When Shivani Handa was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to study a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, she was used to being outnumbered. “In my undergraduate degree in India, there were four women to 150 men,” she says. But nothing prepared her for the reaction from her advisor at Carnegie Mellon, who walked up to their first meeting prepared to meet with a man.
“He looked me up and down, and appeared startled,” says Shivani. “He said, ‘But you’re a woman.’ I replied: ‘Yes, why are you so surprised?’” He said he hadn’t seen an Indian girl do her masters in mechanical engineering for many, many years.” And so, she found herself having to explain why she was there.
Crossing continents
Shivani’s path to engineering was carved from an early age. As a little girl, she and her twin sister would beg their father to take them to the factory in India where he worked as a managing director. “I was in complete awe of the entire magnitude of the design and manufacturing process,” she says. “I realized early on that what I like about engineering is that it’s not a conceptual field where you have to imagine — you can actually see what’s happening.”
At 15, she traveled to the US alone to embark on a high school exchange program through Rotary. Her host father was also an engineer, and when she told him she was having trouble deciding between engineering or law, he immediately drove her and another exchange student to a brewery he was building on the east coast.
“The other student was bored out of her mind looking at designs and manufacturing,” recalls Shivani. “But I thought it was a super interesting experience to see something evolve from start to finish. Of course, I was too young to taste the beer but to watch something being created was just so exciting. When I came back to India the decision was simple: I pursued engineering.”
Shivani did her undergraduate degree in India at the Maharashtra Institute of Technology and later returned to the US to get her Masters in Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. Shivani then landed a job in Las Vegas designing cranes, but still felt there was a piece of the puzzle missing.
“Somewhere along the way, I realized that I didn’t have enough business knowledge to understand what makes a product successful,” she says, “so I decided to go to business school, got an MBA in finance and strategy, and joined the Siemens Graduate Program right after that.”
She says the program was a great opportunity for her: “With the three rotations, I got the chance to delve deeper into various functions and broaden my knowledge base, while using my background in engineering and business.”
Choosing to call India home
To say that her six years at Siemens have been varied is an understatement; she has now moved to her fifth city. She has worked as a financial controller in Erlangen in Germany and Gurgaon in India. She’s worked in a factory on the product side, as well as project controlling at substations. Essentially, moving from a small piece of the pie to the larger picture. She has consulted on factories in Dresden and Nuremberg.
While living in Bangalore, Shivani was a Senior Manager working on the Smart Cities Mission and AMRUT. These are some of the largest schemes ever undertaken by any government, not just in terms of funds but also outreach. The Smart Cities mission covers 100 cities while the Amrut mission covers 500 smaller towns.
“Power is one of the building blocks of city infrastructure, so I felt the transition to my current role was made easier because of my Siemens Graduate Program background,” says Shivani.
“A lot of people ask why I moved back to India after working in the US and Germany. The answer is simple: there’s just so much to be done here. If everyone who is smart or intelligent moves out of the country, then India will never improve. I really think change begins from within.”
It’s estimated that India loses $2 billion annually from computer experts leaving to work in the US. Once you scale up that figure to incorporate all the scientists, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and other highly skilled workers emigrating all over the world, you start to appreciate the seriousness of India’s brain drain crisis.
Shivani’s husband grew up in Singapore, one of the world’s best planned cities, and then lived in the US for 10 years. “He keeps asking me, ‘So, you really never want to move out of India?’” says Shivani. “And my reply is always the same: I know the quality of life isn’t the best, but if we stay here, we can actually do something about it. If you can be part of change, why would you walk away from that?”
In Shivani’s eyes, change is desperately needed in India. “Diarrhea is the third leading cause of childhood mortality and is responsible for 13% of all deaths each year in children under five years of age,” she says. “Can you believe that? This is purely down to the fact that we don’t have clean drinking water. Come on, it’s 2017 and we still have 300,000 children dying every year because of dirty water? Everyone sees India as a superpower and a great place to do business, but I think it’s high time that we focus on the quality of life.”
Building smart cities from the ground up
When urban development planners talk about building smart cities, what they’re usually referring to is building digital urban infrastructures to make cities more livable, resilient and better able to respond to challenges.
In India, says Shivani, it’s more complicated than that. “Most cities and small towns don’t even have basic infrastructure, let alone any sort of digital infrastructure,” she says. “We don’t have 24/7 power. We don’t have 24/7 water. There’s a huge issue of solid waste management. How do you convince talented people to stay in India if you don’t provide them with the basic infrastructure?”
In recognition of this, in 2015 the Indian government launched the Smart Cities Mission, an urban renewal program aimed at developing 100 cities that lack basic infrastructure over the next five years.
“There are close to 1.3 billion people in India and, according to the World Bank, we have the world’s largest un-electrified population,” says Shivani. “There are still 240 million people in India who don’t have electricity. The mission gives us the resources we need to start providing these cities with basic infrastructure. Then we’ll add a smart layer to it, which will integrate all these different applications — for example water, health, governance, citizen services, and power. Hopefully we will be able to reach some sort of operational excellence and reduce our response time to citizens.”
Thinking globally, acting locally
In 2016, India recorded a non-revenue water rate — that is, water that’s ‘lost’ before it reaches the customer — of 34%, which is well above the global average of 28%. Theft makes up a small amount of that figure, but Shivani says one of the major culprits is actually pipe leakage.
“We have no sensors or detection systems to tell us when or where there’s been a leak,” she says. “So Siemens developed a water management system called SIWA Leak, which has an algorithm that pinpoints exactly where the leakage is. In a lot of towns, when the water stops because of a leak, they simply start digging in the hope of finding it. SIWA enables us to make an informed decision as to the best course of action.”
Another technology that Shivani and her team are hoping to introduce to the Smart Cities Mission is ITS, the Intelligent Traffic System. “Everyone who comes to India talks about its traffic problems,” says Shivani. “Even in Bangalore, where I work, it can take me 35–40 minutes just to travel 1km.”
A software system built on the Internet of Things, ITS enables the close monitoring of a city’s infrastructure, but can also intervene and control traffic flows — either across a certain street network or in a focused area.
“The streets are so congested — we desperately need an intelligent traffic system,” says Shivani. “We need to keep track of people who violate traffic rules because otherwise people don’t tend to follow them. People will say, ‘Oh it’s fine, if there’s no cop standing there, I’ll just go on the red light’, stuff like that.”
In 2016, Siemens introduced some of the elements of the ITS to Kolkata and within a year saw a 30% reduction in congestion. For Shivani, that’s true innovation. “It’s not always about being technologically superior and having the best product in the market — it’s also about making a product that’s accessible to millions of people,” she says. “Something that actually benefits their life and improves it. This is what our focus is in India.”
Shaping India’s tomorrow
Shivani’s first meeting as a masters student at Carnegie Mellon might have got off to a rocky start, but her year at the university played a significant role in her decision to stay in India.
In 2007, she was selected as part of the team competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, the richest competition in the world. To win, the team had to drive a robot on the lunar surface and transmit images to earth. As part of the competition, Shivani gave a one-to-one presentation to Dr Abdul Kalam, then India’s president, on lunar robots.
“As I was leaving the presentation, Dr Kalam stopped, turned around and said, ‘We need people like you. I hope you plan on coming back to India.’ I think about that all the time and that’s what I love about my job. We’re helping to build India. Little by little maybe, but we’re definitely building a better future for our kids.”
Shivani is a Senior Manager for Cities Account Management (Urban Development) at Siemens, India. She now lives in Mumbai, recently moving from Bangalore with her husband and two children. This is her fifth city with Siemens. Find out more about working at Siemens.
Illustration: Charlotte Trounce
