of Roorkee, India
The Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, formerly the University of Roorkee, is a public university located in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India.
Established in 1847, it was given university status in 1949 and in 2001 was converted into an Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), thus becoming the seventh IIT to be declared.
IIT Roorkee has 18 academic departments covering engineering, applied sciences, humanities & social sciences and management programs. It lays a claim to being the technical institutions with the largest number of academic units in India.
1845 The institution has its origins in a class started to train local youth in engineering to assist in public works then beginning.
In 1847 it was officially established. It was renamed as the Thomason College of Civil Engineering in 1854 in honour of its founder, Sir James Thomason, lieutenant governor 1843–53. The first Indian to pass out from the Roorkee college was Rai Bahadur Kanhaiya Lal in 1852.
Initially, the college had engineers' class only for Europeans, upper subordinate class for Europeans and Indians and lower subordinate class for Indians only. Such was the reputation of the college, that the recruitment of the Engineering students was directly controlled by the Public Works Departments (PWD). Every student was guaranteed a post in the PWD/irrigation departments. Roorkee pass outs played a role in all the areas of engineering primarily civil, including maintenance of the Ganges canal, construction of dam and irrigation projects like Bhakra Nangal, the Rajasthan canal, the Aswan dam on the Nile in Egypt, and construction of Chandigarh.
Between 1934 to 1943, officers of the Indian Army Corps of Engineers received training at the Thomason College of Engineering and, even after the establishment of the School of Military Engineering (SME) at Roorkee in 1943, they continued to receive technical training at Thomason. In 1948 when SME was moved to Dapodi, Pune. It was given the status of University by Act No. IX of 1948 of the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) and was titled University of Roorkee. Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, presented the Charter in November 1949, elevating the erstwhile college to the first engineering university of independent India. Soil scientist Jagdish Narain was the first student to be admitted into the university under this act.[citation needed]
On 21 September 2001, an ordinance issued by the Government of India declared it as the nation's seventh Indian Institute of Technology, renaming it to the current name, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. The ordinance was converted into an act by the Parliament to make Roorkee an "Institution of National Importance".