The New India Foundation has announced Aparajith Ramnath as the winner of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2025 for his book Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya published by Penguin Viking.
Mr Ramnath will be presented with the award, which includes a cash prize of INR 15 lakhs, a trophy, and a citation, at the official ceremony at the 14th Edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival on December 6, 2025. The NIF Book Prize honours exceptional nonfiction writing on modern and contemporary Indian history, with Mr Ramnath’s book standing out for its scholarship that reconstructs the storied life of M. Visvesvaraya (1861-1962) arguably the most famous Indian engineer of the 20th century.
The eminent Jury for 2025 KCBP includes N Chandrasekaran (Chairman of Tata Sons and Tata Group), Manish Sabharwal (Entrepreneur), Niraja Gopal Jayal (Political Scientist), Srinath Raghavan (Historian), Rahul Matthan (Partner- Trilegal), Jawed Ashraf (Former Ambassador of India to France), and Yamini Aiyar (Public Policy Scholar).
The Jury Citation for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2025 notes: “This is a remarkable biography of an extraordinary figure: an engineer, a bureaucrat, an administrator, a constitutionalist, and a developmental thinker. In a fine display of the biographer’s art, as well as the historian’s craft, Mr Ramnath explores the many social, political, and intellectual worlds that Visvesvaraya traversed and the deep genetic imprint that he left behind on the Indian nation-state and its technological aspirations.”
Selected from a shortlist of five outstanding books, Mr Ramnath’s work joins the ranks of notable narratives that bring new perspectives. His book highlights the role of a man, regarded as a national icon, who played a pivotal role in India’s economic planning and industrialization in the 20th century.
