The Country’s First Woman Engineer

A great pleasure and privilege it was to be introduced to, and chat with Premala Sivaprakasapillai Sivasegaram – Sri Lanka’s very first woman engineer, home-country qualified. First impression of her that struck me was her graciousness and unpretentiousness, and her exemplifying typical elite Jaffna Tamil dignity and beauty. It was Rukmal Dias de Silva who introduced me to Premala, her friend and classmate at LC. We met at Leelananda de Silva and Rukmal’s home in Layards Road, Colombo 5; me persuading her to let me feature her – a distinguished Sri Lankan woman – in my Sunday Island column.

Premala’s father – T Sivaprakasapillai – was a civil engineer and worked in the Colombo harbor, also lectured at the University of Ceylon, Colombo. Though a housewife, her mother too exhibited technical skills which were harnessed by her father asking her to draw a plan for the house he intended building for the family. She did it on square-ruled paper under her husband’s preliminary instructions. Premala has two brothers who both became engineers: one mechanical and the other electrical.

Education

Schooling right through at Ladies’ College, Colombo, Premala excelled in math. As a child her favourite play items were her dolls and Meccano Makers Toolbox, spending hours constructing all sorts of representations of buildings and contraptions. When in Form V and asked what her career would be, she instantly answered “engineering”. Doctors, lawyers, lecturers, teachers were the usual choice of career for girls then. Her answer had been more tongue in cheek and to perhaps arouse curiosity but when known in the extended family, her choice was not approved of. Conservative relatives and friends clucked their disapproval of a girl wanting to step out of tradition.

Premala did just that: she entered the University of Ceylon in 1960 and went through a general science course for one year at the Faculty of Science. The next year she joined the Faculty of Engineering in Colombo – the one girl among 60 male students. Questions came forth from me: Were you ragged? Did the boys accept you civilly? No to the first and yes to the second. She was soon treated just like one of them and settled down happily to her studies. Dean of the Engineering Faculty was Prof E O E Pereira who, Premala said, did not hide the fact he disapproved of girls entering his Faculty. He held the view they’d take the place which better suited a man; would get the degree and then play safe as wife, mother, housewife; meaning give up or select convenient-for-family stations and ‘easy’ engineering.

Listening to the rest of her personal story, this was a completely wrong supposition with Premala. She selected civil engineering of the three options on offer: civil, electrical and mechanical. Practical training and work was at the Maradana Technical College and lectures were at the Faculty of Engineering housed in temporary buildings in the Colombo campus of the University of Ceylon, dubbed ‘Takaran Faculty’. She graduated with a First Class Honours degree in four years: 1964.

Premala, now ready to earn a salary, was first an instructor in the Faculty of Engineering which had moved to the new buildings at Peradeniya in October 1964. Winning a Ceylon Government University Scholarship, she utilized the money for further overseas qualification. She selected Somerville College, Oxford University, and spent three years in the Dept of Engineering Science, residing in Graduate House of the College. In 1969 she earned her doctorate – DPhil

Career

After graduation from Oxford, she worked in the Ministry of Public Building and Works, UK. She did not want to settle in Britain so returning to Ceylon in 1970, she joined the Department of Buildings under the compulsory Public Service Act and worked the first year in Kandy. Her initial salary was Rs 500/= as for a new graduate. She sat for professional engineering examinations, which enhanced her income. She was by now a mother.

Her first solo building supervision was the Matale Drug Store for the Ministry of Health. Transferred to the Structural Design Office in Colombo, she recalled the design of buildings for the National Archives under Chief Arch. Pani Tennakoon. She acknowledged she learnt much from the Chief Structural Engineer Mr Sundaranadarajah and also from the masonry baas in Matale. Seven years later she was promoted to the post of Chief Structural Engineer.

She worked under Pieter Keuneman who was Minister of Housing and Construction in the Sirimavo Bandaranaike Government, 1970 -77. In 1978 she would have been driven hard by Ranasinghe Premadasa who was Minister of Housing and Construction in the 1977 Cabinet of JRJ, appointed Minister on February 2 that year. Along with the responsibilities of her job, she served on several committees, such as those in the Ministry of Local Government, Housing and Construction and the Bureau of Sri Lanka Standards. She noted emphatically that she met with no political interference or injustice.

However, racism was raising its ugly head until it came to a terrifying peak in 1983. She left Sri Lanka in 1985 to be a Consultant to the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation UK, in Barbados. I did not ask her why the change. She made no mention of any impediments in this country to her doing her work in the Department of Building. However, there may have been emerging difficulties of life in Colombo and educating her son. Her contract in Barbados ended in 1988. It was no year to return to the home country, so she moved to London and enrolled in Imperial College, where her husband was a Research Fellow, for a MSc in Management, She worked in the Property Services Agency and the Camden Council. Back home for good in 1997, she joined the Engineering Technology Faculty of the Open University of Sri Lanka.

Other credentials

Her professional career achievements given above seem totally enough for a person, particularly a woman. But no, it was not so for her. Combining her being wife to a very successful professional, Professor Sivasegaram in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Peradeniya, and mother of a highly qualified son, she was an active member of the Institution of Engineers of Sri Lanka (IESL). She edited the quarterly journal Engineer from 1977 to 1980 and has been a Member of the IESL Council. She was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Structural Engineers, Sri Lanka, in 2000.

A remarkable achievement of Premala’s is the most commendable centenary commemoration publication she compiled and guided through publication for the IESL’s hundredth year celebrations, detailing its functioning from 1906 to 2006. Titled History of Engineering in Sri Lanka: a brief overview, it is in truth much more than an overview.

Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidential message is item one followed by that of the then President of the IESL, Eng. Jayantha Ranatunga. Premala’s two paged Foreword, is followed by Chapter I Introduction and so on to Chapter 7 which gives a brief history of the IESL. A layman like me –completely indifferent to engineering in all its subject ramifications – found the coffee table publication fascinating; so much to gather starting From Earliest Times to 500 AD, and then dealing with ancient irrigation systems; ancient cities and capitals; European colonisers’ arrival, the Kandyan Kingdom, and so on to modern times, including industrial ventures, disaster management and the universities. It is a compendium of most valuable information on Ceylon/ Sri Lanka from the beginning of the 20^th century to the 21^st, presented textually, diagrammatically, with photographs and of course including quoted text from publications, particularly reports. The spectrum touched on with fair detail indicated to me that ‘engineering tourism’ could be a source to be tapped.

So here given is a word portrait of an admirable Sri Lankan woman, rich in diverse capabilities, a pathfinder or glass ceiling breaker and yet so gracious in simplicity. She richly deserves more recognition for her immense contribution to the country’s development.