Elattuvalapil Sreedharan (born 12 June 1932) is an Indian engineer and politician from the Indian state of Kerala. He is credited with changing the face of public transport in India with his leadership in building the Konkan Railway and the Delhi Metro while he served as the managing director of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) between 1995 and 2012.<ref name="metromankochi">{{cite news| url= http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-kerala/metro-man-batting-for-kochi/article3600719.ece| title= Metro man' batting for Kochi'| date= 4 July 2012}}</ref> Known as the Metro Man, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2001, the Padma Vibhushan in 2008, the Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 2005 by the French government and was named one of Asia's Heroes by Time magazine in 2003. Sreedharan was appointed by the former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to serve on the United Nations's High Level Advisory Group on Sustainable Transport (HLAG-ST) for a period of three years in 2015. He is a member of Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board. He briefly served as a national executive council member of Bharatiya Janata Party, but later quit active politics in December 2021. Early life and education E. Sreedharan was born on 12 June 1932 in present-day Karukaputhur, Palakkad District, Kerala, India into a Hindu Malayali family to Keezhveettil Neelakandan Moosath and Ammaluamma. Sreedharan's primary education was from Government Lower Primary School Chathannur near Pattambi in Palakkad district. He completed his education at the Basel Evangelical Mission Higher Secondary School and then went to the Victoria College in Palghat. He later-on completed his Civil Engineering degree from the Government Engineering College, Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, presently known as Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University. E. Sreedharan and T. N. Seshan were classmates at BEM High School and Victoria College in Palakkad. Both of them were selected for Engineering in JNTU Kakinada, a university in a port town in Andhra Pradesh, however, E. Sreedharan decided to pursue it, while T. N. Seshan decided to join Madras Christian College (MCC). Career as a professor For a short period, Sreedharan worked as a lecturer in Civil engineering at the Government Polytechnic, Kozhikode and a year at the Bombay Port Trust as an apprentice. He subsequently joined the Indian Railway Service of Engineers (IRSE), after clearing the Indian Engineering Services Exam in 1953 conducted by the UPSC. His first assignment was in the Southern Railway as a Probationary Assistant Engineer in December 1954. Government career In