Incarnations: India in 50 Lives - Visvesvaraya: Extracting Moonbeams from Cucumbers

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Sunil Khilnani explores the life and work of engineer, planner and politician Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya.

Visvesvaraya was a frail bureaucrat who walked hunched, as if the burden of state-building literally pressed down on his shoulders. But in the popular imagination he turned an engineering degree into a superhuman world-fashioning prowess. He changed the Indian nation with practical and enduring improvements for millions of people, including innovations in sanitation, statistics, flood control, drainage and irrigation.

Austere to the point of dourness, but audaciously hopeful, Visvesvaraya sought to frog-march India into modernity.

Featuring Bangalore-based social scientist Chandan Gowda.

Producer: Martin Williams Executive Producer: Martin Smith

Published on Wednesday, 2nd March 2016.

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