In 1794, the famous École Polytechnique (Polytechnic School) was founded in Paris during the French Revolution. The same year, around 8,000 kilometres away, the first technical school outside of Europe came into existence in Madras (Chennai).
The institution, founded as the Survey School in Fort St. George by Michael Topping with just eight students hand-picked from the orphan asylum functioning in the coastal city, has transformed into the prestigious College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG) today, a constituent campus of Anna University.
As its original name indicated, the school was formed to address the dearth of people to assist in surveys carried out by the East India Company. “I have been greatly retarded for want of proper draughtsmen to make copies of my late surveys and plans of the Kistna (the Krishna river),” said Topping, the astronomer and surveyor who had set up the Madras Observatory two years earlier, in his letter to Sir Charles Oakley, president and governor of the council at Fort St. George.
‘Madras Rediscovered’, authored by S. Muthiah, recollects how several of those trained by the school went on to play an important role in the Great Trigonometrical Survey started by William Lambton in Madras.
Barring the nine years from 1810 to 1819 when it remained non-functional for lack of funding, the institution evolved from the Survey School to a college in the 19th century and shifted to multiple locations before moving in 1920 to its present home, the iconic red and white building in Indo-Saracenic architecture. With several notable alumni in different fields and the innumerous engineers it supplied to government sectors, the CEG has contributed immensely to society and transformed the lives of those who graduated from there.
R.T. Chari, managing director of TAG Group of Companies, who passed out of the college in 1961, said he owed whatever he achieved in his life to the institution. Recollecting his humble upbringing and schooling in Tamil medium, he said it was the ecosystem and training in the college that changed his personality.
Eighty-four-year-old T.R. Jagadeesan, an alumnus who also served as Principal and Director of the college, said a key milestone in the college’s journey was the transformation into the unitary Anna University in 1978 with three other colleges — Madras Institute of Technology, Alagappa College of Technology and School of Architecture and Planning — being part of it.
Mr. Jagadeesan recalled the healthy competition that existed in that period between the CEG and the one on the opposite side of the road — IIT Madras, formed in 1959, which was receiving significant funding.
“We did not want to compete in the same areas. We identified where they lacked and started departments and labs in those areas. That was how the Remote Sensing Lab and the Centre for Water Resources were started, for instance,” he said.
The college, during his tenure as Director, implemented systematic quality improvement measures, which focussed on addressing the difficulties faced by students coming from rural areas and underprivileged backgrounds.
Some academics, including Mr. Jagadeesan, however, argue it was the institute’s transformation into a university, particularly as an affiliating one, that has hindered the CEG from reaching greater heights in recent years.
He said stalwarts like V.C. Kulandaiswamy and M. Anandakrishnan had resisted the idea of making Anna University an affiliating university when they were Vice-Chancellors. In 2001, it was made an affiliating university by bringing all the engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu under its purview. Since then, the university went back to its unitary status once in 2010 and was made an affiliating university again a couple of years later by the successive DMK and AIADMK governments.
V. Jayabalan, former Controller of Examinations of the university, points out that with CEG being the primary seat of the university, the majority of the time went in managing the affiliated colleges that are a few hundred in number and paved the way for irregularities. He recollected, in particular, the charges of corruption and other irregularities that have rocked the university since the latter half of the 2000s. He said the university had to be made a unitary university to help it pursue academic excellence. (The erstwhile AIADMK government had in a policy reversal enacted legislation in September 2020 to bifurcate the university and possibly the DMK regime might convert the institution into a unitary university.)
Mr. Chari, who funded an auditorium on the campus along with his brother, also an alumnus of the college, said the alumni network should be leveraged better as being done by other institutions like IIT Madras. “Like me, there are many who achieved what they achieved in life due to CEG. They can do more for the college,” he said.
