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The postman knocks

Adding a footnote to my piece on engineers that appeared in Miscellany, June 9 is reader A. Sitaraman. He writes that the first building on the Marina, the PWD building, was built during the time of A.V. Ramalinga Iyer, the first Indian Chief Engineer of the PWD, and that his grandson, A.V. Venkataraman, was the executive engineer for the construction of the last building on the Marina, namely AIR’s. While the seeming coincidence is intriguing, I’m not sure the facts are right. Ramalinga Iyer joined the service in 1893, whereas Chisholm’s frontage for the PWD Secretariat, as it was then called, was built in 1866-67.

Ramalinga Iyer might well have been the first Indian to have worked in an executive position in the building, for it was only in 1900 that Indians were appointed as Assistant Engineers; till then, they were recruited as Sub-Overseers and S.A. Subramania Iyer was the first Indian recruited to the post by the Madras PWD, soon after he passed out of the Civil Engineering College in 1884. As for the AIR building, which was opened in 1967, several others have come up since then, such as the Slum Board offices.

Another reader with a bit of engineering history to relate is R. Varadan. He writes that U.S. Ramasundaram, an Executive Engineer of the Madras PWD, was posted in 1942, when World War II threatened Madras, as Superintending Engineer, Southern Aviation Circle, to work with Chief Engineer A.W.H. Dean. Ramasundaram was assigned the task of constructing, literally on a war-footing, airstrips in Coimbatore, Bangalore, Tanjore, Trichy and other places that would be able to handle the Allies’ military aircraft.

Those airstrips are the nucleus of the airports that have come up in these places since then. But what was different about his assignment was that an aircraft and pilot were put at his disposal to visit the various sties on inspection. He was probably the first PWD engineer to have an aeroplane to himself - even if it was only until the end of the War when he returned to the Provincial Service.

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