Centenary celebration of JU’s Chemical Engineering department commences

Kolkata: The Chemical Engineering department of Jadavpur University which happens to be the oldest in Asia started its three-day centenary celebration on Saturday, buoyed by a corpus of Rs 46 lakh, thanks to donations from the alumni.

Out of this, Rs 31 lakh has come from the solitary donation of the 1971 batch alumnus, Chennai-based C Ravi Prasad which will be used to set up a high-end continuous reactor and to upgrade the department’s unit operations lab.

“Our undergraduate and postgraduate students will get the opportunity to use such an expensive reactor which is exactly an industrial replica and is very rare in academic institutions across the country,” JU pro-Vice Chancellor Chiranjib Bhattacharya, an alumnus of the department said.

Ravi Prasad who had come from Chennai to attend the centenary celebrations termed the donation as a “Gurudakshina” for his enormous learning in his five years tryst in the varsity.

Bhattacharya said that the Alumni Connect of the local and global alumni will be maintained in the best possible manner for the infrastructural upgrade of the department and orientation of the syllabus from time to time as per the requirement of the industry. The Chemical Engineering department of the university has a placement record of nearly 90 per cent.

Vice-Chancellor Suranjan Das said that the alumni of a department remain the link between the past and the present.

“We look forward to such support from alumni to meet the emerging challenges of higher education, especially for a state university like Jadavpur,” he added.

The department turned 100, in 2021, but the celebration had been put on hold owing to the pandemic. The department will commemorate its centenary, “Chemervescence” between February 25 and 27.