Aparajith Ramnath has been named the winner of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2025 for his biography Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (Penguin Viking), the New India Foundation (NIF) announced on Monday.
The award, which carries a cash prize of Rs 15 lakh along with a trophy and citation, will be presented on 6 December 2025, at the 14th edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival.
Ramnath’s work was selected for its rigorous research and compelling portrait of M. Visvesvaraya (1861–1962), the renowned engineer and technocrat whose contributions shaped India’s early industrial and economic development. The jury commended the book for capturing both the arc of Visvesvaraya’s career and the broader story of a nation in transition.
The 2025 jury comprised N Chandrasekaran, Manish Sabharwal, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Srinath Raghavan, Rahul Matthan, Jawed Ashraf, and Yamini Aiyar.
Other shortlisted titles included Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva by Janaki Bakhle, India’s Forgotten Country: A View from the Margins by Bela Bhatia, India’s Near East: A New History by Avinash Paliwal, and Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity by Manu Pillai.
Based in Bengaluru, the New India Foundation administers the NIF Book Fellowships, which for two decades have supported scholars and writers producing nonfiction on post-Independence India. Thirty-six books have emerged from the programme. Round 13 of the fellowship begins on August 1, 2026.
The NIF Translation Fellowships, launched in 2021 to translate nonfiction texts from ten Indian languages into English, are awarded in alternate years. Applications for the third round are open until December 31, 2025, on the foundation’s website.
