The Sardar Patel University was dream of Shri Bhaikaka.Bhaikaka was thus at the peak of his career as an Engineer when he sought premature retirement from Government Service in 1940 at the behest of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and joined Ahmedabad Municipality as Chief Engineer. This was the time when his mentor, Sardar Patel began to visualise what a soon-to-be independent India would require, and
advised him to give up all this and help him in transforming Charotar into the focal point of India by serving the rural countryside so as to control migration of people from villages to towns in search of education, employment and healthcare. Bhaikaka resigned from this office too in 1942 at the behest of Sardar Patel, and was appointed as Chairman of Charotar Education Society in Anand, a few years before moving on to what we now know as the township of Vallabh Vidyanagar on 3 March 1946, but not before registering Charutar Vidya Mandal as a Charitable Education Trust on 10 August 1945. What was once a wilderness at the tri-junction of Karamsad, Bakrol and Anand thus became Vallabh Vidyanagar, and the ‘Vallabh’ was prefixed to ‘Vidyanagar’ in recognition of Sardar’s advice to work for rural uplift. Containing migration required that the reasons for migration be addressed, and Bhaikaka began to work on a plan together with Shri Bhikhabhai Patel, a dedicated and farsighted educationist, who shared Bhaikaka’s vision.
