New Delhi, April 18 -- A soft-spoken civil engineer with a fondness for early mornings and scriptures, Elattuvalapil Sreedharan appears to be an unlikely revolutionary.

Yet few individuals have altered urban India as profoundly as he has. The label "Metro Man" barely captures the scale of his impact - especially in Delhi, where he didn't just build a railway system, but helped change how a city thinks about movement, time and public space.

When Sreedharan took charge of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation in the late 1990s, the daily commute of a typical Delhite was a case study in hardship. The city's residents squeezed into overcrowded DTC buses with erratic schedules, crawling along accident-prone roads. Getting to work meant exhaustion...