She stayed the course
India doesn’t have a president for bridges, but it certainly has a first lady. Shakuntala Bhagat (above), who died in 2012, wasn’t just India’s first woman civil engineer, she also helped build close to 200 bridges around the world (including 69 in India), in terrains that stump engineers even today.
Born in Bombay in 1933 to SB Joshi, a master engineer, she was the second of five children and the first daughter. “Her father was the force behind her,” says her younger son, Chintamani Bhagat, 52, who heads a private-equity firm in Singapore. “She took to engineering quickly, he mentored her.”
For an upper-caste family at the time, this was radical. But Joshi had a fiery streak. He’d participated in the Quit India movement in 1942. “He gave my mother all the financial, emotional and logistical support,” says her elder son Rajesh Bhagat, 58, a finance manager in the US. “He was even prepared if my mother chose not to marry to pursue her engineering dreams.”
It didn’t come to that. Shakuntala Joshi graduated from what is now the Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, in 1953, becoming India’s first woman civil engineer. She went to Germany to work as a design engineer for two years.
She returned in 1957 to break yet another tradition, by marrying for love. Aniruddha Bhagat wasn’t an engineer; he owned an automobile garage, which raised several eyebrows in the extended Joshi family. The union would change both their lives. “My father didn’t earn enough to support a family, so she took it upon herself to be the main bread winner,” Rajesh recalls. She was an assistant professor of civil engineering in Iit-bombay from 1959 to 1970, taking time off for her Masters in the US.
Chintamani describes his father, Aniruddha, as a man who took risks, dreamed big. “She was the engine to his flashy car.”
The couple founded their own bridgebuilding firm, Quadricon, in 1970, developing radical hinge-type connectors that needed less steel, and prefabricated modular parts that could create bridges of different spans and widths at lower costs. They also invented an unusual towable bridge, which could be wheeled under a weaker one for support when heavy cargo was passing
It was a time when India was growing too. Bridges, particularly in the Himalayas, were transforming landscapes and communities. Quadricon’s patented systems ended up in some 69 bridges across India’s north and north-east. The company also designed bridges in the UK, US and Germany.
“Both my parents had a spark that comes from having a strong will,” Chintamani says. “At home, conversations revolved around risk versus reward.” These were loud, long spirited exchanges. “It would appear as if they were fighting, but once they were done, they’d converse as friends, as if nothing had happened,” says Rajesh.
The couple took risks few engineers do today – they mortgaged their apartment and pawned the family jewellery when governments and firms seemed reluctant to invest in their ideas. “When there were accidents on site, there would be a gloom at home as if someone had died,” Rajesh recalls.
Shakuntala Bhagat did it all while raising two sons and a daughter, and retaining a love for Western classical symphonies from her time in Germany. “I think they were born in the right country but at the wrong time,” Chintamani says. “They had a dozen chances to emigrate. But they believed in India and wanted to see it through.”