Gurunath Venkatesh Bewoor

Sir Gurunath Venkatesh Bewoor KCIE (1888 – 1950) (Marathi: गुरुनाथ वेंकटेश बेवूर /ಗುರುನಾಥ್ ವೆಂಕಟೇಶ್ ಬೇವೂರ್) was a senior Indian civil servant. He served on the Viceroy's Executive Council during World War II and was the first Indian director of the Post and Telegraph department of India. He later served as Managing Director of Air India.

The Indian Postal service issued a postage stamp in his honour on 20 November 1989.

Early life and education

The family name comes from Bevoor village then part of Bijapur district of the old Bombay Presidency and now in the Bagalkot district of northern Karnataka. Gurunath Bewoor was born there on 20 November 1888. He got his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Deccan College, Pune (then part of Bombay University, and won the Dakshina Fellowship. His further education was Cambridge University following which he passed the Indian Civil Service entrance examination.

Civil servant

Bewoor joined the ICS in 1921 in the Central Provinces cadre. After a year of district service he was transferred to the Posts and Telegraphs Department in 1922. He served as Post Master General at Patna, Nagpur and Bombay. He was appointed a CIE in the 1932 King's Birthday Honours List.^[1] In 1934, he was appointed as the Director General of the Post and Telegraph Department of India; he was knighted five years later,^[2] being officially invested as a Knight Bachelor on 20 June 1939 at Viceregal Lodge, Simla, by the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow.

In 1941, he was appointed Secretary, Posts and Air Department. Despite the pressures of World War II and the disruptions caused by the Quit India movement, Bewoor efficiently managed the communications infrastructure of Britain's Indian empire. Bewoor, along with others such as C.D. Deshmukh, N. R. Pillai, Y. N. Sukthankar, R. K. Nehru, H. M. Patel, S. Jagannathan, was a member of the Finance and Commerce Pool (FCP),^[3] an elite group of Indian administrators tasked with managing the economic, commercial, industrial and supply-related issues of the war in India.

In 1946 he reached the pinnacle of the British Raj as a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council under Lord Wavell and was appointed a KCIE (Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire) in the New Year Honours List. ^[4]

Bewoor was the originator of a formula known as the "Bewoor Time Test" to judge the efficiency of postal work. This was based on a report he authored for the postal department in 1929, similar to the time-and-motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Aviation

In 1944 he represented India at the ICAO Conference in Chicago. He was also a member of the United Nations Transport and Communications Commission.

Gurunath Bewoor died unexpectedly in 1950.^[5]

His older son Madhav^[6] was a graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and died during World War II. His younger son Gopal Gurunath Bewoor was India's Chief of Army Staff from 1973 to 1975.

References

1. The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 33831. p. 3572. 31 May 1932.
2. The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 34633. p. 3853. 6 June 1939.
3. Majumdar, Sumit K. (2 December 2006). "Finance and Commerce Pool: An old-is-gold idea". The Hindu: Business Line. Retrieved 19 June 2015.
4. The London Gazette: no. 37407. p. 10. 28 December 1945.
5. "Obituaries". Flight. LVIII (2185): 520. 7 December 1950. Retrieved 19 June 2015.
6. Image of Indian Officer Cadets Parkash Nanda and Madhav Gururao Bewoor at Sandhurst, Source: MOD “We Were There” exhibition.