Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi opened day two of FIDIC’s Global Infrastructure Conference 2026 in New Delhi with a keynote address that moved delegates to reflect not just on what they build, but why – delivered, fittingly, on India’s Engineers Day.
Before he spoke, delegates watched a short film on the role of compassion in the world. Satyarthi then took the stage to note the significance of the date. “Once upon a time, I was also an engineer,” he told the audience, revealing that this was the first time he had addressed a room of engineers since leaving the profession decades ago. He is, he said, the only qualified engineer to have received the Nobel Peace Prize.
He traced the origin of his life’s work back to the age of five, on his first day of school. “I saw a boy my age shining shoes,” he said. “I asked why he wasn’t in class. I was told that poor children have to work.” That single encounter, he said, set the course of his life. “That child’s eyes followed me for all my life.”
Satyarthi told delegates he had given up his engineering career, but never the engineer inside him – “thinking in systems, understanding the deeper, more profound issues.” He put a direct question to the room: “What are you building, in construction and engineering? Humanity. There is often a gap between that and industry and business.” Quality, he said, is usually understood in terms of strength, safety and durability – all essential, but not sufficient on their own. Engineers, he suggested, carry a moral purpose that runs deeper than the technical brief.
He urged delegates to think through the consequences of what they build – the impact on the environment and on people, including the people who supply the materials engineers work with. “Are they being paid well?” he asked, pointing to the work of his own organisation in rescuing children who had been “bought and sold like animals.” Physical infrastructure, he argued, is only one part of the picture. “You are not just an engineer. You are a world citizen. There is interconnectedness with everything that you do.” Alongside physical infrastructure, he said, societies need social infrastructure – built on education, healthcare and social security – which remains lacking across much of the world, even where governments and international institutions exist. “Can we say that humanity is safe?”
Engineers should build compassion into their designs from the outset
The heart of his address was a call for what he termed “mindful problem solving”" – compassion in practice. “When you feel the problems of others as your problem, and act mindfully to solve them, that is compassion,” he said. He asked engineers to build compassion into their designs from the outset: “Can the poor people living in these communities get access to what you are constructing? Think right from the beginning. Compassionate infrastructure building.”
Satyarthi connected this directly to his decades-long campaign against child labour, describing his call to “mobilise the masses” and press for laws that eliminate it outright. Education, he said, “is a right, not a privilege” – a force for enlightenment and growth, and the key that opens up all other rights. He has travelled to 140 countries in pursuit of that goal.
He closed with two personal stories. The first returned to the boy he saw at five years old, the encounter that trained his heart, he said, “as a compassionate human being who can feel the problems of others,” alongside a mind trained as an engineer. The second was of a boy he met in a refugee camp in Germany, who had fled Syria and lost his legs and his mother in the process. Satyarthi asked him whether he wanted to stay in Germany or return home. The boy said he wanted to study engineering and go back to rebuild his village and his country. “That is what engineering can do,” Satyarthi said. “It gave me inspiration.”
He left delegates with a challenge to carry through the rest of the conference: “You have constructed many things of which you can be proud. But what are you going to construct that will make a significant difference to the community of 8.5 billion citizens for generations to come?”
Delegates were each given a copy of Satyarthi’s book, Karuna – The Power of Compassion, as they arrived for the session – a message to carry with them as GIC26 moves into its final day of plenary sessions on risk, procurement and future skills, and a series of parallel forums on resilience, integrity and sustainable transport.
Image shows Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi speaking on the second day of FIDIC’s Global Infrastructure Conference 2026 in New Delhi.
