Shakuntala Bhagat
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A brief profile
July 9, 2023: The Times of India
➤ A decade after her passing away in 2012, India’s first woman civil engineer continues to build bridges, albeit the invisible sort. “Are you Shakuntala’s son,” people in engineering and construction circles ask Chinta Bhagat, her third-born. “It’s a nice ice-breaker,” says Chinta, who has recently instituted an international MBA scholarship in the name of his mother, whose slide rule spawned nearly 100 bridges in India
➤ Born in 1933 in Bombay, Shakuntala Bhagat was the second of five children of S B Joshi, known as the ‘father of bridge engineering in India’. He encouraged her to aim for a career in civil engineering
➤ “She was the only girl in her class at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (earlier Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute) but we never heard her complain of gender bias,” says her Pune-based architect daughter Mita, about her “gentle yet strong” mother who started working as a trainee in her father’s factory after becoming the institute’s first woman graduate in 1953. Then, a boiler exploded on the factory floor. While she sustained minor injuries, “her confidence took a serious knock,” says her Boston-based older son, Rajesh. To boost his daughter’s morale, Joshi sent her to Germany to train under Fritz Leonhardt, a structural engineer known for designing landmark bridges in Venezuela, Argentina and the US
➤ Four years later, Leonhardt’s young intern returned home, fluent in German and with a newfound taste for western classical symphonies. More eyebrows were raised when she married Anirudha Bhagat, a modest Iranian-born auto mechanic who lived opposite the building her father owned in Dadar. Shakuntala’s decade-long stint as a civil engineering professor at IIT Bombay sustained their household of one daughter and two sons, till the couple produced their fourth child: a company called Quadricon
➤ Chinta remembers how his “allintellect” mother and “polarising” father argued passionately over technical matters at the dining table before her notebooks gave shape to his big ideas. Among the biggest of these ideas can be seen in a TOI photo from 1972 which shows the Bhagats jointly inspecting the joints of a bridge that was erected overnight in Mumbai. Made up of two identical halves, these hingetype joints were called unishear connectors and needed just one bolt to make an efficient and permanent connection. The radical, patented invention won them 5,000 from National Research Development Council, apart from an award from the Invention Promotion Board
➤ Later, the duo designed a complete pre-fabricated system that could turn an entire bridge into a modular structure. “Like a life-size lego kit. You could make almost any bridge you wanted from them,” says Rajesh, about the fit-for-toughterrain parts that resulted in 40 to 50 bridges across the Himalayan region extending to the North-East. The Bhagats designed almost 200 bridges across the world, including Bangladesh and the Philippines
➤ Prone to “retreating into a shell with her notebook when faced with a technical problem and coming out with an answer”, Shakuntala kept working even as multiple sclerosis chipped away at her steely interior in the last two decades of her life. Having willed 1 crore to the Multiple Sclerosis Society of India, Shakuntala passed away in 2012 Curated by Ketaki Desai, with inputs from Amulya Gopalakrishnan & Sharmila Ganesan Ram
