The College of Agriculture, Saidapet, Madras: the First Formal Agricultural-Education Facility in India

Abstract

Similar to many other firsts in India, Madras city can boast of the first formally set up agricultural-education facility in Saidapet (then outskirts of Madras city) surrounded by the Long Tank on the one side and the Adayar River on the other. Saidapet has been a favourite locality from the 18th century for cultivation efforts of economically important plants such as Opuntia (the source plant to raise the scale insect Dactylopius for carminic-acid dye extraction) and Saguerus rumphii, the sago palm, better known as Anderson’s Nopalry. This was followed by the Lushington Gardens and Lobo’s Gardens in later decades.

Through the persistent efforts of William Robertson and Charles Benson (graduates of the Royal Agricultural College of Cirencester, U.K.), an Experimental Farm was established first in Saidapet in 1865, which included a high-school level agriculture-teaching facility. In 1876, it grew into a full-fledged Agricultural College, servicing the needs of trained agricultural personnel for the Madras Presidency until 1890. From 1890, importance of this College began to diminish gradually, mainly, because of the ad-hoc policies of the Government of Madras: for example, the 300 acre block allotted to the Experimental Farm in the 1860s was down to 20 acres in 1879. This reduction hampered experimental learning, an aspect which was valued as a prime driver of this institution by its earliest teachers Robertson and Benson.

Like every other institution of the British days, apathy and disregard led this institution to degenerate, although until 1906 this College survived as an institution offering the Diploma in Agriculture, after a 3-year study involving a few agricultural subjects and some non-agricultural subjects as commented on by John Augustus Voelcker, who came on an inspection visit to Saidapet Agricultural College in 1889 as part of the agricultural reform efforts of Government of India. In 1906 the college was shifted to Coimbatore by the Government of Madras, where it metamorphosed into the Agricultural College and Research Institute, which was affiliated to the University of Madras in later years. It was upgraded and renamed as the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in 1971.

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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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