IIT Roorkee to celebrate 175th foundation day with education minister

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee will celebrate its 175th foundation day on November 25 with the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, as chief guest. Pradhan won’t be present in person but will address the gathering virtually.

IIT Roorkee was inducted into the IIT system only in 2001 but it began as Roorkee College in 1847 and according to its website, was the first engineering college in the country. It was the first existing engineering college to be “converted” into an IIT and two more would follow over a decade later -- Banaras Hindu University’s engineering college in 2012 (now, IIT-BHU Varanasi) and Indian School of Mines Dhanbad (now IIT-ISM Dhanbad).

The IIT Roorkee director Ajit K Chaturvedi will address the function and present Distinguished Alumnus Awards (DAA), Outstanding Service Awards (OSA) and Distinguished Young Alumnus Awards (DYAA).

The event will be a webcast on IIT Roorkee’s Youtube channel.

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IIT Roorkee had in September, announced its list of DAA, OSA and DYAA 2021 awardees. These awards will be conferred at the function. The university invites nominations for the awards from across the world. This year, 163 and 37 nominations were considered for the DAA and DYAA 2021 respectively.

Recently, IIT Roorkee has formed the Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to produce more data analytics and artificial intelligence experts. The school which was formed in collaboration with the Mehta Family Foundation, USA, will offer undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes. The first batch of bachelor degree students will be inducted from September 2022.