Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be the chief guest for Anna University’s 42 nd convocation to be held on July 29 at College of Engineering, Guindy campus.
He will be only the second Prime Minister to attend a convocation of the institution, a university official said.
On October 9, 1952, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru delivered the first convocation address at the Madras Institute of Technology, which was at that time an independent educational institution. MIT, formed in 1948, was merged with Anna University, when the latter was formed in 1978. The university currently admits over 1 lakh students annually, including in its affiliated colleges.
Mr. Nehru had dwelt on the need to depend on indigenously created machinery and called for training so that students could go to rural areas to work there. He had called upon the institution to be self-reliant and the students to build their own equipment using indigenously available materials.
Back then, institute vice-president Kasturi Srinivasan, a host of State Ministers and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who later became the President of India, attended the convocation, according to the University official.
