In the state government colleges, aided colleges and in Regional Engineering College in the early stages, Heads of different department were unchanged for a long time. In REC, Prof.P.K. Charlu (Electrical), Dr.K.S.Mony(Civil), Prof.AchyuhthanNair( Mech),Prof.KunjiPaulo, Dr.V.C.Nair(Maths), Dr.A.K.R.Unni(Chemistry), Dr.M.A.Lonappan (Physics),and Prof.K.Sankaran Nair (Humanities) remained as Heads for a long time. However, there was a direction from the Government of India that in national institutions, headship should be rotated among the professors as per seniority in each department. In the earlier days, there were only one or two professors in each department. As the institution grew, each department had several professors so that this could be done easily. Probably this idea was introduced to see that the departments get the benefit of guidance from different persons and growth of the department will accordingly be in different positive directions.
This was introduced in REC Calicut in the 1980s. In the
Electrical Engineering department, Prof. Charlu handed over charge to
Prof.P.S.Srinivasan, then to Dr.Thiruvengadam, then Dr.P.P.Gervadis and Dr.
Neelakantan in turn. Headship changed every three years. When it was
the turn of Dr.F.Gajendran, he refused to take up
the responsibility as he wanted to
spare his full time on research.
Dr.Prabhakaran became the head in his place. The
department of electrical engineering took the initiative in starting the B.Tech
programmes in Electronics Engineering and Computer Engineering and
appointments were made to these departments in due
course. Those who had the basic degree in these branches were able to get
promotion to higher posts under these new branches. As Computer
Science graduates were too few at that time, many of those who had
basic degree in Electrical or
Electronics Engineering but did MTech or PhD in branches
related to Computer Science could
get promotion to this branch. When the department grew in
size and the Electronics and Computer streams were in a position to stand on
their own, for better administrative convenience, Board of Governors decided to
separate the Electronics Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering from
the parent electrical department. Dr.Y.Venkataramani became
the Head of Electronics Engineering and Dr.M.N.Neelakantan, Head of Computer
Science department. As it was my turn to become Head of Electrical
department after Dr.Prabhakaran, I took
over as Head of the parent department in 1995. However, Mechanical
department remained intact with B.Tech Mechanical
and BTech Production & Management and
Civil Department with Civil and Architectural Engineering. The
smaller non-engineering departments of Maths, Chemistry, Physics and Humanities
were combined to form Department of Applied Sciences and Humanities.
From the beginning, the administrative work in the
Electrical department was divided among the senior faculty and all cooperated
in doing whatever possible to help the department. Head of the
department was only a person to put the signature for the department. Seniors
and juniors were all working together and it was not at all difficult for me to
carry on my duty as Head. As head, I initiated steps to record the
history of the department from the beginning acknowledging the contributions
from the teaching and nonteaching staff. Research publications from all members
of faculty were collected and kept in a file for ready reference. Whenever a
new paper was published by the faculty, this was being displayed in the
departmental notice board. A copy of the PhD thesis done by the faculty and
those guided by the faculty were kept for reference in the departmental
library. Almost all cooperated with me in these except one professor
whom I asked several times to give copies of publications and PhD
theses guided by him. He refused flatly. From the beginning he had some
peculiarities and we juniors have seen the seniors making fun of him on many
occasions. He loved sweets too much and in departmental meetings, any one not
interested in taking sweets used to give him the sweets and he used to eat any
number of them without any difficulty. One funny thing was even though he was
supposed to be doing research in an area related to Control Systems which
happens to be my specialization too, I could never get a
chance to understand his work or the work of his students who took PhD of
Calicut University under him. Three of my colleagues have done PhD
under him and one or two from N S S College of Engineering, Palakkad but I
could not keep even one of
their publications or PhD theses in the department for
reference because of his attitude.
I am very
happy to place on record that except for this lone case, I could get full
cooperation from all teaching and nonteaching staff in carrying out my duties
as Head. I would like to place on record my gratitude to every one of them.
Even though the department was split into three, all three departments joined
together for many common functions as if we were together
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