Prof. Prabhakar B. Bhagwat, son of the former Superintendent of the Empress Botanical Garden in Pune, Mr. Bhalchandra V. Bhagwat, studied at Poona Agricultural College and later at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He worked with C. Th. Sørensen and was among the early cohort of students in Landscape Design under Brian Hackett at Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
On returning to India, he served as Superintendent of the Empress Botanical Gardens and went on to teach at the J.J. College of Architecture in Mumbai. He later joined IIT Kharagpur, where he earned a degree in Town Planning and went on to establish India's first landscape architecture programme—a landmark development in the field.
In 1964, he became one of the founding faculty members of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and later led the newly established landscape programme at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi.
A pioneering figure in landscape education in India, he founded the landscape programme at CEPT University in 1992 and led it for nearly two decades, shaping generations of practitioners and educators. He established his practice in 1973 and played a key role in advancing the profession nationally, including through the founding of the Indian Society of Landscape Architects (ISOLA) in 2003.
