Every year on September 15, we celebrate National Engineer’s Day to recognise and honour the achievements of the great engineer M. Visvesvaraya. This day is observed to commemorate the great work done by engineers and encourage them to improve and innovate for the future.
Since the IT boom in the 90s, India has produced some of the best engineers and engineers turned entrepreneurs who have made a mark for our nation on the world stage. Here is a list of the great engineers who, with their entrepreneurial spirit, made it big in the world and disrupted their particular industries:
Azim Premji
At the age of 21, Azim Premji, a 1966 Stanford University BSC graduate, took over the family business, Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd. The company used to produce mineral oils, soaps, and other products for daily use. Later, he extended the company’s product portfolio to include lighting products, hydraulic cylinders, hair care soaps, infant toiletries, ethnic ingredient-based toiletries, and baking fats. The young businessman understood the significance of the developing IT industry. Taking advantage of the void left by IBM’s expulsion from India in the 1980s, they changed the company’s name to Wipro and entered the high-technology industry. Wipro started producing minicomputers in technical cooperation with an American company, Sentinel Computer Corporation. Premji’s decisions and leadership put India on the map of IT companies and the sector as a whole. In 2005, the Government of India honoured him with the title of Padma Bhushan for his outstanding work in trade and commerce.
Sabeer Bhatia
After beginning his undergraduate education at BITS Pilani in 1986, Sabeer Bhatia moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) after two years. He received a Master of Science degree from Stanford University and briefly worked for Apple Computer as a hardware engineer. Bhatia’s visionary contribution to the Internet revolution earned him widespread acclaim as a pioneer in the field of web-based e-mail when he co-founded Hotmail Corporation in 1996. As President and CEO, he guided Hotmail’s rapid rise to industry leadership and its eventual acquisition by Microsoft in 1998 for 400 million dollars, an amount which was unheard of at that time. Hotmail has now transitioned to Outlook – which remains one of the largest email providers in the world.
Sabeer Bhatia is now moving ahead as the Co-Founder and CEO of ShowReel, a Video Conversation and Analytics company that aims to revolutionize entrepreneurship and innovation through the use of short-form video content.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Vijay is an alumnus of the Delhi College of Engineering. He comes from a modest background and faced a lot of difficulties during his early years. His resilience and tenacity made him start One97, the company behind the brand Paytm. Vijay’s hard work and his efforts behind building India’s biggest fintech company finally paid off. Today, Paytm has become so well-known that even Warren Buffet has invested in the company. Paytm’s ₹18,300 crores initial public offering (IPO) was oversubscribed 1.89 times in what was said to be India’s biggest share sale.
Sachin Bansal
Sachin Bansal became the poster boy who transformed the e-commerce landscape of India. Sachin met Binny Bansal at IIT Delhi when they were students, and they later worked at Amazon together. E-commerce in India was in its infancy when Sachin and Binny quit Amazon to start Flipkart. Indians were not comfortable with the concept of online shopping, so this venture was a huge risk. But they believed in their dream and worked hard to achieve their goals. Flipkart has now been acquired by Walmart for a whopping $16 billion, and Sachin is known as the pioneer of the eCommerce industry in India.
Bhavish Aggarwal
Bhavish is a graduate of IIT Bombay. An entrepreneur at heart, he initially worked with Microsoft but quit after two years to start his own travel and tourism business. A bad experience one day while renting a cab made him see the opportunity in starting a cab rental company for people facing similar issues. That’s how he started Ola Cabs – to simply solve a consumer problem – and over time he’s taken the company to even greater heights. Ola has now entered the EV vehicle space as well and is valued at around $5 billion.
Also Read: Engineer’s day 2021: engineers who changed the world