Nearly three years after the project was proposed, the restoration work on the decades-old Calve College Government School, an important landmark in the town, has commenced with the Public Works Department taking up replacement of wooden rafters and beams on the ground floor.
The school, a legacy of the French, had been crying for attention when the cyclone Thane struck Puducherry in 2011.
According to Ashok Panda, co-convenor of Intach, “the restoration work has begun in two rooms on the ground floor of the heritage structure. This mainly includes replacement of the wooden rafters and beams and removal of vegetation on the terrace and plugging the leaks.”
Extensive damage
The Thane cyclone had caused extensive damage to the first floor of the building. The cost for the school’s renovation was then estimated at at ₹5.40 crore
A Grade II A heritage structure, Calve College was among the three schools functioning out of heritage buildings in the city.
The other two were V.O. Chidambaram Government Higher Secondary School and the Pensionnat De Jeunes Filles (Government Girls French High School).
The schools were provisionally shut down by the government in 2014 after an inspection reported that the buildings were “unsafe”.
The Calve School gets its name from Calve Souprayachettiar (Kalavai Subburaya Chettiyar) who belonged to a renowned merchant family. The school was opened for the education of local Hindu and Muslim children. The family’s roots are in Kalavai (Calve) village near Vellore.
In the beginning, the school functioned as a private school till May 1877 when it was placed under public management. From 1877 to 1880, it was run by members of a congregation. An English section was opened in 1880. After 1885, it was upgraded into an upper primary school and open to children of all castes, according to an Intach report.
Calve College, which was built in 1886, had churned out political leaders such as V. Subbiah and M.O.H. Farook. The school continues to cater to French education for a small group of 110 students from Classes 1 to 10, apart from classes in the State syllabus. The architectural design features a mix of Indian and colonial styles. The classrooms are arranged around a U-shaped courtyard with colonnaded verandahs, says the Intach report. The report makes note of modifications and structures which were added later that were not in tune with the “architectural aesthetics of the building”.