IIT Roorkee

Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee
Former names
  • College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee
    (1847–1854)
  • Thomason College of Civil Engineering
    (1854–1947)
  • University of Roorkee
    (1947–2001)
Mottoश्रमं विना न किमपि साध्यम् (Sanskrit)
Motto in English
Nothing can be achieved without hard work
TypePublic technical university
Established1847; 177 years ago (1847)
ChairmanB. V. R. Mohan Reddy
DirectorKamal Kishore Pant[1]
Academic staff
585[2]
Students9,735[2]
Undergraduates4,498[2]
Postgraduates2,360[2]
2,877[2]
Location
Roorkee
,
Uttarakhand
,
India India

29°51′52″N 77°53′47″E / 29.86444°N 77.89639°E / 29.86444; 77.89639
CampusUrban
365 acres (1.48 km2)
LanguageEnglish, Hindi
Websitewww.iitr.ac.in Edit this at Wikidata
Map

Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (abbreviated IIT Roorkee) is a technical university located in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. It is the oldest engineering institution in India.[3][4] It was founded as the College of Civil Engineering in 1847 during East India Company rule in India by James Thomason, the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces in which Roorkee was located; its purpose was to train officers and surveyors employed in the construction of the Ganges Canal.[4][3] In 1854, after the completion of the canal and Thomason's death, it was renamed the Thomason College of Civil Engineering by Proby Cautley, the designer and projector of the canal.[5][6] It was renamed University of Roorkee in 1949, and again renamed IIT Roorkee in 2001. The institution has 22 academic departments covering Engineering, Applied Sciences, Humanities & Social Sciences and Management programs with an emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.[7]

  1. ^ Luthra, Swati (17 February 2023). "CWC signs MoA with IIT-Roorkee to develop International Centre of Excellence". mint. Retrieved 10 March 2023.
  2. ^ a b c d e "NIRF 2024" (PDF). Ministry of Education.
  3. ^ a b Headrick, Daniel R. (1988), The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 317, ISBN 0-19-505115-7, The first engineering college was an outgrowth of the Ganges Canal. Named after the lieutenant governor of the North-Western Provinces who founded it in 1847, the Thomason Engineering College at Roorkee trained employees for the irrigation branch of the Public Works Department. It offered different curricula for different types of students: an engineering class for domiciled Europeans and a few Indians, an upper subordinates class to train British noncommissioned officers as construction foremen, and a lower subordinates class to train Indian surveyors. By the mid-1880s, the school has a hundred students, substantial buildings, and a reputation as an important center for the study of hydraulic engineering.
  4. ^ a b Subramanian, Ajantha (2019), The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, pp. 30–31, ISBN 978-0-674-98788-3, Before the 1854 despatch, there was already one engineering college in operation: the Thomason College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee. The college was founded in 1847 and was affiliated to the University of Calcutta, in response to the demand for civil engineers to aid the construction of the Ganges Canal in the North-west Provinces.
  5. ^ Brown, Joyce (1980), "A Memoir of Colonel Sir Proby Cautley, F.R.S., 1802–1871, Engineer and Palaeontologist", Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 34 (2): 185–225, doi:10.1098/rsnr.1980.0008, JSTOR 531808, S2CID 145414793
  6. ^ Derr, Jennifer L. (2019), Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt, Stanford University Press, p. 44 (digital), ISBN 9781503609662, –... the British government established the College of Civil Engineering, later renamed the Thomason College of Civil Engineering, in the town of Roorkee in northern India. ... Engineers at Thomason assisted with the construction of northern India's largest canal, the Ganges Canal, begun in 1842 and completed in 1854. ... Little existed in Britain itself in the nineteenth century that would approach the standard of formalized civil engineering training in India.
  7. ^ "Departments, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee". iitr.ac.in. Archived from the original on 24 January 2012. Retrieved 5 June 2011. technical institutions in the country having the largest number of academic units