India is now the most populated country in the world. There’s a pressing need for more and better-educated civil engineers there. A civil engineer working in India today can expect to work 9 AM to 9 PM six days per week and 9 AM to 2 PM on Sundays (according to Dr. Balasubramaniam, Managing Director of Hitech Concrete Solutions Ltd) because their skills are in such high demand.

However, this current weekend is a holiday, so I hope most of them are taking some time off!

Based on my two-week glimpse into life in India, I believe Indian people work extremely hard. Most people working in businesses or projects at the national and international levels work in English. Higher education in India is also in English because India has around 100 languages.

Civil engineers’ work is incredibly important! In a developing nation, the infrastructure and buildings overseen by civil engineers (and architects!) shelter and support a growing population of people – a population working hard to live ethically and build a brighter future.

In the first couple weeks of January 2024, I got an inside perspective by attending events and touring workshops and laboratories at the Chennai branch campus of Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT).

VIT’s Dr. Nithya Venkatesan, Assistant Director of International Relations, and Associate Professor Dr. Shanmuga Sundaram (who goes by Shanmugham) served as my primary hosts. They helped coordinate my entire two-week trip, and without them I never would have managed to make my first venture into this fascinating land.

Dr. Renukadevi Selvaraj, Professor and Head of the Dept. of Education at the National Institute of Technical Teachers Training Institute (NITTTR), run by the Ministry of Education for the Government of India, connected me with VIT after I met her in Blacksburg, Virginia (my hometown) at an ethics symposium last summer.

At VIT, I attended a two-day conclave on civil engineering organized by Shanmugham that included presentations by academic and industry partners. Shanmugham’s areas of specialization include sustainable building materials, special concrete, alternative binding processes.

I delivered the opening keynote address for the conclave. Most of the audience of around 45 participants were civil and structural engineering students, but their teachers, some PhD researchers, and some industry partners also attended.

Other presenters at the conclave talked about structural failures within existing buildings (causes, effects, and ways of avoiding or addressing defects), earthquake resistance and previous structural failures in India due to earthquake activity, and the importance of being part of professional organizations (such as the UK-based Institution of Civil Engineers, ICE). India does not yet have a licensure program for professional/licensed/chartered engineers of the type you see in the US, UK and Ireland, but Professor Johnson Alengaram from the University of Malaya encouraged the audience to join ICE and maintain their learning and their credentials with care.

Shanmugham noted that he’s in the second generation of civil engineers the people of his father’s age with a first generation of civil engineering professional in the country. The students he is educating now, he sees as the third generation of civil engineering in India.

Arvindh Raj Rajendran, who earned a Master of Structural Technology degree, delivered the conclave’s final talk with an extremely well-articulated presentation about an apartment complex that his family’s company, Hitech Civil Engineering Services, Ltd., has worked to diagnosed and remediated. The original construction, by a different company, had severe deficits that had made national news in India. Hitech has made interventions to keep the structure inhabitable and conducted detailed analyses to help the government and the courts decide if the building can be salvaged or must be replaced. He explained the analysis and rectification process in detail. Arvindh showed other faulty structures that Hitect has been able to salvage, as well as the equipment they use (all pictured below).

Before the conclave started, I had the distinct honor of visiting four of the engineering laboratories on the VIT Chennai campus, being shown around by Shanmugham. We visited the soil testing lab where he and his colleague, Associate Professor Dr. Karthiyaini train PhD students and conduct research.

We visited Shanmugham’s materials testing laboratory. He has just gained national certification to test materials (such as concrete samples from active construction sites). He can test the performance of all kinds of concrete steel and concrete-related products. He is also researching possibilities for creating concrete mixed with less embodied carbon than today’s standard material.

He’s working towards a net-zero-type concrete method using byproducts of other industries in India — because concrete is a central construction material in the country. China and India are using a huge portion of the entire amount of concrete fabricated each year currently worldwide.

I also visited a water quality research lab and met the academic leader and her PhD students. They are working on a wide array of topics, including addressing toxic landfill effluents that leak into the soil, reviving microplastics from water, desalination process, and ocean clean-up techniques. I learned so much and wish I’d taken notes!

The geology lab was equally interesting as the students were taking samples from a soil boring to study contaminants. They introduced me to each doctoral research project, and I asked loads of questions, which, again, unfortunately, my brain failed to file into long-term memory. It does this filing in the night while I sleep and in the day when I retell what I’ve learned. But I learned so very much in that single day of touring that my brain couldn’t hold it all.

One thing I will never forget is how many talented women are studying engineering at VIT. To my delight, the research labs are gender balanced.

On the day of the tours, I also met VIT’s vice president for academics, Dr. Sekar Viswanathan. He holds this role on all four VIT campuses. I was very impressed with how attentively he communicated with Dr. Johnson, another international guest speaking at the conclave, and me.

VIT is a private institution that provides itself in excellence and holds academic world rankings. The Chennai campus is currently educating about 10,000 engineering students and is expanding its facilities to double its enrollment. This is very important in a country where many hundred thousand engineers graduate from higher education institutions each year but are not well-prepared for industry. Receiving an education at a highly-ranked institution like this helps ensure the graduate will be ready to perform well in the industry. The country desperately needs more civil engineers who can do this. Hopefully, one day, India’s civil engineers won’t need to work seven days a week!

Shanmugham was an exceptional host during my trip. He and his wife (Rama, an electrical/computer engineer who runs a startup business with a colleague) and their six-year-old daughter (Shanmuga, who speaks English in addition to her mother tongue), took me shopping for Indian outfits — so I’ll fit in better on my next trip to India!

They also invited me to their home, located in a huge complex of apartments. There are 20 buildings, each about 17 stories tall. I met their neighbors, and I learned something about how they live. We got to share a bit of our own cultures with each other, which was a true highlight of my time in Chennai.

At the very start of my trip, I also got the chance to visit some stone temples near Chennai. Shanmugham showed me around the massive site and, in true Indian fashion, took pictures of me at each important structure. These temples, carved from solid granite boulders protruding from the sand at this coastal location, have stood for 1300 years. The craftsmanship was superb and awe-inspiring.

The day we visited the temples (the day I landed in India, January 2) was a holiday. The site was being visited by many busloads of tourists from all over India dressed to the nines. I included pictures of one group of visitors in the gallery below.

“The Group of Monuments at Mahabalipuram is a collection of 7th- and 8th-century CE religious monuments in the coastal resort town of Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu, India and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal, about 60 kilometres south of Chennai.”

—https://www.tamilnadutourism.tn.gov.in/

The Indian people definitely made me feel welcome and safe and thankful for this opportunity to meet and learn from them. Everywhere I went, people stopped and asked to take a picture with me. Little children looked at me in amazement. Shanmugham noted that many visitors to the temple had come from afar, from rural parts of India, and only some of the children had seen anyone like me before.

Incidentally, the food was incredible! During my two-week visit, I enjoyed the taste of every single thing I ate. At VIT, I had the privilege of residing at the international guesthouse. The drivers and guesthouse staff were absolutely incredible and made my stay a joy. At first, they offered me more Western foods, but when they saw that I enjoyed the Indian dishes more, that changed! The entire staff went the extra mile to ensure my safety and comfort.

In this post, I described just five of my days in India. I hope to post another blog this week about my experiences at REES 2024 in Hubli, India, and visiting NITTTR outside Chennai.

From ancient stone temples to teaching labs and structural failure — I got insider perspectives of civil engineering in India from the staff of VIT and I look forward to my next visit to India.