How one wishes India produces more talents like Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, builder of the marvels like Delhi’s Metro Rail network and the Konkan Railway. Aptly, he has been described as one of the builders of modern India, truly a “Ratna” (jewel) of Bharat, decorated with Padma Vibhushan.

Thousands of commuters who travel by Delhi Metro everyday silently express their gratitude to this 74-year-old railway engineer as they board the swanky air-conditioned trains.

Gone are the days of endless waiting at crowded bus stops and jostling in rickety vehicles. An hour’s journey has been reduced to barely 10 minutes. With the 56 km track ready and two phases left, the $2 billion Metro project is running ahead of schedule and, more importantly, strictly within the budget.

In just two years the high-speed underground train will be accessible to every resident of Delhi. Indeed, this is India’s public transport revolution.

What is the “mantra” behind the success of the man who is known to make impossible things possible ? Punctuality, picking up right people for the right job, team work, discipline, honesty and adherence to deadlines have been Sreedharan’s yardsticks.

He motivates people around him and rewards them for completing the assigned task before time. Every officer in the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation keeps a digital board which shows the number of days left for the completion of the next target.

On his part, Sreedharan clocks in at work on the dot at 8.45 every morning, 15 minutes before his staff. For him, the job at hand is not just a duty but his “dharma”. He is hardly ever seen in public and rarely gives interviews or attends public functions except some classical music concerts.

Remember it took two decades to build the Kolkata metro and all the chaos and hardship that the people had to undergo. It was a result of bad planning.

In Delhi Sreedharan faced no such problem. When people in old Delhi (Chandni Chowk area) objected to the demolition of their houses, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation used the tunnel boring machine technology to solve the problem. The same technology is being adopted in South Delhi’s densely populated areas. At the same time it is ensured that there are no major traffic bottlenecks, no demolitions.

The Konkan Railway project was mooted by the then Railway Minister, George Fernandes in 1990 but later he himself gave up the idea, dismissing the project as impossible. A month later, Sreedharan met him with a well-charted plan and told him: “We will have to work in a different fashion”. Fernandes was so impressed by the plan that he got the Cabinet approval for the project within three days and work began in right earnest under the newly constituted Konkan Rail Corporation.

When the government was short of funds, Sreedharan raised public bonds. The end product was an engineering marvel with the laying of a rail network across the mountainous Western Ghats. The Mumbai-Kochi distance was reduced by one third.

When Sreedharan disclosed the plan to build a metro rail in Delhi, everybody laughed, terming the project as impossible. “We have seen the chaos while building a small, one-line metro in Kolkata”, they remarked. But the former railway civil engineer made possible what looked like a fantasy. Besides other states in India, many foreign countries too now want to replicate the experiment.

Ellatuvalapil Sreedharan is from Karukaputhoor in Palaghat district of Kerala. The quest for excellence came naturally to Sreedharan. In school, he would vie with T.N. Seshan, the former Chief Election Commissioner of India,to come first in class. He later studied at the Victoria College in Palghat and then graduated as an engineer from the Government Engineering College, Kakinada (now JNTU). After a short tenure as a lecturer in Civil engineering at the Kerala Polytechnic in Kozhikode and a year at the Bombay Port Trust as an apprentice, he joined the Indian Railways in its Service of Engineers. This was through a nation-wide selection procedure and his first assignment was in the Southern Railway as a Probationary Assistant Engineer in December 1954.

He first came to the limelight in 1963 as a 31 year old executive engineer of the Southern Railway, restoring the Pamban bridge connecting the Rameshwaram island with mainland Tamil Nadu, which had given way under a lashing tidal wave. The Railways set a target of six months for the bridge to be repaired while Sreedharan's boss, under whose jurisdiction the bridge came, reduced it to three months. Sreedharan was put in-charge of the execution and he restored the bridge in 46 days! The Railway minister's Award was given to him in recognition of this achievement.

In 1970, as the Deputy Chief Engineer, he was put in charge of implementation, planning and design of the Calcutta metro, the first ever metro in India. Cochin Shipyard launched Rani Padmini, the first ship it built, when he was its Chairman and Managing Director (CMD). He retired from Indian Railways in 1990.

Though he retired, the Government was reluctant to let go of his services and Sreedharan was appointed the CMD of Konkan Railway on contract in 1990. Under his stewardship, the company executed its mandate in seven years. The project was unique in many respects. It was the first major project in India to be undertaken on a BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) basis; the organisation structure was different from that of a typical Indian Railway set-up; the project had 93 tunnels along a length of 82 km and involved tunneling through soft soil. The total project covered 760 km and had over 150 bridges. That a public sector project could be completed without significant cost and time overruns was considered an astounding achievement by many.

Sreedharan was not through yet. He was made the managing director of Delhi Metro and by mid-2005, all the scheduled sections were completed by their target date or before and within their respective budgets. Sreedharan was given the sobriquet of 'Metro Man' by the media. In 2005, he was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) by the government of France. He had announced that he would retire by the end of 2005, but his tenure has been extended by another three years to oversee the completion of the second phase of Delhi Metro. Recently he was called in Pakistan for development of the Lahore Metro plan.

Success and virtue- a rare combination in today's world. But they run side by side in Sreedharan's life - like rail tracks. (Wikipedia)