For decades, the turning of an engine was a primitive struggle of bone against iron. In pits dug during the British colonial era, laborers would lean their chests against heavy levers, physically shoving the massive machines until they faced the right direction. When these mechanisms inevitably seized under the weight of years, the railway simply stopped turning the engines altogether. Locomotives were driven in reverse, with the long hood of the boiler blocking the operator’s view, a practice that turned the tracks into a landscape of blind risks and avoidable tragedies.
Babu, a mechanical engineer who viewed his state-funded education as a debt to be repaid to the public, refused to accept the unwritten rule that a train merely reaching its destination was a success. He saw the wreckage of the October 2023 collision at Bhairab—where seventeen lives were lost—not as an act of fate, but as a failure of simple mechanics. He set to work in the depot workshop, naming his series of low-cost solutions Odommo, the Bengali word for unstoppable.
The automated turntable is more than a technical upgrade; it is a restoration of sight to the men in the cabs. Having secured the safety of his local lines, Babu has been recognized as the first Bangladeshi to win a Silver Stevie Award for innovation. Yet his gaze remains on the horizon of his own country. He has accepted a doctoral position at Louisiana Tech University, but he frames the move as a temporary gathering of skill.
Bangladesh should build its own trains and engines rather than importing them.
His vision for the future is as precise as his engineering. He does not intend to remain in the laboratories of the United States; he plans to return to the depots of his home, ensuring that the country no longer needs to look abroad for the machines that move its people.