For its first four years, DMET Calcutta worked from temporary rooms on Gorachand Road in Park Circus. In 1953 it moved to a new campus of its own on Taratala Road.
On 14 December 1953, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru opened the new building as the Marine Engineering College. Lal Bahadur Shastri, then the Transport Minister, also attended. We found only one public source for these details, so they need confirmation from the Trust’s own records.
The college grew fast after the move. The intake rose to 60 cadets in August 1958 and to 100 the next year. From 1962, all cadets came in through an all-India entrance examination.
The college stayed on the same site when it became the Marine Engineering and Research Institute (MERI) in 1995. Before 2008, MERI Kolkata ran a four-year B.Tech in Marine Engineering, affiliated to Jadavpur University.
The address today is P-19, Taratala Road, Kolkata. Since 2008 it has been the Kolkata campus of the Indian Maritime University. The campus has a “ship in campus”: a full-size marine propulsion engine of about 6,000 BHP that cadets learn to run and maintain. The workshops also hold a restored steam reciprocating engine, so cadets see both the old and the new kind of ship machinery. The campus has simulators, a library of more than 23,000 books and hostels for more than 1,000 cadets.
The MERI Alumni Trust gives its scholarships to third-year and fourth-year cadets of this campus and of the IMU Mumbai campus. The first alumni grant was awarded in 2013.
