Histort of the College
The Beginning
During the World War II, in the early forties after the Pearl Harbour incident, the Allied Forces set up an advanced air-base taking over around 750 acres of farmland from the three mouzas of Sherpur, Baigachi and Tahaberia in the district of North 24 Parganas,Westbengal.
Once the World War II was over, the air-base fell out of use. But the erstwhile farmland could never be reclaimed back. In 1947, India became independent, suffering the pangs of partition preceded by violent communal riots. As a fall-out of it, huge numbers of people got uprooted from their soil – land, home, and the like — and started to come to the eastern part of the divided Bengal, re-christened as West Bengal. They were known (and somewhat frowned at then) as the refugees. The then Chief Minister of West Bengal, the late Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy, seeing the plight of these people started the process of getting compensation from the Allied Forces’ headquarters. After a lot of efforts put in both by Dr. Roy and Jawaharlal Nehru the desired compensation was released. Dr. Roy was obstinate that the money received had to be spent building a new township for the refugees in the place where the air-base once was. He finally got his way and the desired township started to be built by the military contractors who once built the air-base.
Ashoknagar, the small town some twenty five kilometres 48 kms from Kolkata came into being a couple of years after the independence, and started to be filled with the people, ‘refugees’ from erstwhile East Bengal or East Pakistan(now Bangladesh).
These people were mostly gentlemanly folk –admirers of education, art, theatre and the like. They first initiated the process of setting up schools, both primary and secondary, in Ashoknagar for the academic betterment of their progeny. In a couple of decades, a good number of schools came up, both for boys and girls. But the want still was of a degree college to provide university level education in various subjects.