“Please don’t make me unnecessarily famous,” she wrote in a candid LinkedIn post, just days after the inauguration. “I am one of thousands who deserve appreciation for the Chenab Bridge.”

metro india news  I hyderabad

As the Chenab Railway Bridge — now the world’s tallest railway arch bridge — was officially inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 6, accolades flooded in from across the nation. Among the names celebrated, one stood out: Dr. Madhavi Latha, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

Dubbed by the media as “the woman behind the Chenab Bridge”, Dr. Latha was hailed as the one who made the impossible possible. Headlines praised her 17-year-long association with the project. Social media lit up with congratulatory posts and admiration. Yet, the woman at the centre of the storm remains strikingly modest.

“Please don’t make me unnecessarily famous,” she wrote in a candid LinkedIn post, just days after the inauguration. “I am one of thousands who deserve appreciation for the Chenab Bridge.”

A geotechnical consultant to Afcons Infrastructure Ltd., the engineering firm behind the bridge, Dr. Latha played a crucial role in stabilising the steep and unpredictable Himalayan slopes upon which the bridge stands. Her work focused on slope stabilization and designing deep foundations—an essential but often unseen part of the engineering marvel.

In her post, she humbly redirected the spotlight: “All other media statements like ‘woman behind the mission’, ‘made the impossible possible’ or ‘done miracles to build the bridge’ are baseless,” she wrote. “The real glory belongs to Indian Railways, Afcons, and the thousands of unsung heroes who made this dream a reality.”

Her humility, however, has only deepened the admiration she’s received. “Many fathers have written to me saying they want their daughters to be like me. Young students are now aspiring to become civil engineers. That, I think, is the greatest reward,” she said.

Despite being overseas — attending a technical conference in Spain — Dr. Latha has used her platform to spotlight the sheer complexity of the Chenab Bridge project. Rising 359 metres above the Chenab River, the bridge stands taller than the Eiffel Tower by 35 metres. Built at a cost of ₹1,486 crore, it connects the Kashmir Valley with the rest of India via rail — a feat over a century in the making.

Dr. Latha and her team adopted a “design-as-you-go” approach, a method born out of necessity as the mountainous terrain revealed unexpected geological surprises — fractured rocks, hidden cavities, and unforeseen obstacles. “Our objective was to design for the worst-case scenarios,” she said. “But what we didn’t know were the secrets the mountain would throw at us.”

She chronicled her experience in a scholarly paper titled Design as You Go: The Case Study of Chenab Railway Bridge, published in a special women’s edition of the Indian Geotechnical Journal, which she shared on her LinkedIn profile.

“I’m happy to have been part of a project that helped realise a century-old dream,” Dr. Latha reflected. And while she resists the limelight, the story of her quiet resilience, scientific precision, and refusal to bask in solitary glory makes her, perhaps, the most remarkable part of this national triumph.