of the Delhi Metro opened on 24 December 2002. The whole of the first phase was finished in 2005, ahead of schedule. The trains were clean and punctual, and the stations were looked after with care. For millions of people, the long, hot, crowded journey to work became shorter and gentler.

There were dark days, too. In July 2009, part of a bridge under construction collapsed, and workers were killed. Sreedharan, who was not on the site, offered to resign and take responsibility. He was asked to stay, and he did, until he finally retired at the end of 2011, aged seventy-nine.

What he left behind

By then the newspapers had a name for him: the Metro Man. He received the Padma Shri in 2001 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2008, two of India's highest civilian honours. Cities across the country asked for his advice as they began to build metros of their own.

What he left behind was more than track and stations. He showed a generation that public work in India could be done well, on time and honestly.

Want to read more?

M. S. Ashokan's biography Karmayogi follows Sreedharan's life from Palakkad to the Delhi Metro. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation and the Konkan Railway Corporation describe the building of their lines on their own websites.