Schools eye higher study - Multi-crore diversification drive by Anglo-Indian institutions

After steering some of the most sought-after schools in the city, Anglo-Indian educational institutions are ready to foray into higher education and professional courses.

Several reputed Anglo-Indian schools have taken up multi-crore projects to set up institutions teaching management, business studies, law, fashion design, computer science, IT, engineering and medicine. Centres for teachers? and vocational training are also on the drawing board.

Leading the Anglo-Indian charge into higher education is the Church of North India (CNI), eyeing a law college in Rajarhat. ?A meeting of the board of governors of the schools under the CNI will be held in early May to finalise the proposal. We will also decide at the meeting which school?s name the law college will bear. If our plans materialise, we will start it in 2007,? said Reverend P.S.P. Raju, Bishop of the Calcutta diocese of the CNI.

According to the Bishop, the CNI also plans to add to the engineering college it had opened on the St Thomas Boys? School premises in Kidderpore. Rajarhat is the preferred location for the proposed institutes.

The Methodist Church, which controls Calcutta Girls School and Calcutta Boys? School, the two oldest Anglo-Indian institutions in the city, is working on a proposal to expand the girls? campus. The blueprint for a law college and computer training institute at Calcutta Girls is being drawn.

Realising the current job market needs, the St Augustine?s chain of three schools has also embarked on a mega project to set up B-schools, a teachers? training college and fashion designing institutes.

?The time has come to diversify and take forward the traditional mission in producing efficient graduates in various fields. We have started the process of searching for suitable plots on the outskirts of the city,? stated St Augustine?s Day School principal C.R. Gasper.

Welland Gouldsmith School is ready with proposals for an engineering and a medical college, that will soon be presented to the state government, confirmed principal Gilian Rosemary Hart.