The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are a network of autonomous public engineering, technology and research universities in India. Established in 1950, they are under the purview of the Ministry of Education of the Government of India and are governed by the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961.
The Act designates them as Institutes of National Importance and lays down their powers, duties, and governance framework as the country's premier institutions in the field of technology. There are currently 23 IITs functioning under this act. Each IIT operates autonomously and is linked to the others through a common council called the IIT Council, which oversees their administration. The Minister of Education serves as the ex officio chairperson of the IIT Council.
History
In the late 1940s, a 22-member committee, headed by Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, recommended the establishment of these institutions in various parts of India, along the lines of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with affiliated secondary institutions.
The first Indian Institute of Technology was founded in May 1950 at the site of the Hijli Detention Camp in Kharagpur, West Bengal. The name "Indian Institute of Technology" was adopted before the formal inauguration of the institute on 18 August 1951 by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.
On 15 September 1956, the Parliament of India passed the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur) Act, declaring it as an Institute of National Importance. Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India, in the first convocation address of IIT Kharagpur in 1956, said:
On the recommendations of the Sarkar Committee, four campuses were established at Bombay (1958), Madras (1959), Kanpur (1959), and Delhi (1961). The locations of these campuses were chosen to be scattered throughout India to prevent regional imbalance.See "more IIT" in references below. Under "Final selection", the third paragraph The Indian Institutes of Technology Act was amended to reflect the addition of new IITs.
In the tenth meeting of IIT Council in 1972, it was also proposed to convert the then IT-BHU into an IIT and a committee was appointed by IIT Council for the purpose but because of political reasons, the desired conversion could not be achieved then. IT-BHU had been taking admissions through Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) for undergraduate courses and Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) for postgraduate courses since 1972. Finally, in 2012 the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University was made a member of the IITs and renamed as IIT (BHU) Varanasi.
Student agitations in the state of Assam made Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi promise the creation of a new IIT in Assam. This led to the establishment of a sixth institution at Guwahati under the Assam Accord in 1994.
In 2001, the University of Roorkee was converted into IIT Roorkee. Over the next few years, there have been several developments toward establishing new IITs. On 1 October 2003, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced plans to create more IITs "by upgrading existing academic institutions that have the necessary promise and potential". Subsequent developments led to the formation of the S K Joshi Committee, in November 2003, to guide the selection of the five institutions which would be converted into IITs. Based on the initial recommendations of the Sarkar Committee, it was decided that new IITs should be spread throughout the country. When the government expressed its willingness to correct this regional imbalance, 16 states demanded IITs. Since the S K Joshi Committee prescribed strict guidelines for institutions aspiring to be IITs, only seven colleges were selected for final consideration. Plans are also reported to open IITs outside India, although there has not been much progress in this regard. Eventually in the 11th Five year plan, eight states were identified for establishment of new IITs.
From 2008 to 2009, eight new IITs were set up in Gandhinagar, Jodhpur, Hyderabad, Indore, Patna, Bhubaneswar, Ropar, and Mandi.
In 2015 and 2016, six new IITs were established in Tirupati, Palakkad, Dharwad, Bhilai, Goa, and Jammu, as approved by a 2016 bill amendment, along with the conversion of Indian School of Mines Dhanbad into IIT, Dhanbad.
The entire allocation by the central government for the 2026-27 budget for all Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) is slightly over Rs. 12123.00 Cr (about 1.343 billion US$). However, the aggregate money spent by Indian students for tertiary education in the United States was about six times more than what the central government spends on all IITs.
In June 2023, education officials of India and Tanzania announced that the first foreign IIT campus would be established on the Tanzanian autonomous territory of Zanzibar, as a satellite campus of IIT Madras. The campus is scheduled to begin offering classes in October 2023.
Organisational structure
The president of India is the ex officio visitor, and has residual powers. Directly under the president is the IIT Council, comprising minister-in-charge of technical education in the Union Government, the chairmen of all IITs, the directors of all IITs, the chairman of the University Grants Commission, the director general of CSIR, the chairman of IISc, the director of IISc, three members of Parliament, the Joint Council secretary of Ministry of Education, and three appointees each of the Union Government, AICTE, and the visitor.
Under the IIT Council is the board of governors of each IIT. Under the board is the director, who is the chief academic and executive officer of the IIT. Under the director, in the organisational structure, comes the deputy director. Under the director and the deputy director, come the deans, heads of departments, registrar, president of the Students' Council, and chairman of the Hall Management Committee. The registrar is the chief administrative officer of the IIT and overviews the day-to-day operations. Below the heads of department (HOD) are the faculty members (professors, associate professors, and assistant professors). The wardens come under the chairman of the Hall Management Committee.
The Institutes of Technology Act
The Institute of Technology Act (parliamentary legislation) gives legal status, including degree-granting powers, to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). It was notified in the gazette as Act Number 59 of 1961 on 20 December 1961 and came into effect on 1 April 1962. The Act also declares these institutes as Institutes of National Importance.
List of all Indian Institutes of Technology +IITs and their locations, sorted by date of establishmentNo.Logo Name AbbreviationFounded Converted as IITState/UTWebsiteFacultyStudentsBudget1IIT Kharagpur IITKGP19511951West Bengal92815,8622IIT BombayIITB19581958Maharashtra75912,9763IIT Kanpur IITK19591959Uttar Pradesh6558,3464IIT Madras IITM19591959Tamil Nadu67410,2385IIT Delhi IITD19611961 Delhi68712,5436IIT Guwahati IITG19941995Assam5397,8497IIT Roorkee IITR1847 2002Uttarakhand 5859,7358IIT Jodhpur IITJ20082008Rajasthan2383,3089IIT Hyderabad IITH20082008Telangana3063,94610IIT Gandhinagar IITGN20082008Gujarat1432,01011IIT Ropar IITRPR20082008Punjab1792,76812 IIT Patna IITP20082008Bihar1662,88313IIT Bhubaneswar IITBBS20082008Odisha1782,59714IIT Indore IITI20092009Madhya Pradesh2042,32315IIT Mandi IITMD20092009Himachal Pradesh1972,34316IIT (BHU) Varanasi IITBHU1919 2012Uttar Pradesh3817,98017IIT Palakkad IITPKD2015 2015Kerala127137018IIT Tirupati IITT2015 2015Andhra Pradesh1191,16819IIT (ISM) Dhanbad IITISM1926 2016Jharkhand4146,66020IIT Bhilai IITBH20162016Chhattisgarh7180621IIT DharwadIITDH20162016Karnataka8686622IIT JammuIITJMU20162016Jammu and Kashmir1161,17823IIT GoaIITGOA20162016Goa 68 591
Academics
The IITs receive comparatively higher grants than other engineering colleges in India. While the total government funding to most other engineering colleges is around 100–200 million ($– million) per year, the amount varies between 900–1300 million ($– million) per year for each IIT. Other sources of funds include student fees and research funding from industry and contributions from the alumni. The faculty-to-student ratio in the IITs is between 1:6 and 1:8. The Standing Committee of IIT Council (SCIC) prescribes the lower limit for faculty-to-student ratio as 1:9, applied department wise. The IITs subsidize undergraduate student fees by approximately 80% and provide scholarships to all Master of Technology students and Research Scholars (PhD) to encourage students for higher studies, per the recommendations of the Thacker Committee (1959–1961). The cost borne by undergraduate students is around per year. Students from the OBC, ST, SC categories, female students as well as physically challenged students are also entitled to scholarships.
The various IITs function autonomously, and their special status as Institutes of National Importance facilitates the smooth running of IITs, virtually free from both regional as well as student politics. Such autonomy means that IITs can create their curricula and adapt rapidly to the changes in educational requirements, free from bureaucratic hurdles. The government has no direct control over internal policy decisions of IITs (like faculty recruitment and curricula) but has representation on the IIT Council. The medium of instruction in all IITs is English. The electronic libraries allow students to access online journals and periodicals. The IITs and IISc, Bengaluru have taken an initiative along with Ministry of Education to provide free online videos of actual lectures of different disciplines under National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. This initiative is undertaken to make quality education accessible to all students.
The academic policies of each IIT are decided by its senate. This comprises all professors of the IIT and student representatives. Unlike many Western universities that have an elected senate, the IITs have an academic senate. It controls and approves the curriculum, courses, examinations and results, and appoints committees to look into specific academic matters. The teaching, training and research activities of the institute are periodically reviewed by the senate to maintain educational standards. The director of an IIT is the ex-officio chairman of the senate.
All the IITs follow the credits system of performance evaluation, with proportional weighting of courses based on their importance. The total marks (usually out of 100) form the basis of grades, with a grade value (out of 10) assigned to a range of marks. Sometimes, relative grading is done considering the overall performance of the whole class. For each semester, the students are graded on a scale of 0 to 10 based on their performance, by taking a weighted average of the grade points from all the courses, with their respective credit points. Each semester evaluation is done independently and then the weighted average over all semesters is used to calculate the cumulative Grade Point Average (known as CGPA or CPI—Cumulative Performance Index).
Undergraduate education degrees