Born on July 1, 1940 at Farahada, Bhojpur in Bihar, Dr. Braj Bhushan. Pandey, obtained his Civil Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1961 and a Ph.D in 1977 with specialization in Highway Engineering.
He joined a faculty at IIT, Kharagpur in 1964 and retired as Professor in 2002. Now he is, Advisor, Sponsored Research and Industrial consultancy.
During his tenure he has supervised over twelve doctoral theses in areas connected with roads and highways, continued to work as an Emeritus Professor in Civil engineering in which the major activity was application oriented research in highway engineering and many innovations were developed which have found applications in India for design and construction of roads. He also has accomplished a number of research and consultancy projects of Ministry of Road transport and Highways, All India council of Technical Education.
Dr. Pandey has been honoured with many awards. To name a few, Indian Geotechnical Society Medal in 1984 and 1988 for best paper on Instrumentation, Indian Roads Congress Medal in 1993 for the paper Analytical Design of Flexible Pavements, Commendation award in 2003 for the paper An ANN Based Model for Back Calculation of Pavement layer Moduli, etc. He was also honoured ‘Eminent Civil Engineer by the Institution of Engineers (India) at the 19th National Convention of Institution of Engineers, held at Ranchi, in 2003.
His major contributions towards development of standards was involved in development of rural Road Manual for design and construction of village roads after the launching of Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana in 2000, guidelines for strengthening of highways, for design of flexible pavements for highways, etc. Dr. Pandey developed a new technology of maintenance free roads for villages, which consists of fabrication of formwork of cells with recycled plastic. He also developed ‘In-vehicle falling weight Deflectometer’ for evaluation of strength of Highways, which was granted patent by Government of India and transferred to a private company.
The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, GoI, is likely to award a project for development of durable wearing course for highways. The project is expected to develop technology for obtaining a long lasting wearing course for highways with a life of about eight to ten years under heavy traffic condition.
