- Lived:
- born 12 June 1932, Karukaputhur near Pattambi, Palakkad district, Kerala; a working life spent wherever India's hardest transport projects were — Pamban, Calcutta, Kochi, the Konkan coast, Delhi; now living in Ponnani, Kerala (as of September 2026)
- Field:
- civil engineering — railways and urban metros; the rarer field underneath: the management of enormous public projects with honesty
- The Big Idea:
- An Indian public project can be delivered on time, on budget and without a single bribe — not by a miracle of character alone, but by a designed system: countdown clocks, delegated powers, contractors paid on time, and an integrity culture enforced from the top.
- In their words:
- "punctuality and total integrity" — the two-value formula he has repeated in interviews for decades as the whole secret of the Delhi Metro's work culture (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- When a crane collapse killed six workers on his metro in 2009, the seventy-seven-year-old chief resigned the same afternoon — and that reflex, the instinct that someone must own failure, is inseparable from why his projects finished early.