Gurudas College, Kolkata

About Gurudas College, Kolkata

Gurudas College (Govt. Sponsored), founded in 1956, is situated at Phoolbagan in East Calcutta. It is a Co-Educational college teaching both Pass and Honours courses at the undergraduate level, and it is affiliated to the University Of Calcutta. It also has a Higher Secondary Section with all the three streams of studies namely, Science, Arts and Commerce under the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education.

The college has highly qualified and academically minded teachers, a good library and well-equipped laboratories. The atmosphere of the college is congenial and permeated by a sense of discipline. The teacher student ratio is 1:25 and the students are free to approach the teacher for any sort of academic counselling. Classes in the college are held during day- time (i.e. between 10-05 a.m. and 5-15 p.m.), though timetable for undergraduate science pass courses is extend into the morning (i.e. between 6-45 a.m. and 10 a.m.).
The beginning was modest, or even challenging. The college did not have a building of its own; the University of Calcutta, to which the college is affiliated, permitted the teaching of Intermediate (Arts and Science) and B.A. and B.Sc. at the pass level; the admission season had already started; not very far were few long-established colleges; much of the immediate hinterland was inhabited by people at the lower rungs of the economy; and the idea of a co-education institution had still not many supporters in the existing social milieu. But an unbounded enthusiasm among local educationists at various levels, and the generosity of a local girls' school to provide accommodation to the new-born college by shifting its own location made it possible for the latter to start functioning from August 14, 1956 (later on observed as the College Foundation Day) with only 75 students and 2 whole-time lecturers.

Subsequently, the college was allotted land by the Calcutta Improvement Trust, and the first building came up in 1958, the second in 1962, and the third in 1996. The college still has a substantial amount of vacant land under its possession on which it has plans to construct an auditorium-cum-academic building in the near future.