IIT Kharagpur Recruitment 2019 For Junior Programmer

IIT Kharagpur started its journey in the old Hijli Detention Camp where some of our great freedom fighters toiled and sacrificed their lives for the independence of our country. The history of IIT Kharagpur is thus intimately linked with the history of the Hijli Detention Camp. This is possibly one of the very few Institutions all over the world which started life in a prison house.

With the help of Bidhan Chandra Roy (chief minister of West Bengal), Indian educationalists Humayun Kabir and Jogendra Singh formed a committee in 1946 to consider the creation of higher technical institutions for post-war industrial development of India. This was followed by the creation of a 22-member committee headed by Nalini Ranjan Sarkar. In its interim report, the Sarkar Committee recommended the establishment of higher technical institutions in India, along the lines of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and consulting from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign along with affiliated secondary institutions. The report urged that work should start with the speedy establishment of major institutions in the four-quarters of the country with the ones in the east and the west to be set up immediately.

On the grounds that West Bengal had the highest concentration of industries at the time, Roy persuaded Jawaharlal Nehru (Indias first prime minister) to establish the first institute in West Bengal. The first Indian Institute of Technology was thus established in May 1950 as the Eastern Higher Technical Institute. It was located in Esplanade East, Calcutta, and in September 1950 shifted to its permanent campus at Hijli, Kharagpur 120 kilometres south-west of Calcutta. Hijli had been used as a detention camp during the British colonial rule in India, to keep Indian freedom fighters captive.

IIT Kharagpur is the 3rd oldest technical institute in the West Bengal state after Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology Shibpur (1856) and Jadavpur University (established as Bengal technical institute in 1906) When the first session started in August 1951, there were 224 students and 42 teachers in the ten departments of the institute. The classrooms, laboratories and the administrative office were housed in the historic building of the Hijli Detention Camp (now known as Shaheed Bhawan), where political revolutionaries were imprisoned during the British rule. The office building had served as the headquarters of the Bomber Command of the U.S. 20th Air Force during World War II.