Malur Ramaswamy Srinivasan (1930-2025): The Quiet Engineer of the Indian Atom

MR Srinivasan, who died on May 20 in Ooty at the age of 95, belonged to a vanishing class of Indian public figures: men who built institutions not for personal grandeur, but out of a near-ascetic belief in the country’s future. Through embargoes, indifference, budget cuts, and international scorn, he remained at the centre of India’s nuclear power effort: designing reactors, refining fuel cycles, and threading a technological programme through the eye of a political needle. In a field that began with Homi Bhabha’s velvet charisma and often collapsed into bureaucratic opacity, Srinivasan’s legacy lies in what was actually built.

Born in Bangalore on January 5, 1930, Srinivasan studied mechanical engineering at the University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, graduating in 1950. He then crossed continents to McGill University in Canada, where he earned his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in engineering. His specialisation, gas turbine technology, might have taken him into aeronautics or high-speed propulsion in a wealthier country. But Srinivasan returned to India at a time when the most urgent engineering questions involved energy, and energy, in the postcolonial imagination, was everything.

In September 1955, he joined the Department of Atomic Energy, which had been established the previous year under the leadership of Homi Bhabha. At the time, India was on the cusp of achieving criticality with Apsara, its first research reactor, which would go operational the following year. Srinivasan was among the first engineers charged with turning atomic theory into infrastructure by drafting designs, refining instrumentation, and building the systems that would one day power the grid.

The blueprint he helped implement was audacious. India’s nuclear doctrine was not content to mimic the West. Bhabha laid out a three-stage plan that aimed to make India energy-independent using what it had in abundance. The idea was to start with reactors that used natural uranium to generate plutonium, then move to fast breeder reactors that could convert thorium into a more usable fuel, and finally run advanced reactors powered by thorium itself. It was a long game, technically sound, suited to India’s resources, but slow by design. India had little uranium but vast thorium reserves. The challenge was time. Srinivasan had the patience for this kind of slowness.

In the 1960s, Srinivasan played a central role in the engineering and design of India’s first indigenously constructed power reactors. By 1967, he had become Chief Project Engineer for the Madras Atomic Power Station at Kalpakkam. There, in the aftermath of Canada’s abrupt withdrawal of support following India’s 1974 nuclear test at Pokhran, he led the adaptation of the CANDU reactor design to Indian conditions. His team was forced to reverse-engineer critical components, localise supply chains, and commission reactors. What began as a diplomatic rupture became an engineering renaissance, and Srinivasan was at its centre.

By 1974, he was Director of the Power Projects Engineering Division. A decade later, in 1984, he was appointed Chairman of the Nuclear Power Board, overseeing the country’s growing reactor fleet. In 1987, he rose to lead the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Atomic Energy as Secretary. That same year, he helped steer the creation of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), which consolidated the country’s civilian nuclear infrastructure under one public umbrella and laid the groundwork for its next generation of reactors.

By then, the glamour of the atomic age had faded. Chernobyl had exposed nuclear energy’s capacity for catastrophe. India’s own economy was faltering. Dissent had begun to form, softly, around the environmental and human costs of reactor construction. And yet, over the course of his career, Srinivasan played a leading role in bringing seven reactors into commercial operation, advancing another seven into construction, and preparing plans for four more.

There was a practicality in his leadership. He understood the metallurgy and the flow dynamics of reactors of course, but he also had a strategic view of India’s energy needs. He was a persistent voice in committees, arguing for the retention and expansion of nuclear power capacity in the face of growing reliance on coal and oil. Public honours came, albeit late: the Padma Shri in 1984, the Padma Bhushan in 1990, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2015. He remained part of policy and planning conversations long after his official tenure had ended. He served on the Planning Commission and advised successive governments.

His career spanned the entire arc of India’s nuclear journey, from the romanticism of the 1950s to the defiance of the 1970s, through the isolation of the 1980s and into the global reintegration of the 2000s. Srinivasan is survived by his family, by the institutions he helped shape, and by the reactors that continue to hum across India. There will be no dome, no plinth of national memory to mark his passing. But in the sealed cores of Kalpakkam, Tarapur, Narora, and Kakrapar, where control rods descend, steam rises, and electricity is drawn from the architecture of fission, his legacy persists.

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