India, Sept. 25 -- Every year on Engineers' Day, we celebrate the profession, and every year the celebration says roughly the same thing. Engineers build the nation. It is true, and it is also comfortable enough to be forgettable.

I would like to say something less comfortable. The engineers of this generation have been handed a job much larger than the one their predecessors had, and they will not be able to do it the way it has always been done.

Consider what India has committed to build. Homes at a scale we have never attempted. Hospitals, schools, airports, metro networks, data centres, roads and rail capacity, much of it within the same window. This is not an incremental expansion of what the country already does. It is a step chan...