James Thomason (born 3 May 1804, Great Shelford, near Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England died 27 September 1853, Bareilly, India) was a British colonial governor. He was British Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces in India and founder of a system of village schools.
The son of a British clergyman stationed in Bengal, Thomason was educated in England, but he returned to India in 1822. He held numerous positions there, including magistrate-collector and settlement officer in Azamgarh (1832–37) and foreign secretary to the government of India (1842–43). In 1843 he was named Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces, and for the next 10 years he served in that post, improving communications, police protection, and social services. By 1853 he had also established a system of 897 locally supported elementary schools in centrally located villages that provided a vernacular education for children throughout the region. He died on the day that Queen Victoria appointed him governor of Madras.
It was James Thomason, who proposed the establishment of a College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee to train engineering personnel at various levels for public works of the country particularly for the construction work of the Ganges Canal which started in 1842. The aqueduct for the proposed the Ganges Canal, which was a challenging piece of work, was situated at Roorkee. Thus, the Roorkee College was started in 1847 when the concept of a college to train civil engineers as against military engineers was not entertained even in England. After the death of James Thomason in 1853, the College was very deservedly named as Thomason College of Civil Engineering in 1854. It was elevated to the First Technical University of India in 1949[1] and finally converted to an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 2001 after being regarded as an institute of national importance by then HRD minister Mr. Murli Manohar Joshi.
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| Preceded by Sir G. R. Clerk |
Lieutenant Governor of North-Western Provinces 22 December 1843 – 10 October 1853 |
Succeeded by A. W. Begbie (acting) |