From designing and planning the alignment of Mumbai Metro’s Yellow Line-2 and Green Line-4 as an engineer with India’s premier rail planning body, RITES (Rail India Technical and Economic Service), to resisting pressure to push through an unviable monorail project in Kalyan more than a decade ago, he has largely remained a behind-the-scenes architect of Mumbai’s evolving transport network.

A 1988-batch officer of the Indian Railways Service of Engineers (IRSE), Vivek Kumar Gupta today occupies one of the most consequential positions in the city’s transport ecosystem—general manager of both Central Railway (CR) and Western Railway (WR), the twin lifelines that move millions daily and operate among the most complex suburban train systems in the world.