Calcutta, Oct. 17 :    Calcutta, Oct. 17:  Students and teachers, both past and present, of the 150-year-old Bethune Collegiate School in north Calcutta are keen to pay tribute to founder John Eliot Drinkwater Bethune on his 200th birthday next year. But they've failed to finalise the b'day plans. The reason: there's no confirmation yet about Bethune's date of birth. That's precisely why the school, set up in 1849, has been unable to observe the birthday of its founder, who died in 1851. His death anniversary is observed on August 12 every year. Bethune was born in Scotland in 1801 and came to Calcutta as the legal secretary of the then Governor-General in India in 1848. Now, with the bicentennial year just a couple of months away, students and teachers connected with the school, presently run by the state school education department, have been running from pillar to post, from Delhi to London, trying in vain to trace the birth date. 'We are extremely pained at not being able to show our respect to the great reformer, who dedicated his life for the development of women's education in Bengal, on his birthday,' says Chhaya Sengupta, principal of the school opposite Hedua. 'We definitely hope that something positive will emerge out of the efforts being made by students and teachers to find out the birthday of Bethune Saheb.' Ex-students of the institution, which had started with 11 girls and now has a student strength of over 2,000, have recently set up a reunion committee. They have sought the help of the state government, the Central government, the British government, and the authorities of various museums in the UK. The committee has now decided to approach the India Office Library in London. According to Kum Kum Chattopadhyay, a teacher of Bethune and a former student of the school, the reunion committee had urged ex-students settled in the UK to get in touch with the local church where Bethune was born, but 'unfortunately, no such record was available'. 'Less concerted attempts to find out the founder's birthday were made by the school when it celebrated its 50th, 75th, 100th and 150th anniversaries,' recalled Sunanda Ghosh, a retired teacher of Bethune College and a former student of the school.