India's first IIT was built on the grounds of a colonial detention camp
In May 1950 newly independent India opened its first Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, on the site of the Hijli Detention Camp. Jawaharlal Nehru called the transformation a symbol of the country's future taking shape. The network modelled on MIT has since grown to 23 institutes, including one in Zanzibar.
The plan came from a 22-member committee led by Nalini Ranjan Sarkar in the late 1940s, which proposed regional technology institutes along the lines of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kharagpur, in West Bengal, was formally inaugurated on 18 August 1951 by education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Parliament declared it an Institute of National Importance on 15 September 1956, and Nehru spoke at its first convocation that year about the old prison ground becoming a monument to India's aspirations.
Following Sarkar's advice to spread them out and avoid regional imbalance, campuses opened in Bombay in 1958, Madras and Kanpur in 1959, and Delhi in 1961. The Institutes of Technology Act, passed in 1961 and in force from 1 April 1962, gave them degree-granting powers. Later additions often had political roots: student agitation in Assam led Rajiv Gandhi to promise an institute there, and Guwahati opened in 1994 under the Assam Accord. Roorkee's university converted in 2001, and a proposal of 1972 to absorb the engineering institute at Banaras Hindu University took until 2012. Eight more arrived in 2008 and 2009, and another wave came in 2015 and 2016.
Each institute runs itself, with its own senate of professors setting curricula and exams, while a shared IIT Council, chaired by the education minister, oversees the group. Teaching is in English. They receive far more money than typical Indian engineering colleges, roughly 900 million to 1.3 billion rupees a year each against 100 to 200 million, and keep one teacher for every six to eight students. Undergraduate fees are subsidised by about 80%, leaving students paying around 280,000 rupees a year.
Most undergraduates take a four-year BTech, with a common first year of physics, chemistry, mechanics, electronics and computing. Several campuses, including Bombay and Kharagpur, have scrapped switching departments after first year to cut stress. In June 2023 India and Tanzania announced the first overseas campus, a satellite of IIT Madras in Zanzibar.
Source: Indian Institutes of Technology
