Mysore was, at this time, a princely state. The British, who defeated Tipu in battle in 1799, had reinstalled the Wodeyar dynasty, which predated the Sultan and his father Haider Ali, in 1881. Overseen by the colonial government, the Wodeyars had, nonetheless, considerable autonomy within their kingdom. A series of bold, modernising Dewans headed the administrative machinery. They initiated several industrial projects, often backed by foreign capital and technology: railway lines were laid, and expatriate mining companies developed what became the Kolar Gold Fields.

In 1902, Mysore established one of India’s first hydroelectric works at an island on the Cauvery called Sivasamudram, ^[5] where a series of spectacular waterfalls marked the ideal setting for a power plant. This allowed the Mysore government to supply electricity to the mining companies of Kolar, promoting the gold-mining industry and bringing in valuable revenue.

But it turned out that during summer, the water levels in the Cauvery were too low to permit the plant to function at full capacity. This ended up becoming a nuisance for the state, which often defaulted on its commitments and had to pay large fines to the mining companies.

Visvesvaraya had recently taken early retirement from the Bombay Public Works Department (PWD) after working there for close to a quarter of a century, but he hailed from Mysore. Born in 1861 near Bangalore and educated in that city, he had first gone to the Bombay Presidency for a degree in civil engineering at Poona’s College of Science. After his studies, he joined the Bombay PWD, where he built a solid reputation, earning lavish encomiums from his superiors. (Senior British officials variously described him as ‘excellent,’ ‘talented,’ and, in one instance, ‘one of the ablest officers, European or Indian, of the Public Works Department, with whom it has been my pleasure and honour to work.’)

These plaudits came at a time when Indian engineers faced considerable prejudice. In a profession dominated by white Britons, Indians were paid less than their colleagues, and rarely rose to the highest ranks. Yet Visvesvaraya rose rapidly. For many years, he served as Sanitary Engineer to the Bombay government, designing water supply and drainage systems for cities across the Presidency. He administered large irrigation works in the Deccan region, introduced an innovative system of water distribution on the Nira Canal near Poona, and provided valuable testimony to the Indian Irrigation Commission of 1901-03. Nevertheless, he had higher aspirations, and the job in Mysore promised the freedom to explore these.

When he took over the reins of the Mysore PWD in 1909, one of the first things Visvesvaraya did was revive the idea of damming the Cauvery. In the Deccan, he’d studied and worked on the big dams at Bhatghar and Khadakwasla. The experience had convinced him that in regions without perennial, snow-fed rivers––in other words, most of peninsular India––large reservoirs were necessary to rationalise irrigation. He knew of the great multipurpose projects emerging around the world, and was especially inspired by the Aswan Dam on the Nile, which he’d seen during a world tour he undertook privately before taking up the Mysore position.

In 1910, Visvesvaraya had his team of Indian engineers ^[7] undertake fresh surveys and sketch preliminary proposals for a dam-and-reservoir project at Kannambadi. His plan differed from Dawes’s proposals on some key technical points; it was also more practical, while promising to be less expensive. ^[8] But it was a lot more than a quick fix for the immediate requirements of the mining companies—it was, in fact, a part of Visvesvaraya’s grand vision for Mysore. This vision involved a modernised system of irrigation, the promotion of commercial agriculture and a market economy, and the fostering of industrial enterprises.

Visvesvaraya’s reservoir was to be built in stages over a decade, finally reaching a capacity of around 39 thousand million cubic feet (39 TMC). It would bring 125,000 acres of land under irrigation, staving off famine in drought years and allowing cultivators to grow cash crops like sugarcane. It would also boost the flow at Sivasamudram, so the state could generate more electric power—not just for the mining companies but also for the new industries that he planned to promote in Mysore.

Visvesvaraya made astoundingly confident predictions about his project. In around a decade, he argued, ‘the return on the irrigation share of the capital may amount to as much as 8 percent,’ and at that stage Mysore ‘may get produce valued at about [₹] 1 ½ crores from irrigation alone.’ He also thought the project would help generate enough power to net the government more than ₹30 lakh per year in revenue.

All this was remarkable considering that for some four decades, the creation of a Cauvery reservoir had remained purely in the realm of theoretical possibility. The implications were manifold and the challenges—financial, legal and logistical—enormous. But Visvesvaraya was a man in a hurry. Over the next year, he threw himself into the task of getting the project under way. Consequently, he got involved in multiple, simultaneous, and frenetic negotiations.

‘If you have not come here to assure us of the willingness of the Company to pay £2 more per H.P. for power already supplied and £12 per H.P. for any additional power you might want,’ Visvesvaraya told Taylor brusquely, ‘you need not waste your breath in carrying on negotiations with this Government.’ ^[9]

Visvesvaraya didn’t want the deal to fall through, for his reservoir project depended on it. But he was no pushover either. Over the next month, the parties went back and forth several times.  Eventually the mining companies agreed to pay £12 per horsepower for the first ten years following the commissioning of a reservoir. ^[10]

Yet, after all this, Mysore were unable to guarantee that they would build a reservoir. As the months rolled on without a decision, the mining companies grew restive. But Mysore’s ability to get started depended on a number of other negotiations which were playing out simultaneously. Of these, the main challenge came from the government of the neighbouring Madras Presidency.

In October 1910, the Dewan of Mysore informed the Madras government about his state’s plans to build a dam on the Cauvery. Madras, unsurprisingly, raised concerns. They argued that the project would seriously deplete the volume of the Cauvery as it entered Madras and endanger the welfare of farmers across the sprawling Tanjore delta.

But this was not the only objection. It emerged that Madras had been planning their own reservoir on the Cauvery—a much larger one than Mysore’s—at Mettur, near Salem. Now they worried there wouldn’t be enough water left in the river at Mettur to make this a viable proposition.

In late November, Visvesvaraya travelled to Madras, where he parleyed with his counterparts in the PWD. A million acres of land were being irrigated in the Cauvery delta, the Madras engineers told him. To safeguard crops, they needed water to flow into the delta at a particular rate, represented by a reading of seven feet on the Upper Anicut near Trichy. In years when the flow measured less than this, the proposed reservoir in Mysore should not be permitted to store water.

Jnan Saran Chakravarti was a precocious 35-year-old official with a sterling academic and professional background. Hailing from Bengal, he had been a star student at Presidency College, Calcutta. In addition to holding degrees in science and mathematics, he was considered an exceptional scholar of English and Sanskrit, and had dabbled in legal studies. He began his career as a teacher, but soon joined the Imperial Finance Department after topping its nationwide selection exams. He served for a decade in Rangoon, Allahabad and Calcutta before being deputed to Mysore, on generous terms, in 1908.

Chakravarti was reared on principles of financial prudence, and challenged Visvesvaraya’s attempts to rush through proposals requiring large expenditures. On 22 November 1910, he produced a painstaking memo scrutinising every argument raised by Visvesvaraya in favour of the KRS and other projects.

Was it really necessary to spend scores of lakhs on a reservoir, he asked, just to slightly augment the power available to the mining companies? Would it not be much less expensive, and equally effective, to strengthen existing efforts at river conservancy? Gold deposits were finite, he pointed out. Data suggested ‘that Mysore gold mining has in all probability passed its zenith…the chances of the demand for power increasing considerably beyond the present standard are very remote indeed.’

As for the project’s additional irrigation component, he argued it was totally unnecessary. Visvesvaraya had claimed that the reservoir would irrigate 125,000 acres, resulting in substantial agricultural revenues a few years down the line. Chakravarti thought this was unrealistic, because the Cauvery valley in Mysore simply didn’t have the density of population needed for labour-intensive farming of the kind Visvesvaraya had in mind. Citing the report of the Indian Irrigation Commission issued some years previously, he emphasised that storage reservoirs designed to store rainwater were expensive to build and unlikely to yield high returns.

Most importantly, the projected cost of ₹160 lakh was unthinkable. The government coffers contained only around ₹124 lakh, of which ₹54 lakh was available for investment, assuming—and this was a crucial point—that they spent no money on anything else. Visvesvaraya and the Dewan wanted to borrow money from public deposits in savings banks in order to make up some of the shortfall. Chakravarti was against this, as it ‘really amount[ed] to incurring a loan which should be quickly repaid to avoid possible embarrassment.’ In sum, the reservoir project would drain the treasury while preventing the state from addressing other necessary issues.

Visvesvaraya retorted that Chakravarti had ‘grievously misunderstood’ the situation. Irrigated land would not depend exclusively on water from the reservoir; that was only in addition to the water available in the river during the rainy season. His ego had been pricked by the fact that the younger man had opposed his arguments by citing the report of the Irrigation Commission, the same body Visvesvaraya had so impressed a decade previously. ‘I am not likely,’ he wrote, ‘to recommend any proposal which the Irrigation Commission would not have approved.’

He also lectured Chakravarti on the principles of finance in progressive countries. ‘Whatever may be the case in old-fashioned Native States, modern Governments do not accumulate money. State accumulations are not meant to be locked up as they are in Mysore, earning a low rate of interest, but to be utilized to the fullest extent in attracting capital and developing the resources of the country.’

If they waited until Madras had built its reservoir at Mettur, Visvesvaraya warned, Mysore’s hopes of proceeding with its project would diminish. The mining companies would not wait endlessly either. ‘If counsels of inaction and timidity should prevail, a great opportunity would slip out of our hands.’ He was not above employing pressure tactics in negotiating with his Mysore colleagues. He also demanded from them a certain degree of trust and deference, and didn’t always bother to give detailed defences of his projections. ^[13]

But Chakravarti was not cowed by Visvesvaraya’s manner. He protested that he and his colleagues were not given all the relevant papers to see, and when they were, they were given very little time to digest them. Over the next few months, in the midst of meetings and discussions, Chakravarti produced a series of further memos, arguing eloquently against hasty decisions, demanding justifications, and trying to safeguard the financial security of the state.

Chakravarti eventually conceded that the state did need a reservoir, at least to guarantee electricity to the mining companies. He was still unconvinced about the irrigation component, a huge waste of money in his view, and the subject of some sleight-of-hand from Visvesvaraya. ‘It is financially fallacious,’ Chakravarti argued, ‘to couple the returns of the electric side and the irrigation side of the scheme and say that the return will be so much on the whole.’

When Visvesvaraya and the Dewan proposed building a first stage with foundations large enough to permit the eventual raising of the dam, Chakravarti argued this was risky unless they were absolutely sure that Madras was going to allow them to build a bigger reservoir eventually. Otherwise, it would mean a loss of ₹30-40 lakh.

Both combatants were equally spirited. The Financial Secretary thought Visvesvaraya’s plans were seductive but irresponsible. ‘[T]he idea of almost unlimited future development has a very powerful charm; and an advocate of the less expensive scheme runs the risk of appearing in the light of a narrow and short-sighted individual,’ he acknowledged. But huge expenditures required scrutiny. Visvesvaraya pressed his point in his response:  Chakravarti, he said, was unable to see the larger social and economic benefits of the proposed projects, ‘[concerning] himself solely with debt heads, cash balances and interest charges.’

A difference of worldviews and temperaments lay at the heart of the debates. Chakravarti was not the only official to have misgivings about Visvesvaraya’s proposals, but he was certainly the most vocal and the most articulate. The finance officer was careful and scholarly; the engineer was expansive and impatient, not wanting to miss the wood for the trees. The former thought the state’s primary responsibility was to maintain enough funds for times of distress; the latter believed bold steps were needed to make such distress redundant.

The stalemate could easily have continued for years. But Mysore, for all the checks and balances in its system of government, was a monarchy. So after a marathon run of correspondence, meetings, and negotiations, it fell to the Maharaja to take a final decision. And Visvesvaraya had his ear. Although no decision was forthcoming for several months, Krishnaraja IV finally sanctioned the reservoir project in October 1911.

The KRS and its irrigation canals are clearly central to the lives of many, for whom Visvesvaraya remains the face of the project. The district reportedly has hundreds of memorials to the engineer. In one village, I saw a small Ganesha temple with busts of Visvesvaraya and Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV in the yard. The former was described as annadaata, provider of food. In a public park in the centre of Mandya town stands a towering statue of the former Dewan, sponsored by the government-owned Mysore Sugar Company.

All of this suggests a near-deification of Visvesvaraya in the present day. But Visvesvaraya’s vision was contested in his time, and his legacy is not without its opponents today. One set of critics claims that he has received too much credit for the KRS. When, in 2020, the Karnataka government decided to put up statues of Visvesvaraya and Krishnaraja IV at the South Gate of the KRS, protestors argued against placing the two men on the same footing. The benevolent and far-sighted Maharaja was the key figure behind the project, they said; Visvesvaraya only carried out his wishes as a part of his job. Moreover, he only played a peripheral role in a project that took two decades to complete. He was not even the originator of the project; that honour should go to the intrepid Captain Bernard Dawes. ^[15]

There is no doubt that the execution of the KRS was the work of several capable engineers, and any attempt at moving away from a simplistic, Great Man version of history is welcome. Even in Visvesvaraya’s time, his subordinates played key roles in the studies that undergirded his proposals. It is also true that Dawes had prepared a scheme before Visvesvaraya.

Yet, as our story indicates, it is also true that the idea was languishing before Visvesvaraya showed how it could be implemented in a relatively practical and self-contained manner. Moreover, only someone with Visvesvaraya’s nation-wide reputation as an engineer, his clout, and his immense drive could have got the project cleared in the face of the numerous obstacles it faced. In this sense, he was undoubtedly the pivotal figure behind the project.

Ultimately, the backstory of the KRS raises questions far more interesting than an apportioning of credit. Visvesvaraya’s approach was an early instance of the technocratic thinking that became a centrepiece of public policy in modern India, and its history shows us both the triumphs and the limits of such an approach.

Large technical projects seem to be imbued with the cold light of reason. But they can’t be divorced from political considerations, which necessarily touch upon questions of distribution and equity. These projects materially transform lives and economies; but they often come with serious environmental consequences. When, and in what circumstances, do they make sense? To navigate these big questions—as much of this time as of a century past—we need not only the brilliance of lone heroes, but also political and intellectual debate that incorporates a wide range of perspectives.