Elattuvalapil Sreedharan

Leaders

Elattuvalapil Sreedharan

Born:12 June 1932

He is an Indian civil engineer and a retired IRSE officer popularly known as the “Metro Man”.
He is credited for changing the face of public transport in India with his leadership in building the Konkan Railway and the Delhi Metro while he served as the managing director of Delhi Metro between 1995 and 2012.
He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2001,the Padma Vibhushan in 2008, the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 2005 by the French government and was named one of Asia’s Heroes by TIME magazine in 2003.
He was appointed by the former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to serve on the United Nations’s High Level Advisory Group on Sustainable Transport (HLAG-ST) for a period of three years in 2015.
He is also a member of Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board.
For a short period, he worked as a lecturer in Civil engineering at the Government Polytechnic, Kozhikode and a year at the Bombay Port Trust as an apprentice.
He subsequently joined the Indian Railway Service of Engineers (IRSE), after clearing the Indian Engineering Services Exam in 1953 conducted by the UPSC.
His first assignment was in the Southern Railway as a Probationary Assistant Engineer in December 1954.
In December 1964, a cyclone washed away parts of Pamban Bridge that connected Rameswaram to mainland Tamil Nadu.
The Railways set a target of six months for the bridge to be repaired while his boss, under whose jurisdiction the bridge came, reduced it to three months.
He was put in-charge of the execution and he restored the bridge in just 46 days.
The Railway minister’s Award was given to him in recognition of this achievement.