Sir M. Visvesvaraya Raised a Lake's Storage by a Quarter With Patented Gates, Designed the Krishna Raja Sagara Dam, Served as Dewan of Mysore From 1912 to 1918 and Received the Bharat Ratna in 1955

Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, the engineer whose birthday India marks as Engineers’ Day on 15 September, designed the Krishna Raja Sagara reservoir on the Cauvery river, which his memoir calls the largest reservoir built in India up to 1912. Years earlier he had patented gates that open and close by themselves and added about 25 per cent to the storage of the lake that supplies Poona (now Pune) without raising the dam wall.

His working life ran through the Bombay government’s Public Works Department, the Nizam of Hyderabad’s service and the princely state of Mysore, where he was Chief Engineer from 1909 and Dewan, the chief minister under the Maharaja, from 1912 to 1918. Most figures below come from his Memoirs of My Working Life, which he published in Bangalore in 1951, checked against the Gazette of India, the University of Mysore and later biographies.

Poona, Sukkur and the first water works

Visvesvaraya was born at Muddenahalli, a village near Bengaluru, and lost his father at 12, the Deccan Herald records. A BA from Central College, Bangalore, in 1881 was followed by engineering at the College of Science in Poona, where he took his degree in November 1883. In 1884 he joined the Bombay Public Works Department.

In February 1894 he reached Sukkur, in Sind, to build the town’s water works after the engineer posted there had died. The municipality could not afford filter beds for muddy Indus water, so he dug a circular well in the river bed close to the bank, letting the water filter through sand. When the well gave too little, he drove a tunnel from its bottom under the flowing river. The work was done by August 1895.

Gates that raised the Khadakwasla lake’s storage by a quarter

The lake at Khadakwasla, then called Lake Fife, fed the Mutha Canal and the water supply of Poona city and its military cantonment. Each year it overflowed to a height of six to eight feet above the crest of its surplus weir, the spillway. The memoir says he designed gates that hold water at the old flood height, swing open on their own when it rises above that level and close again when it falls.

They lifted the lake’s permanent storage level by about eight feet (2.4 metres), adding about 25 per cent to its storage without raising the dam. He took out a patent, and the memoir says he asked the government for no royalty. A Bombay firm, Geo. Gahagan and Company, made the gates, fitted in 1901 to 1903. More than 45 years later, he writes, they were still working. The same pattern went onto the surplus weir of the Tigra Dam, which supplies Gwalior, and onto that of the Krishna Raja Sagara dam.

The block system was a way of sharing canal water

Some popular accounts, among them the Institution of Civil Engineers’ profile and a ThePrint feature, describe his “block system” as an automatic gate. The memoir uses the name for a scheme for sharing canal water.

When the Indian Irrigation Commission visited the Poona district, its president asked for a working plan to make Bombay’s irrigation works more popular and more profitable, and Visvesvaraya submitted one within about three months. Under the Block System of Irrigation, a canal’s water reached more villages, and inside each village irrigation was concentrated in blocks of set size on chosen soils. Only a third of each block grew sugarcane or another year-round crop at a time.

The Commission’s report of 1901 to 1903 said the scheme “appears to us very complete and well considered”, in the memoir’s quotation. Tried on the Nira Canal, it met obstruction from local revenue officers until the Bombay government told them to cooperate. In June 1908 Sir John Muir Mackenzie, the government’s Senior Member, told the Legislative Council the system’s development was “due entirely to the genius of Mr. Visvesvaraya”. When he tried it under the Marikanave reservoir in Mysore, he writes, the reform “was not strictly enforced” because cultivators and civil officers opposed it.

Hyderabad, 1909: a flood report that became two dams

The Musi river flooded Hyderabad on Monday 28 September 1908. The memoir estimates the flow at 425,000 cubic feet a second from a catchment of 862 square miles and says many small irrigation tanks (reservoirs) breaching together made it worse. It records about 2,000 people drowned or washed away in one area, Kolsawadi. The Better India gives a citywide toll of about 15,000, so reported figures differ.

Visvesvaraya had retired from the Bombay service in 1908, the Deccan Herald says, and was touring abroad when the Nizam’s government asked him to come. He started on 15 April 1909 as special consulting engineer. His survey found that the city could be made safe only by storing floodwater above it, and he proposed two dams, one on the Musi and one on its tributary, the Esi, with planned storage of 8,439 and 11,950 million cubic feet. Swarajya, quoting the memoir, dates his flood report to 1 October 1909.

No decision came before he left in November 1909. The Nizam laid the Musi dam’s foundation stone in March 1913, and The Better India dates Osman Sagar on the Musi to 1920 and Himayat Sagar on the Esi to 1927. The Nizam’s state, which joined India in 1948 (the story of Operation Polo), called him back in 1922 to advise on drainage.

The Cauvery reservoir at Kannambadi

Mysore’s Dewan wrote to Visvesvaraya on 24 May 1909 offering the Chief Engineer’s post, noting that he was “by birth a Mysorean”. He had asked first whether the state would back industries and technical education, was told it would, and joined on 15 November 1909.

Sivasamudram hydroelectric station on the Cauvery gave about 13,000 horsepower, 11,000 of it to the Kolar Gold Fields, but the river sometimes dropped below 100 cubic feet a second in the hot season. A reservoir at Kannambadi had been proposed, but no workable design existed. His project report of 5 May 1911 described a masonry dam about 8,600 feet long and 130 feet above the river bed, storing about 48,000 million cubic feet, to irrigate 150,000 acres and generate about 80,000 horsepower.

First cost was estimated at Rs 253 lakh (Rs 2.53 crore), more than the state had spent on any single project. Sanction stalled, the memoir says, and he thought of leaving until the Maharaja told him “Don’t be hasty” and approved every proposal. Live History India adds that the Maharaja sold royal jewellery when money ran short.

Madras had its own plan for a reservoir at Mettur, about 60 miles downstream, and objected. Viceroy Lord Hardinge allowed a first stage to a height of 80 feet. Mysore laid a foundation wide enough for 124 feet, and an arbitration award later let it build to the original design. In October 1916 Visvesvaraya told Mysore’s Representative Assembly that the valley’s irrigated area was 115,000 acres in Mysore against 1,225,500 in Madras, although about three-fourths of the river’s water passes through Mysore. He noted that statements in the press and at public meetings in the Madras Presidency called the award too favourable to Mysore. The river’s sharing has since gone before tribunals and the Supreme Court, as our explainer on river water disputes traces.

By the memoir’s account, the reservoir supplied the power station as promised, against a target of 1 July 1915. Output rose by stages from 13,000 to 25,000 horsepower, and the memoir puts it at about 83,000 by 1951, with nearly 100,000 acres irrigated. Mahatma Gandhi, visiting in July 1927, said the reservoir alone “would perpetuate the name of Sir Visvesvaraya”, in the Bangalore Daily Post report the memoir reprints.

Dewan of Mysore, November 1912 to December 1918

Visvesvaraya had suggested a development portfolio, but the Maharaja insisted he take the Dewan’s office. Civil servants had held it until then, the memoir notes, so an engineer’s appointment surprised official circles. In his first address to the Representative Assembly, in October 1913, he said only one person in every sixteen in the state could read and write.

The Economic Conference, set up at his suggestion and opened by the Maharaja on 10 June 1911, became a permanent body in 1918. The University of Mysore began on 1 July 1916 by the memoir’s date, and at its first convocation on 19 October 1918 the Maharaja called him “the man to whom our University owes its being”. The university’s own site gives 27 July 1916 as its founding date and credits the Maharaja and the Dewan. The memoir adds that no Indian state had a university before.

Railway mileage in the state rose from 411 to 616, with 46 miles more under construction. Sericulture, sandalwood oil, soap, a metal factory and chrome tanning were started, and the Deccan Herald adds the Bank of Mysore in 1913 and the Mysore Chamber of Commerce in 1916. The iron works at Bhadravati was sanctioned in May 1918 with the American consultant Charles P. Perin, who had designed the Tata steelworks at Jamshedpur. Building ran on to 1923, and Visvesvaraya chaired its board of management until September 1929. His 1928 to 1929 statement says the state ran a surplus in every year he was Dewan and invested Rs 332 lakh in industries and productive public works.

He left in December 1918. His memoir explains that agitation against Brahmin predominance in public jobs had spread from Madras to Mysore and the government set up the Miller Committee on measures for backward communities. He opposed it, fearing that ignoring merit would hurt efficiency, and obtained the Maharaja’s consent to retire. He also records scholarships for backward communities and some reserved vacancies during his term. The state he served is now part of Karnataka (Karnataka at a glance).

Dates the sources do not settle

Birth year comes first. The University of Mysore’s page gives his dates as 1860 to 1962, and the Deccan Herald gives 15 September 1860. The Better India and ThePrint say 1861. The memoir says he began government service in February 1884 “in my twenty-third year”, which fits a birth in September 1861.

Dam dates also differ. Live History India says construction began in November 1911 and finished in 1931, while the Garden History Blog gives a foundation stone in 1911 and completion in 1924. The memoir implies work began in 1912. The ICE profile says he was appointed chief engineer of the project in 1924, which the memoir’s account of joining as Chief Engineer in 1909 does not support.

Brindavan Gardens, below the dam, were laid out after he had left office. The Garden History Blog dates the layout to 1924 to 1932, names Dewan Mirza Ismail as the driving force and credits the plan to the German-born horticulturist Gustav Krumbiegel, as does the Deccan Herald.

After Mysore: committees, books, the Bharat Ratna and Engineers’ Day

Visvesvaraya presided over the Indian Science Congress at Lucknow in 1923 and the Indian Economic Conference in Bombay in 1924. The Court of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore elected him its president each year from 1938, and he stepped down at his own request in 1947. His Reconstructing India was published in London in 1920, and the Deccan Herald dates his Planned Economy for India to 1934.

The Gazette of India Extraordinary of 26 January 1955 notified the President’s award of the Bharat Ratna to Dr Bhagwan Das of Banaras and Shri Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya. The Deccan Herald recounts that he sent word to Jawaharlal Nehru, “I am a fact-finding man”, and was then asked to accept. India Post issued a stamp for his hundredth birthday on 15 September 1960, and he died in April 1962, on 12 April by the Deccan Herald’s date.

On 15 September 2026 the Prime Minister, the Vice-President, the Defence Minister and the Home Minister each paid tribute to him on National Engineers’ Day, All India Radio reported.