New Delhi: Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta drew parallels between engineers and the Hindu deity Hanuman at an event here Monday. “Sometimes I feel our engineers are like Hanuman. We have to remind them of their strength. They forget in between,” she said.
Gupta was addressing a gathering of more than 1,000 engineers from various departments, including Municipal Corporation of India, Delhi Development Authority, National Highways Authority of India, and the Delhi Jal Board. “Many times, when we used to take rounds with our engineers, we used to tell them that ‘it will be like this’. So, they used to suggest on their own. We used to keep on looking at the problems,” she added.
Gupta was invited as the chief guest at the National Engineers’ Day celebration event, organised by the Indian Engineers’ Association at Kedarnath Sahni Auditorium.
National Engineers’ Day is celebrated each year on 15 September to honour the birth anniversary of Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, civil engineer and 19th diwan of the erstwhile state of Mysore.
At the event, Delhi chief minister also felicitated 32 engineers from different departments with an honorary award. Ramveer Tanwar, also known as ‘Pondman of India,’ was among the recipients.
“This year’s Engineers’ Day is dedicated to the infrastructure of our country,” said Satish Upadhyay, vice chairperson of the Delhi Municipal Council, while detailing recent achievements on the same front.
The Delhi CM, in turn, had an appeal to engineers: “Today, the creativity and compassion towards your profession, if you put it to sleep, then the speed of the city will become very slow.”
She highlighted that even small things get ignored on account of a ‘casual attitude’ towards work. “If you work in the private sector, then you have to double your creativity. You have to put wheels, sometimes wings.”
Sunil Sehgal, a retired executive engineer from the Delhi Development Authority who spoke to ThePrint at the event, said, “There has been improvement. Actually, today’s engineers are better than us. They are educated, and they know computers. In the past, we had to wait for a long time to get a quotation or a flyer. Now, we have computers.”
In her speech, Rekha Gupta also took a dig at past governments. “Fifteen-year-old governments and 11-year-old governments have come and gone. They never understood your pain, nor did they channelise this system. New charging has to be done. Until the old system is not removed, energy will not come into things. I am with you. But I want to know if you are with me,” she concluded, with an urgent call to revive the Capital.
Ojas Jaiswal is an alum of ThePrint School of Journalism, currently interning with ThePrint.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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