Indian Institutes of Technology

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Main Building of IIT Kharagpur

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are tertiary educational institutes established by the Government of India to offer undergraduate, integrated postgraduate and postgraduate degrees and the Doctor of Philosophy in over 25 different engineering, technology and business/management disciplines.

There are about 2500 undergraduate and 1500 graduate students in each IIT (except IIT Guwahati, which is presently approximately half this size). The students/alumni of any IIT are informally referred to as IITians.

The related Indian Institute of Science is a post-graduate institution focussed on research and advanced instruction. There are also six Indian Institutes of Management.

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Location of IITs

The IIT Family

The following 7 Institutes constitute the Indian Institutes of Technology:

Name	Location	Established in	Student Intake (UG+PG)	Land Area (acres)	Motto	Logo
IIT Bombay	Mumbai	1958	2000+2000	550	ज्ञानम् परमम् ध्येयम् (Gyanam Parmam Dhyeyam) ("Knowledge is the Ultimate Aim")	File:Iit blue.jpg
IIT Delhi	New Delhi	1961	3000+1000	320		File:Iitd.gif
IIT Guwahati	Guwahati	1994	1300+500	705	"Knowledge is Power"	File:IITG.JPG
IIT Kanpur	Kanpur	1959	2000+2000	1200	तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय (Tamaso Ma Jyotirgamaya) ("From Darkness, Lead me towards the Light")	File:IITKLogo.jpg
IIT Kharagpur	Kharagpur	1951	4500+5000	2100	योगः कर्मसु कौशलम् (Yoga karmasu kaushalam) ("Yoga is skill in actions")	File:IIT Kharagpur Logo.JPG
IIT Madras	Chennai	1959	2500+2000	620	सिद्धिर्भवति कर्मजा (Siddhirbhavati Karmaja) ("Success comes through hard work")	File:Iitlogo.gif
IIT Roorkee	Roorkee	1847(became IIT in 2001)	Not Available	360		File:IITRoorkee.PNG

History

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Pandit Nehru laying foundation stone of IIT Kharagpur

The history of the IIT system dates to as early as 1946. Sir Jogendra Singh of the Viceroy's Executive Council set up a committee to consider the setting up of Higher Technical Institutions for post war industrial development in India. The 22 member committee headed by Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, in its report, recommended the establishment of four Higher Technical Institutions in the eastern, western, northern and southern regions, possibly on the lines of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a number of affiliated secondary institutions. The report also urged the speedy establishment of all the four institutions with the ones in the east and the west to be started immediately. The committee also felt that such institutes should not only produce undergraduates but should be engaged in research, producing research workers and technical teachers as well. The standard of the graduates was recommended to be at par with those from first class institutions abroad. They felt that the proportion of undergraduates and postgraduate students should be 2:1.

With the above recommendations of the Sarkar committee in view, the first Indian Institute of Technology was born in May 1950 at the site of Hijli Detention Camp in Kharagpur, a town in eastern India. Initially the IIT started functioning from 5, Esplanade East, Kolkata and shifted to Hijli in September 1950. The present name 'Indian Institute of Technology' was adopted before the formal inauguration of the Institute on August 18, 1951, by Abul Kalam Azad.

The subsequent four campuses were founded at Mumbai (1958), Chennai (1959), Kanpur (1959), New Delhi (1961). In 1994, a sixth campus at Guwahati and in 2001, a seventh campus was established in Roorkee by renaming University of Roorkee, one of India's oldest engineering institutions, as an IIT.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of the Republic of India, in the first convocation address of IIT Kharagpur in 1956, said:

"Here in the place of that Hijli Detention Camp stands the fine monument of India, representing India's urges, India's future in the making. This picture seems to me symbolical of the changes that are coming to India."

Admission

Main article: Joint Entrance Examination

The IITs (along with IT-BHU Varanasi and ISM Dhanbad) use the Joint Entrance Examination (known as IIT-JEE or just JEE) to select students for their undergraduate programmes. The Joint Entrance Examination is a science-oriented entrance exam, testing applicants' knowledge of mathematics, physics and chemistry. The undergraduate acceptance rate at the IITs through the JEE is around 2%, with around 200,000 annual test takers for a little under 3900 seats. Only students who have completed (or will be completing at the end of the academic session in question) their higher secondary studies from a recognized board are allowed to sit the IIT-JEE. Since inception, the IITs have had a tough subjective pattern of questioning. In 2000, a preliminary test (called Screening Test) was introduced with the intention of reducing the load on IIT-JEE Mains exam.

In September 2005, an analysis group comprising of directors of all the IITs announced major reforms in JEE, to be implemented from 2006 onwards. The new test consists of a single objective test, replacing the earlier two tests system. The candidates belonging to the general category must secure a minimum of 60% marks in aggregate in their Qualifying Examination. Candidates belonging to SC, ST and PD categories must secure a minimum of 55% in aggregate in the Qualifying Examination. The age limit for appearing in IIT-JEE is 25 years (30 years for candidates belonging to SC, ST and PD categories). Also, starting 2007, a candidate can take the JEE at most twice. This has been done mainly to reduce stress on students and discourage the concept of "cram schools" - where students are made to memorize all sorts of possible exam questions. Also from 2007 onwards, students who are selected for an IIT cannot resit the JEE.

A section of students and academia criticized the changes in admission rule as this might lead to increased selection of less-intelligent students, which would dilute the IIT brand. As the suggested scheme is based upon objective tests, the significance of the luck factor is also argued upon.

The admissions into the postgraduate programmes are made through various other exams, primarily the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE).

Education in IITs

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The Main Building of IIT Roorkee

The Indian Institutes of Technology receive disproportionately higher grants as compared to the other engineering colleges. This has translated into superior infrastructure and better faculty in the IITs and consequently higher competition among students to gain admissions into the IITs. The entrance test for IITs (IIT-JEE) has always focussed on intelligence rather than rote, enabling selection of intelligent students. The reputation of IITs as centres of excellence gained acceptance in industry as well as academic institutions as the standard of education and quality of IIT students was consistently better than other colleges. This led to the establishment of what is popularly known as the IIT Brand. Various nationwide educational surveys over the past years rated IITs over other colleges confirming the eliteness of the IITs.

The various IITs function autonomously, sharing only the entrance test between them. The special status of Institutes of National Importance facilitated the smooth running of IITs virtually free from both regional as well student politics. The autonomy in education meant that IITs can set up their own curricula and hence made it easier for them to adapt rapidly to the changes in educational requirements.

Although IITs offer a range of degrees including Bachelor of Technology, Masters of Technology, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Science, the most widely sought degree of IITs has been the BTech degree. It is based on a 4-year program with eight semesters. All the IITs follow the credits system, with proportional weighting of subjects based on their importance. For each semester, the students are graded on a scale of 0 to 10 based on their performance throughout the semester. Each semester's evaluation is done independently and then the weighted average over all semesters is used to evaluate the cumulative grade point average (known as CGPA or CPA).

Factors contributing to the high success of the IITs

The IITs are highly successful institutions as compared to all other engineering colleges in India. No engineering college as of yet is close enough to the IITs in terms of the brand name that they have created. These could be argued to be the factors that have contributed to the high success of the IITs:

• The autonomy of the IITs. It must be noted, time and again, that though a democracy, India unfortunately has a highly complicted bureaucracy. This slows down every kind of progress in India, provides channels for undue and illegal political influence from many powerful politicians, and gives way to rampant corruption and bribary in some extreme cases. This kind of thing does happen in some of the government-owned and government-assissted universities in India—things like backdoor-entry (illegally admitting students not qualified in the entrance tests through bribes), extermely slow way of reforms into the educational system, too much interference from the state governments (under whom such institutions generally function), and a very painful bureaucratic procedure that needs to be followed for research grants. The IITs are largely oblivious to these faults, because their autonomy from the government politicians is protected by the Indian Institute of Technology Act passed several times by the Union Parliament of India.
• The IITs are able to take out the crème de la crème (as said colloquially) out of the bright students of India because of its tough and highly selective JEE (Joint Entrance Examination)—through which they take up students for undergraduate programs. For admission to BTech/Dual Degree in the IITs, qualifying the JEE is the necessary and sufficient condition. After this, no admission can be stopped on flimsy grounds (as happens in many other government colleges of India). Without JEE, no admission is possible, however large amount of bribe or other illicit means one can try. The (rather very tough) questions asked in the JEE (physics, chemistry and mathematics) test the complete learning of senior high school years, which means that the IITs do not need to brush up such studies once the qualifiers enter the IIT; the professors directly take up the specialized courses that are based upon JEE physics, chemistry and mathematics. Also, the amount of stress already borne by the students implies that they, in general, would be able to bear the stressful and difficult courses of engineering. Admissions to the graduate programs, through GATE, are also very stringent and ensure a high quality of the entrants for the Masters degree programs.
• The IITs, over the years, have built up a huge brand name. The name IIT is recognized with great reverence all over India and now in many parts of the United States, Canada, Europe, Southeast Asia, etc. No other university system of India except the IITs and the IIMs enjoy a brand name even near to this.
• Much of the success of the IITs also owes itself to the reputation of the IITian alumni. Many of them hold up very high positions in multinational companies worldwide and some even own large profit-making companies.
• The IITs have stringent procedures for taking up faculty members (professors). The result is that the standard and the knowledge level of the professors at IITs is much higher than most other engineering colleges in India.
• The IITs have an excellent interaction with the Indian industries, be it the chemical, infotech, machinary, electronics, civil engineering, whatever. IITian professors offer consulancy services to them on a professional basis.
• The IITs take up students from all over India through JEE (and GATE), and they do not reserve any special quota for the students of the state (province) in which they are situated. Reserving a special quota for the students of one state is generally a requirement in each state-government funded university, for the state in which it is situated.

Criticism of IITs

Brain drain

Amongst the criticisms of the IIT system by the media, academia and the people in general, the most prominent is that it encourages brain drain. Many IIT graduates go abroad for better job opportunities, despite the country having spent large amounts of money on the students’ education. The critics argue that putting money into IITs is useless as eventually it benefits other. The need for a bond requiring IITians to work in India has been debated upon quite a lot of times in the past though without success. It should be noted that the extent of brain drain has dropped susbtantially in the past few decades, with the percentage of students going abroad dropping from as high as 70% to around 30% today.

In comparison, proponents of the system argue that the capital sent home by the graduates has been a major source of Forex Reserves for India, which until the 1990s was short of Forex as it was a net importer. Another counter-criticism is that until very recent years, India used to follow a largely socialist system of economy, whereby most jobs were government jobs (note: India is one of the most bureaucratic regimes in the world), the private sector was not large, and "quality" of things were poor. In the recent years, the Indian government having opened its doors towards economic liberalization and globalization, the trend of brain drain has decreased and even reversed in the favor of India, due to most multinational companies opening up centres in India. A significant part of the IITians still go abroad for higher studies (Master of Science and PhD degrees). The reason for this is that the IITs are considered world-class institutions only in their undergraduate programs (BTech and Dual Degree BTech+MTech). Their graduate programs (MTech and PhD) are also good in India, but they need too much improvement as of yet to be among the world class—including improvement in terms of laboratories and infrastructure. Thus undergraduate students of teh IITs, if they wish to pursue higher studies, are left with no other option but to apply to the high ranking universities of the United States (as well as Canada and Europe).

Quality of education

Another notable criticism of IITs has been that they actually add little value to the students studying there. Just because IITs continue to get more intelligent students because of the pattern of JEE and more importantly media attention, the IITians continue to excel in various fields. The evidence cited for this observation is that the number of published papers and patents from the IITs are far less than the institutes with whom IITs are compared (like the Massachussets Institute of Technology).

Some say that the reason for this is again the fact that the IITs are world-class only in their undergraduate degrees, where they get the crème de la crème among the bright students of India. Research work, patents and scientific papers are primarily the job of MTech and PhD students, and the IITs need to improve upon their Graduate Schools. Most IITs have already started directing hige funds to do so.

Media attention

A related criticism has been of the undue media attention given to IITs. It is argued that it acts as a deterrent in students' willingness to learn with the media continuously highlighting the demand of IITians in industries regardless of their academic performance.

Dangerous precedents

It is widely argued that IITs are becoming more and more elite as innumerable number of coaching institutions have started throughout the country giving IIT-JEE specific education by charging such a high fees that only the rich can afford. The success of these institutions, with a few claiming to have coached around one thousand selected candidates (nearly a fourth of all admitted students) has led to widespread criticism of the way JEE is conducted. This is seen as the main reason behind the restructuring of the IIT-JEE format in 2006.

The traditional IITian argument has been that although the IITs and their faculty strongly denounce the coaching institutes, they nevertheless cannot compromise on the quality of the JEE tests paper. The JEE is meant to be a difficult test, in order to select only the brightest students from all over India. Sometime in the decade of 1990's, the JEE was rumoured to be so difficult that it contained questions of the level of B.Sc. of the "normal universities"! In the recent years, the JEE paper has been eased out somewhat to limit it to the syllabus of the senior High School of contemporary India (called Classes XI and XII in India).

Is IIT an engineering and technology school?

Some criticism has also been towards the fact that although the IITs are meant to be teaching engineering and technology, many of the jobs that their undergraduate students get through their on-campus placement process are rather jobs pertaining to entrepreneurship, information technology, business research, marketing, trading, finance, banking and management—sectors that are almost completely divorced of the four or five years of courses in Chemical, Mechanical or Electrical engineering. Indeed, these kinds of jobs are getting more and more polpular among the students than the so-called core jobs (into the engineering industries).

Reservation in IITs

IITs have been offering reservation for Depressed Classes (Backward Classes) of society. However, while a policy of quota system exists throughout the country for reservation of Backward Classes, a different scheme exists in IITs as they are Institutes of National Importance.

As per the rules of admission to IITs, there exists a reservation of 15% for Scheduled Castes and 7.5% for Scheduled Tribes. No separate reservation exists for OBCs. However, the IITs are not bound to fill these seats, much of which remains unfilled owing to the nature of selection process. All the Backward Class candidates have to sit the Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) with the rest of the students. Based on the results of IIT-JEE, those Backward Class candidates that qualify by a relaxed selection criteria (based on the performance of the General Category candidates) are admitted directly to IITs. Another slab of candidates who do not meet this relaxed admission crietria are offered a Preparatory Course of physics, chemistry and mathematics at the IIT concerned. After one year of study, only those candidates who are able to clear a cut-off in the End Semester Exams are allowed into regular studies at the IITs. The seats reserved for Backward Class students are not transferable to General Category and roll on to the next year's students from the Preparatory Courses.

The logic sited for this procedure is that IITs being Institutes of National Importance, there should not be any compromise on the quality of students studying in them. Moreover, as the IITs have a very rigorous curriculum, it will result in higher cases of depression and suicides among the below-average students.

Opposition of the procedure

Some people consider the additional procedures for admission into the IITs as unnecessary and counter-productive. The opposition to the policy of reservation only (and not quota) is based on the following arguments:

1. In the present scheme, a large number of seats remain vacant. According to some estimates, only 10% of seats actually go to the Backward Class candidates.
2. The current procedure is humiliating for the Backward Class candidates as they have to study separately.
3. They face a wasted year, as they go through the additional year of studying the Preparatory Course.

Recent developments

In the year 2005, based on the recommendations of an independent panel, the central government led by Congress (I) proposed to implement quota system for Scheduled caste, Schedule tribe and minority communities (prominently Muslims) in IITs and IIMs (for both students and faculty). It was strongly opposed by the opposition led by BJP as "dangerous and divisive".

Inter IIT Sports Meet

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A volleyball event at Inter IIT Sports Meet-2004

All the IITs compete in a variety of sports held under the purview of the Inter IIT Sports Meet. The competition is organized every year in the month of December in one of the seven IITs by a policy of rotation. The first Inter IIT Sports Meet was held in IIT Bombay in 1961. The total number of participants in any Inter IIT Sports Meet is usually around 700. The award consists of a running shield that is passed over to the winning IIT every year. The winner is decided based on the weighted average of the points of the events. There are three prizes for every event: ‘‘gold, silver and bronze. Separate events for boys and girls are organized and points are tallied separately for determining the final winner.

The twelve events in the Inter IIT Sports are athletics, badminton, basketball, cricket, football, hockey, swimming, lawn and squash tennis), table tennis, volleyball, water polo and weightlifting.

As swimming and water polo are played in water, which is usually very cold by the month of December, the Inter IIT Sports Meet for them is usually held in the first week of October and is called Inter IIT Aquatics Meet.

Alumni

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Vinod Gupta School of Management in IIT Kharagpur

A lot of IIT Alumni Associations are active in India and abroad. The IITians are known to be very attached to their alma mater and have contributed in the form of donations to their institute. The Shailesh J Mehta School of Management (SJMSOM) in IIT Bombay and Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSOM) in IIT Kharagpur are management schools inside IITs set up largely by alumni donations and named after the donors. Other forms of donations include donations for Hostel (or Hall) development and maintenance of computer networks.

See also: List of notable IIT alumni

International Rankings

The Times Higher Education Supplement (2005) ranked the IITs the 50th best overall universities in the world in their 2005 World University Rankings. They occupied the 36th position globally for science. The IITs were ranked 3rd best worldwide for technology.

Setting up of more IITs

Over the past few years, there have been a lot of developments towards setting up of new IITs. The process has been continuing for a while as IIT Guwahati and IIT Roorkee are considered to be new generation IITs. However these were implemented on case basis, unlike the new plans that propose setting up of as many as 5 new IITs. In October 2003, the then Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced that there are plans to set up more IITs 'by upgrading existing academic institutions that have the necessary promise and potential'. Subsequent developments led to the formation of S K Joshi Committee in November 2003 to guide the selection of the five institutions to be the five new IITs. The committee comprised eminent academics, scientists and research administrators such as Dr K Kasturirangan, Dr R Natarajan, Prof V S Raju, S K Joshi, and H S Bhartiya.

The committee faced a challenging task as there were pressures for it to be politically correct also. This was because after the University of Roorkee was transformed to an IIT, northern India had three IITs (IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur and IIT Roorkee) while the south had only one (IIT Madras). When the government expressed its willingness to correct the 'regional imbalance', this led to demands from all the states. However, the committee finalised upon the following seven colleges:

• Aligarh Muslim University's Zakir Hussain College of Engineering and Technology, Aligarh, UP.
• Andhra University's College of Engineering, Vishakhapatnam, AP.
• Banaras Hindu University's Institute of Technology (IT-BHU), Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh.
• Bengal Engineering College, Howrah, West Bengal.
• Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT), Kochi, Kerala.
• Jadavpur University's Engineering and Technology Departments, Calcutta, West Bengal.
• Osmania University's College of Engineering and College of Technology (both participated), Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh.

For states with more than one college in the race, it is being speculated that only one will get IIT status as the Nalini Ranjan Sarkar Committee recommended the setting up of IITs in different parts of the country.

The government has laid strict guidelines for aspiring institutions. The institutes have to ensure the following things (though not limited to them) in order to be eligible to become an IIT:

1. All the vacancies for faculties need to be filled.
2. They should be granted autonomy (for those that don't have it already).
3. The departments need to be rationalized (i.e. restructured on the basis of demand in the economy).
4. Good student quality is to be ensured (by admitting at least 50% of students through AIEEE).
5. The quality of education and assessment (examinations) should be improved up to the standard of present IITs.
6. More attention needs to be paid on research work.

Criticism of the process

A section of society and academia has criticized the move to set up new IITs. The most notable argument is that it will lead to dilution of the IIT brand. It is argued that IITs as of now are admitting far more students than their capacity. Furthermore, since a lot of worth of IITians is generated at their point of entry (by getting selected into the JEE), increasing the intake would mean recruiting less intelligent students. They argue that instead of making them IITs, they should be made into NITs or something else to preserve the identity of current IITs. The other notable arguments are:

• There is already a faculty shortage in most IITs since India produces only about 400 engineering doctorates per year and a majority of them opt for lucrative industrial and research positions. Though there is a small talented pool of 'foreign-qualified' doctorates available, but they tend to settle in a metropolis or with reputed institutes, as IITs don't pay faculty enough compensation compared to industry.
• As IITs are drain of national resources, the government needs to liberalize the present IIT system rather than create more IITs.
• It will be very difficult to change the culture of new colleges (that are claimed to have a lot more politics in students' life) to the relatively politics-free student life in IITs.

IITs in the media

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In this strip, Asok claims that as an IIT graduate, he's mentally superior to most people on earth, and trained to sleep only on National holidays

Literature

Fiction

• Asok, a character in the Dilbert comic strip, is an IIT graduate.
• Five Point Someone? What not to do at IIT! is a fiction novel by an IIT graduate Chetan Bhagat about the life of students in IIT. The novel prominently features three fictional IITians: Hari, Alok and Ryan.

Non-fiction

• The IITians by Sandipan Deb
• IIT: India's Intellectual Treasures by Ranjan Pant and Suvarna Rajgurua.
• Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom by Rukmini Bhaya Nair. ISBN 817223273X Publisher: Harper Collins, 1997

Cinema

• Hemant Rai, the groom in the 2001 movie Monsoon Wedding is told to be an IITian.
• Maya (played by Jyothika), in the Tamil movie "Kaakha Kaakha" is a teacher, who has done MSc Mathematics from IIT Madras.

See also

• Indian Institutes of Management
• Indian Institute of Science
• National Institutes of Technology

External links

• Indian Institute of Technology (Brand IIT)
• IIT Bombay
• IIT Delhi
• IIT Guwahati
• IIT Kanpur
• IIT Kharagpur
• IIT Madras
• IIT Roorkee
• Ranking of Indian Engineering Schools
• Exams4India on IIT JEE 2006
• CBS 60 Minutes - Video about IITs(92MB)