When a construction worker set up an engineering college

Nitin Gadkari, minister for road transport and highways, launched ‘Ramaiyanam — Life and Times of M S Ramaiah’ Tuesday. An excerpt from the book

When we look at the history of the emergence of Bangalore as the ‘Knowledge Capital of India’, it all began with the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), started by visionary industrialist J R D Tata in 1909, and the Government Engineering College set up by Sir M Visvesvaraya in 1917. These two institutions were the harbingers of change at a time when India was still under the yoke of colonialism. But there was a lull for almost three decades as two World Wars and some epidemics ravaged the economy. Soon after, when the gloom lifted, construction activities began to gain momentum and the demand for qualified engineers increased, the city’s well-known philanthropist B M Sreenivasaiah started the country’s first private engineering college, the BMS College of Engineering, in 1946. About a decade and a half later, a young man who lived in Mathikere, in the vicinity of IISc, began to dream about starting an engineering college. He went by the name of Mathikere Sampagappa Ramaiah, or simply, M S Ramaiah.

Every dream a reality

Ramaiah’s grandfather and father were poor construction workers and the family’s circumstances led him to the same profession when he was barely 14 years of age. He neither had a guide nor a godfather. But he progressed quickly from being a mortar and brick layer to owning brick kilns to building dams. He built five masonry dams in succession in some of the most hostile and remote ‘jungles’ of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Bihar. He earned a reputation as a dynamic and resourceful civil contractor ready to take up any challenge thrown at him. It was the India of the late 1940s and ’50s. Ramaiah, not yet 40 years, had, unselfconsciously, joined Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘army’ of the builders of modern India.

During his years of lonely struggle and harsh life in the forests while building dams, he realised the dire need for qualified engineers. With considerable funds at his disposal, he set up a trust, the Gokula Education Foundation, in 1962, with a corpus of Rs 25 lakh. An engineering college was started the same year in Bangalore. It was only the third of its kind at that time. He followed it up with a string of educational institutions in the fields of medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, Ayurveda, healthcare, clinical research, public policy, law and management which cater to more than 10,000 students. Some unfortunate deaths in the family triggered in him the desire to start a medical college and a hospital. Later, a super specialty hospital came up too. Together, they now cater to over three lakh patients and perform more than 11,000 surgeries a year.

(From ‘Ramaiyanam — Life and Times of MS Ramaiah’ by Ramakrishna Upadhya)