Our Founder – JANAB A Thangal Kunju Musaliar (1897-1966)

Janab A. Thangal Kunju Musaliar is best known to the present generation as an eminent educationalist and the doyen of the cashew industry in Kerala. But for the people who knew him well, he was an extraordinary genius who rose from humble beginnings to become a legend of his lifetime. His remarkable achievements could be attributed to his multifaceted personality which combined the reflective and the pragmatic, the visionary and the missionary. He was highly independent in spirit, innovative in conception, thorough in execution, uncompromisingly honest in all dealings and deeply humane in approach. No wonder that he rose to become at one time an industrial phenomenon with twenty six cashew factories and twenty five thousand workers working directly under him – a fact that led Fortune magazine to rate him as the single employer who gave direct work to the largest number of people in the world.

Today, the name of this great man continues to live through the several educational institutions run by the T.K.M. College Trust. This Trust, established by Janab Thangal Kunju Musaliar in 1956, started T.K.M. College of Engineering, the first private engineering college in Kerala State in 1958. Today there are seven educational institutions under the Trust of which T.K.M. Institute of Technology which commenced in 2002 is the latest.