India's first woman civil engineer who designed and built bridges

Decades before “women in STEM” became a buzzword, she was out there building India’s future one bridge at a time.

In the 1950s, when engineering classrooms in India were overwhelmingly male, a young woman from Mumbai quietly made history. Shakuntala A. Bhagat became India’s first woman civil engineer, graduating from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) in 1953. She didn’t stop there she went on to earn a master’s degree in structural engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, becoming one of the very few Indian women of her time to study abroad in that field.

Back home, while India was laying the foundations of a modern nation, Shakuntala decided to literally build them. Along with her husband, Dr. Anant Bhagat, she co-founded Quadricon Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering company