Ghaziabad: Wrightganj

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Tehsil office: 1821

As of 2025

Ayantika Pal, August 17, 2025: The Times of India

Noida : In a building with high vaulted ceilings and brick walls pierced by arched windows letting in shafts of light lies an abandoned pile of lanterns and a century-old register. They are remnants of this heritage site that predates not just Independence, but possibly the 1857 sepoy mutiny.


Though the earliest entry in official records dates to 1916, the school building in Ghaziabad’s Wrightganj was constructed in 1821 as a British tehsil office, former principals say. A section of it was converted into a residential school in 1881, and that gave it the name: Tehsil or Town School. 


On Aug 15, 1947, hours after Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's address to the nation, Shri Murlidhar took charge as the school's first principal in free India – a record still displayed on a board there.


Shri Murlidhar, it says, led the school till Feb 15, 1949. Fourteen principals followed after him, the registers show. 
Scribbled into their yellow pages are meticulously maintained records, originally written in Urdu and switched to Hindi after Independence.


"Since the beginning, only classes 6, 7, 8 and 9 were taught at the school. The legacy has continued till date. It was probably sometime after Independence that it was renamed as Purv Madhyamik Vidyalaya," said Jagdish Sharan Sharma, the school's principal from 1998 to 2012.


The building's historical significance extends beyond local boundaries. 


"UP Board was established in 1921. Before that, there were only schools till Class 8. In the Meerut division and western UP region, the school in Wrightganj is probably the oldest. Students from across other districts also came to study there," said Dharmendra Sharma, district inspector of schools (DIOS), Ghaziabad. 


The school now operates from a new building, to which it moved in 2001, just about 200m away from the British-era one. 


Its current principal Layik Ahmed, who took the post in 2013, said he and his predecessors have, over the years, "tried to preserve as much of this building as possible". 


"The old registers are also kept and maintained. If the old building can be preserved, it can be turned into a heritage building or a museum. My father also studied in the school during the 1950s. It holds many historical merits," he said. 
But there are no such plans to preserve the abandoned classrooms linked through open corridors where lantern holders are gathering dust. 


"The building is very old. We can say it is the oldest school building in Ghaziabad... We will see if anything can be done to preserve it," said OP Yadav, Ghaziabad's basic shiksha adhikari (BSA).


The school building, it appears, isn’t the only one to carry the weight of history. Named after a British collector, Wrightganj itself is a town noted in The Imperial Gazetteer of India for its role in the 1857 mutiny; though the early 20th century book doesn’t detail why.