Metro Rail News November 2017

Meet Annie Roy: The Only Woman Tunnel Engineer of India
S
he must be a visitor. That's the murmur she heard
when Annie Sinha Roy walked into the
construction site of Delhi Metro on the first day of
her job. "There were about 100 men, most of them
labourers and a few engineers. They thought I
would not last long. There were no toilets, no place
to sit and debris all around," the country's first
and only woman tunnel engineer recalls.
"After a couple of hours, I was standing in front
of a huge machine that had to break the ground
but it was stuck. A German engineer and my
boss asked me to get inside it and open a nut.
Even before I realized what I was doing, my face
was gushed by hydraulic oil. The colleague said
my face would glow for the rest of my life.
Today tunnelling is my life," says Annie, 35,
ahead of the inauguration of Bangalore Metro.
In Bengaluru, she alone steered Godavari, the
tunnel-boring machine that recently finished
boring underground from Sampige Road to
Majestic. She calls it her tunnel because the
machine had got damaged just when she joined
as assistant engineer in Bangalore Metro Rail
Corporation (BMRC) in May 2015. After that,
she used to spend eight hours in the tunnel
every day. "Sometimes when people see me
with the helmet and jacket and learn that I work
for Namma Metro, they would only ask when
the work will get over," she says. Recalling her
long journey, she said she wanted to pursue her
masters after completing degree in mechanical
engineering from Nagpur University.
"But I lost my father and I had to get a job to bail
out my family from financial crisis. I got a job
offer from Senbo, a contractor with Delhi Metro
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