Roorkee

Roorkee, a town on the Upper Ganga Canal in the plains of Haridwar district, holds a singular place in the story of modern India: it is the birthplace of formal engineering education in Asia.

• The institution now known as IIT Roorkee was founded here in 1847 and formalised in 1854 as the Thomason College of Civil Engineering — the first engineering college in Asia — created to train the engineers who would build the canals of the Gangetic plain.
• Its heritage Main Building, tree-lined campus and old survey and hydraulics laboratories remain a working monument to that legacy.
• The town grew up around one of the great engineering feats of the nineteenth century, the Upper Ganga Canal, conceived and driven through by Sir Proby Cautley and opened in 1854 to carry Ganga water from the Bhimgoda barrage at Haridwar across hundreds of kilometres of the Doab for irrigation.
• Roorkee's defining structure is the Solani Aqueduct, a long masonry aqueduct that carries the canal over the Solani river — among the earliest and most ambitious works of its kind in India.
• The old Ganges Canal Workshop at Roorkee, established to fabricate and maintain the canal works, is also remembered as the place where an early steam locomotive was assembled to haul construction materials, a little-known first in Indian railway history.
• Beyond its engineering heritage the town offers gentle canal-side walks and the Bhola Jhal reservoir, a popular local picnic and sunset spot.
• Unlike the strictly vegetarian holy cities of Haridwar and Rishikesh nearby, Roorkee is an ordinary plains town where food is mixed, so vegetarian travellers should choose clearly pure-vegetarian mithai shops, bhojanalayas and campus canteens.
• Best visited October to March, when the plains are cool; the hot April-to-June summer is best avoided.