September 15 is celebrated as National Engineers Day

UNESCO celebrates March 4th of every year as World Engineer’s day. India celebrates Engineer’s day every year on September 15th as a tribute to late engineering marvel Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, known as Sir MV.

Hyderabad: The day is dedicated to feel proud of our engineers’ achievements in every field of science and technology. Engineers owe a remarkable contribution to a nation’s economic progress and development. This day of importance is celebrated to appreciate past achievements and glorify present engineering trends. The day embarks on the modern engineering world and the significance of engineers at every step of our life. Also, the Engineer’s day broadcasts a strong message to help us understand the utility of complex engineering principles for making our lives easier, simpler, and more beautiful.

September 15 is celebrated as National Engineers Day

Every year, the country celebrates September 15 as National Engineer’s Day to appreciate the contributions of Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya.

• He was born on September 15, 1861, in a village called Muddenahalli in Karnataka.
• A Bharat Ratna awardee, Visvesvaraya had studied Bachelor of Arts (BA) from the University of Madras and pursued civil engineering at the College of Science in Pune.
• He later patented and installed an irrigation system with water floodgates at the Khadakvasla reservoir near Pune to raise the food supply level and storage to the highest levels.
• This was also installed at Gwalior’s Tigra Dam and Mysuru’s Krishnaraja Sagara (KRS) dam, the latter of which created one of the largest reservoirs in Asia at the time.
• King George V knighted him as a commander of the British Indian Empire, in the year 1915.
• He created automatic sluice gates which were later reused for Tigra Dam (Madhya Pradesh) and KRS Dam (Karnataka; then Asia's biggest) as well. For this patent design, he was supposed to get a recurring income in the form of royalty, but he refused it so that the government could use this money for more developmental projects.
• In Hyderabad, he designed the flood protection system, which earned him celebrity status.
• He was offered Dewanship (Prime Minister position) of Mysore in 1908 and given full responsibility for all the development projects. Under his Dewanship, Mysore saw a major transformation in the realms of agriculture, irrigation, industrialization, education, banking, and commerce.
• He received the Bharat Ratna in 1955, became a member of the London Institution of Civil Engineers before he was awarded a fellowship by the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) Bangalore. The eminent engineer, Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya passed away in 1962.

Engineers response to fight against COVID-19

• Engineers and scientists have taken wonderful initiatives in this period, often working from home and in virtual teams. Companies and institutions both large and small have contributed to the effort to combat the pandemic in myriad ways.
• The first initiative focused on organizing hospital space and trying to deal with the shortage of personal protection equipment (PPE) for hospital staff. Many institutions with in-house hospitals, like Hindustan Aerospace, railway and defense services, arranged wards and spaces for COVID-19 patients to be used by public health authorities.
• The Indian Railway’s workshops, including many IMechE members, quickly converted some 5,000 air-conditioned sleeper coaches into care units and stabled them at various locations for hospital overflows.
• Several groups who have designed from scratch or sped up existing work have prototyped and tested new hospital equipment in a few weeks, meeting regulatory requirements. Standards and quality objectives were adhered to and never abandoned. The range of equipment is wide, from PPE gels and UV sanitisers and inexpensive throwaway bag respirators, through to supportive breathing devices with additional features, to full-scale ICU invasive ventilators.
• The press highlighted the activities of two honorary fellows. Dr. Pawan Goenka, managing director of automotive firm Mahindra and Mahindra, fast-tracked a major project to manufacture affordable respirators. The Tata Group and trusts led by Ratan Tata donated $200m for PPE and test kits. Meanwhile, engineers in Tata Motors – many of them our members – worked to build robots to sanitize hospitals. Biotech companies provided test kits for the virus within weeks, ready to be manufactured.
• Virologist Minal Dakhave Bhosale made headlines after producing a kit from scratch, based on the genetic code of the virus that Chinese scientists shared on the internet. Just one hour after receiving certification for manufacture, the pregnant researcher checked into the hospital and delivered her daughter. Mother and child are reportedly doing well and the kit is being manufactured.

Innovation and technology in the age of COVID-19

Automatic mask machines: To fight the shortage of N-95 masks in India and to eliminate the import of special automatic machines and their parts from China, engineers from NIT & IIM Calicut, and a start-up firm from Bengaluru are now manufacturing these machines.

Ruhdaar: The low-cost frugal innovator: Engineers at the Design Innovation Centre (DIC) of the Islamic University of Science and Technology, along with a team of engineering students from IIT Bombay, have created a prototype of a low-cost ventilator and named it ‘Ruhdaar’. Medical experts at SKIMS are soon set to evaluate it, which is working successfully in the laboratory and cost the team around Rs 15000.

Jeeva Setu ventilators: Innovators at REVA University in Bengaluru have invented an oven-sized, low-cost, and portable ventilator. The chancellor of REVA University launched ‘Jeeva Setu’ ventilators with the resident staff to aid the medical infrastructure of the country. “It is expected to deliver 500-600 ml of air per breath and 15-18 breaths per minute, as specified for Covid-19 patients,” said Dr P Shyama Raju, Chancellor of REVA University.

Low-cost PPEs: The Navy’s innovation: A doctor in the Indian Navy has developed a low-cost PPE that helped the Indian Navy acquire a patent in association with the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC), an enterprise under the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Safe swab: Phone booth testing: In a bid to keep healthcare staff from getting infected, the BMC has created a phone booth where patients can be tested for coronavirus.

IIT-Bombay devises tracking app: IIT-Bombay students and alumni have developed an app called ‘Corontine’ that can alert authorities about quarantine violations.

IIT-Hyderabad proposes low-cost ventilators: IIT-Hyderabad Director Prof B.S. Murty has called upon the Narendra Modi government to consider adopting “bag valve masks”, an existing technology, as an inexpensive, easier-to-make option to address any surge in demand for ventilators.

Sanitisers, awareness videos from Kharagpur: Students at IIT-Kharagpur have created videos in 12 regional Indian languages — Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu — to ensure awareness about COVID-19.

A herbal hand sanitiser from Roorkee duo: Led by students Siddharth Sharma and Vaibhav Jain, an IIT-Roorkee team has prepared more than 150 liters of a herbal hand sanitiser. Personal hygiene and regular cleaning of hands is believed to one of the most important COVID-19 prevention techniques, and medical experts have advised keeping sanitisers at hand to reduce the risk of contamination.

A cheaper test kit: Researchers at IIT-Delhi have developed a test kit that promises to slash the cost of diagnosing Covid-19. The kit, developed at the Kusuma School of Biological Sciences, has been successful at the laboratory stage, and is now undergoing clinical trials at the Pune-based National Institute of Virology (NIV), which has been tasked by the government to validate new testing innovations.

Engineers (Entrepreneurs, students & Researchers) across India have responded quickly to the challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. A host of new innovations, some emerging from start-ups that have been incubated by universities and other institutions.

“Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.