Every September 15th, India marks the birth anniversary of Bharat Ratna Sir M Visvesvaraya, a man who built dams, tamed floods, and laid the groundwork for modern India armed with little more than a slide rule and a stubborn belief that “it is better to work out than rust out”. National Engineers Day 2026 gives the manufacturing and engineering community a reason to pause and take stock. Not just of how far we’ve come technologically, but of what kind of engineers we’re becoming.
I’ve spent close to three decades in manufacturing. I’ve watched shop floors go from analogue dials to digital twins, from paper logs to sensors that talk to each other in real time. Engineering hasn’t just changed, it’s being rewritten. Sir M V built things to last. Our job now is slightly different, and arguably harder: we must build things that last without costing the earth in the process.
Engineers’ Day 2026: Engineering education must shift from theory to real-world skills, experts say
From Craft to Code
For most of the last century, good engineering was about tolerances, load calculations, and knowing exactly when something would fail before it actually did. None of that has gone away. But it’s been layered with something new. Today’s engineers work alongside AI models, IoT sensors, and generative design software that can compress what used to take years of trial and error into a few weeks of simulation.
Walk through a modern factory and you’ll likely find AI systems quietly reading data off hundreds of machines, spotting patterns humans would take hours to notice. We use something similar ourselves. A troubleshooting job that once ate up half a shift now gets flagged and diagnosed in minutes. I don’t see this as machines taking over engineering work. If anything, it hands the boring, repetitive diagnostic grind back to the algorithms and leaves engineers free to do the part that actually needs a human brain: judgment, creative problem-solving, deciding what matters. Some call this Industry 5.0. Whatever the label, it’s just engineering getting its priorities back in order.
Sustainability Isn’t a Bolt-On Anymore
There was a time when sustainability got tacked onto a project after the “real” engineering was finished, a compliance box, a line item, something the marketing team asked for at the last minute. That approach doesn’t hold up anymore, and honestly, it shouldn’t have held up for as long as it did. The more interesting work happening right now is engineers baking sustainability into a product from the very first sketch, not the final review.
Take materials. Bio-based oils are replacing petroleum derivatives. Recycled and end-of-life materials are finding their way back into high-performance products instead of landfills. Natural raw materials are increasingly traced back to their source, with sourcing commitments that can actually be verified rather than just claimed. We’ve seen concept products built from close to three-quarters sustainable material content, a number that would have sounded implausible a decade ago. None of this happens without digital tools quietly doing the heavy lifting in the background: molecular modelling, AI-assisted formulation, virtual testing that cuts both R&D time and physical waste.
Engineer’s Day: Why India’s AI, semiconductor push demands new-age engineers- VIT Bhopal VC explains
It’s not only about what goes into the product either. It’s about where it’s made. Factories now run on real-time energy dashboards, predictive maintenance that catches a failing machine before it wastes a batch of raw material, and increasingly, power drawn from rooftop solar rather than the grid. Every bit of scrap avoided through smarter quality checks, every kilowatt saved through better scheduling, is really an engineering decision wearing an environmental hat.
Mobility’s Particular Challenge
The automotive and mobility world carries a slightly heavier burden here. Engineers in this space have to enable the shift to electric and low-emission transport, while making sure the components that make that shift possible (batteries, motors, tyres, structural parts) are themselves built responsibly. EVs are heavier, and they generate heat and torque differently than combustion vehicles ever did. That’s forced a rethink of construction, thermal management, and rolling resistance, all in service of squeezing more range out of a battery without cutting corners on safety. It’s a good example of sustainability being solved at the system level, not just patched onto individual parts, and it’s quietly reshaping how entire supplier networks operate.
A Note to the Next Generation
If I had one thing to say to engineers just starting out, it would be this: technical ability will always matter, but it isn’t enough on its own anymore. The engineers who end up shaping the next fifty years will be the ones who ask “should we build this?” just as often as they ask “can we?” Digital tools have given us the power to simulate, predict, and optimise almost anything. Sustainability is what gives that power a point. Treating these as two separate boxes to check misses the bigger picture entirely, they’re really one design philosophy, and the sooner the profession internalises that, the better off we’ll all be.
Sir M V once said progress depends on the education of a nation’s people. I’d add a footnote to that: it also depends on the imagination of its engineers. India has real ambitions to become a serious player in deep-tech, clean-tech, and advanced manufacturing. Getting there will take an engineering community willing to prove, over and over if necessary, that growth and sustainability were never actually opposed to each other. We just hadn’t imagined hard enough.
So, on this National Engineers’ Day, here’s a small tribute to everyone doing that work — in labs, on factory floors, behind screens full of data, out in the field getting their hands dirty: keep building smart, keep building responsibly, and keep building for a future you probably won’t fully see, but one you’re still on the hook for.
Happy Engineers’ Day.
(This article is written by Neeraj Kanwar, Vice Chairman & Managing Director, Apollo Tyres Ltd)
