From complex Harappan towns to Delhi's Qutub Minar, India's indigenous technologies were very sophisticated. They included the design and planning of water supply, traffic flow, natural air conditioning, complex stone work, and construction engineering. It is but natural to think there must have been some form of mathematics because without some form of rational calculation method, these achievements would have been simply impossible. Hence, despite all the controversy regarding vedic maths, we can safely assume that there indeed was some form of mathematics whether vedic or not!

Most students learn about the ancient cities of the Middle East and China. How many have even a basic understanding of the world's oldest and most advanced civilization the Harappan or Indus-Sarasvati Valley Civilization in India? The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization was the world's first to build planned towns with underground drainage, civil sanitation n, hydraulic engineering, and air-cooling architecture. While the other ancient civilizations of the world were small towns with one central complex, this civilization had the distinction of being spread across many towns, covering a region about half the size of Europe. Weights and linguistic symbols were standardized across this vast geography, for a period of over 1,000 years, from around 3,000 BCE to 1500 BCE. Oven-baked bricks were invented in India in approximately 4,000 BCE. Over 900 of the 1,500 known settlement sites discovered so far are in India.

Since the Indus-Sarasvati script is yet to be decoded, it remains a mystery as to how these people could have achieved such high levels of sophistication and uniformity in a dispersed complex and with no visible signs of centralized power. Also the precision of man made things tells us about the system of mathematics which is today broadly called vedic maths.

For instance, all bricks in this civilization are of the ratio 1:2:4 regardless of their size, location or period of construction. There are many pioneering items of civil engineering, such as drainage systems for water (open and closed), irrigation systems, river dams, water storage tanks carved out of rock, moats, middle-class style homes with private bathrooms and drainage, and even a dockyard; there is evidence of stairs for multiple-storied buildings; many towns have separate citadels, upper and lower towns, and fortified sections; there are separate worker quarters near copper furnaces; granaries have ducts and platforms; and archeologists have found geometric compasses, linear scales made of ivory. Indians also pioneered many engineering tools for construction, surgery, warfare, etc. These included the hollow drill, the true saw, and the needle with the hole on its pointed end.

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