It is a great pleasure to greet our fellow alumni in the new year (1999) on behalf of the fraternity at Roorkee and to wish that the NEW YEAR will bring them greater happiness, good health and prosperity.

Concerted efforts are being made to improve the quality of our newsletter both in scope and quality. As intimated through the October 1998 issue, effort is being made to create a corpus which will perpetuate the financial support for the newsletter. Also you may note that this has now been named THOMASONIAN. This is significant in that the word is synonymous with fine traditions of our almamater and the sense of discipline, self confidence and excellence of those who pass through its portals.

To keep up the traditions of excellence and leadership in Technical education, continued effort is being made by the University. As part of the Sesquice ntennial celebrations (1996-97) a document on the VISION-2020 was prepared. Excerises to follow up some of the recommendations have been taken up, notable amongst these being a comprehensive review of the undergraduate as well as the post graduate programmes. The alumni association too has brought into its agenda of a ctivities, programmes dealing with technical issues of contemporary interest. One such programme, on IT, is being reported upon in this issue.

It is intended to start a new column - ‘Letters to the editor’ . We invite you to contribute to this column by sending your suggestions or comments about the newsletter or the almamater, or information of general interest to the alumni.

A number of our fellow alumni, working within the country as well as abroad, have excelled in a wide variety of tasks. They have thus brought credit and glory to the alma mater. It will be a matter of joy for all alumni to know more about these highly accomplished persons. Furthermore their career details can serve as role models for our young alumni. We are therefore introducing a column , entitled “Our Alumni Excel”, and this issue features Ms. Vinita Gupta (Alumnus 1973).

Roorkee University Alumni Association plans to honour the Diamond Jubilee batch( 1939), the Golden Jubilee batch (1949), 1959 batch & the Silver Jubilee batch (1 974) during Alumni day celebrations to be held on 24th November 1999. Alumni of the above batches are most cordially invited to attend the above celebrations al ong with their families.