St. Xavier's Collegiate School

The school was founded in 1860 by the Society of Jesus, an all-male Catholic religious order. The school is named after Francis Xavier, a Spanish Jesuit saint. The founder of the school is Fr. Henri Depelchin,[1] who oversaw most of the groundwork during the early years.[2]

Students have excelled on the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education exam.[5] In 2015, a student secured the highest marks in the ICSE examination while in 2017 a student scored the highest marks, in the Indian School Certificate examination.[6][7] In 2013 Xavier was ranked by Digital Learning as the top school in West Bengal.[8]

The school is divided into houses namely Berchmans, Britto, Gonzaga and Loyola, all trained in synchronized marching.[9] The tertiary section extended to coeducational Honors Arts and Science programs and Teacher Training while still on the high school campus.[1]

In 2011 Xavier was judged the best eco-initiative school in Kolkata City for its preparation of compost manure for organic gardening.[10] The school won a football tournament organized to promote outdoor exercise (so that youth do not become addicted to staying indoors with their computers).[11] The traveling cricket team in 2016 secured the first place in a tournament in Leicester, England.[12] In September 2016 the school hosted an exhibition of about 90 paintings of Mother Teresa to commemorate her canonization that month.

Xavier is expanding into tertiary education in collaboration with other groups, as with the Jesuit Xavier School of Management in Jamshedpur, on a new 17-acre campus in Rajarhat near New Town, Kolkata. A research centre with post-graduate courses is also planned. While schools of engineering and medicine are being considered, plans are progressing slowly to assure that fees will remain low and a wide range of students will be able to afford the education.[13]

• Rabindranath Tagore, polymath, novelist, poet, musician, artist and the recipient of the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature[1]
• Jagadish Chandra Bose,biologist, physicist, biophysicist, botanist, archaeologist and Fellow of the Royal Society[1]
• Jyoti Basu, longest-serving Chief Minister of West Bengal(1977-2000), India
• Siddhartha Shankar Ray, barrister, former Chief Minister of West Bengal(1972-1977), Union Minister for Education(1971-1972) and Indian Ambassador to the United States of America(1992-1996)
• Sourav Ganguly, former captain of the Indian cricket team and 39th President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India(BCCI)[14]
• Raj Kapoor, actor, producer, director
• Shashi Tharoor, UN undersecretary, eminent parliamentarian and former External Affairs minister
• General Shankar Roychoudhury, former Chief of Army Staff of the Indian Army and former member of the Indian Parliament
• Norman Pritchard, dual silver medalist, 1900 Paris Olympics
• Kaushik Basu, senior vice-president, former chief economist of the World Bank(2012-2016), Carl Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, President of the International Economic Association since June 2017
• Sanjiv Goenka, chairman, RPG Enterprises
• Satyendranath Tagore, first Indian to join the Indian Civil Service, elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore
• Dipankar Gupta (lawyer), former Solicitor General of India[15]
• Utpal Dutt, actor
• Dhritiman Chatterjee, actor
• Derek O'Brien, quizmaster, parliamentarian[16]
• Barry O'Brien, quizmaster, thespian and motivational coach
• Neil O'Brien, quizmaster
• Sanjeev Sanyal, economist, author, litterateur, Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India
• Dilshad Khan, Hindustani classical singer
• Aditya Vikram Birla, industrialist
• Barun De, historian; chairman, West Bengal Heritage Commission, Calcutta
• P. Lal, writer[17]
• Aditya Vikram Sengupta, filmmaker, cinematographer, graphic designer and artist
• Mahan Maharaj, mathematician, recipient of the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for Mathematical Sciences and recipient of the 2015 Infosys Prize for Mathematical Sciences
• Somak Raychaudhury, astrophysicist, Director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics(IUCAA), Pune
• Vijay Balasubramanian, theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania