Indian Institutes of Technology

Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are the premier educational institutions for science and technology established by the Government of India. At present, there are seven IITs spread over the country, in Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai, Kanpur, New Delhi, Guwahati and Roorkee. Besides establishing the seven IITs, the Government of India also has the Indian Institute of Science, a purely post-graduate institution, under its purview.

There are about 1500 undergraduate and 2000 graduate students in each IIT (except for IIT Guwahati, which is about half of this size). The IITs are well respected worldwide. In 2004, a ranking by The Times Higher Education Supplement named the IITs as the fourth-best institutes for engineering and IT in the world.

The seven IITs (along with the IT-BHU Varanasi and ISM Dhanbad) use the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) to select students for their undergraduate programmes. The Joint Entrance Examination is one of the toughest science-oriented entrance exams in the world, testing applicants' knowledge of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. The undergraduate acceptance rate through the JEE is only 4% every year. This makes them some of the most selective colleges in the world, as even the most competitive Ivy League schools have acceptance rates of close to 10%.

A student/alumnus of the Indian Institutes of Technology is informally known as an IITian. In early 2004, the IITs and the IIMs were struck in a controversy with the then ruling BJP government branding them as elitist, as people from poorer areas of the country found it harder to gain entrance.

Contents

1 History

2 Notable Alumni

3 Notable Praises

4 List of fictional IITians

5 Books on IIT-ians

6 External links

History

In 1946, Sarkar Committee was setup to explore setting up technical institutes of higher education for post-war industrial development of India by the Indian Government under a special act by the President. The recommendations of the Sarkar Committee were modelled along the lines of great US universities, notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The first IIT was born in May 1950 in Kharagpur, West Bengal at the site of Hijli Detention camp. Four other campuses were subsequently founded at Mumbai (1958), Chennai (1959), Kanpur (1960), New Delhi (1961). In 1995, a sixth campus at Guwahati was added and most recently in 2001, a seventh campus was established in Roorkee by upgrading Roorkee University, one of India's oldest engineering institutions, into an IIT.

Today, IITs offers undergraduate, integrated postgraduate, postgraduate and doctoral degrees in over 25 different engineering, technology and business/management disciplines.

Notable Alumni

Name	Campus	Year	Achievement
Vindi Banga	Delhi	1975	Chairman, HLL
Ajay Bharadwaj	Delhi	1982	President, Biocon India
Arjun Malhotra	Kharagpur	1970	Co-founder, HCL Technologies
Arun Sarin	Kharagpur	-	CEO of Vodafone
Ashok Soota	Roorkee	-	CEO and Founder of MindTree
Avi Nash	Mumbai	1975	Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs
Ajit Jain	Kharagpur	1972	President, Berkshire Hathaway Reinsurance Group
Bharat Desai	Mumbai	1975	Chairman and CEO, Syntel
Gururaj Deshpande	Chennai	-	Co-founder Sycamore Networks
Kanwal Rekhi	Mumbai	-	CEO Ensim Corporation; Ex-CTO Novell
Madhu Sudan	Delhi	1987	Nevanlinna Prize, 2002
Manindra Agarwal	Kanpur	1986	Clay Research Award, 2002
Manohar Parrikar	Mumbai	1978	Chief Minister, Goa
Narendra Karmarkar	Mumbai	1978	-
N.R. Narayana Murthy	Kanpur (M Tech)	-	Co-founder and Chairman of Infosys
Nandan Nilekani	Mumbai	1978	Co-founder and CEO of Infosys
Rajat Gupta	Delhi	1971	Managing Director, McKinsey
Rakesh Gangwal	Kanpur	-	CEO Worldspan, Ex-CEO US Airways Group
Ravi Uppal	Delhi	-	Vice-Chairman and MD, ABB India
Ronojoy Dutta	Kharagpur	1972	Former President,United Airlines,President and CEO Air Sahara
Dr. Sadanand D. Joshi	Mumbai	1975	President, JTI Inc.
Shanker Agarwal	Roorkee	1956	-
Som Mittal	Kanpur	1973	CEO Digital GlobalSoft
Victor Menezes	Mumbai	1970	Senior Vice Chairman, Citigroup
Vinod Khosla	Delhi	1976	Co-founder Sun Microsystems
Vyomesh "VJ" Joshi	Kanpur		Executive Vice President, Imaging and Personal Systems Group Hewlett Packard

Notable Praises

Lesley Stahl of CBS on 60 Minutes: "Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together and you get to an idea of the status of IITs in India."

N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder Infosys: "My son wanted to do Computer Science. But to be in the IITs he had to be among the top 200 in the country. So he chose Cornell."

N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder Infosys: "I do know cases where students who couldn't get into Computer Science at IITs, they have gotten scholarship at MIT, at Princeton, at Caltech."

Vinod Khosla, Venture Capitalist: "When I finished IIT Delhi and went to CMU for my master's, I thought I was cruising all the way through Carnegie Mellon because it was so easy, relative to the education I had gotten at IIT Delhi."

In April 2005, the United States Congress passed a resolution praising the efforts of IIT alumni, as well as the rest of the Indian-American community, for their significant contribution to the American society.

List of fictional IITians

Asok, character in the Dilbert comic strip
Hari, Alok and Ryan fictional charaters in Chetan Bhagat's Book on Life of three simple students in IITs, "Five Point Someone ? What not to do at IIT !"
Hemant Rai, the groom in "Monsoon Wedding"
Maya (played by Jothika), in the tamil movie "Kaakha Kaakha". She plays a teacher, who has done M.Sc Mathematics from IIT Madras.

Books on IIT-ians

The IITians: The Story of a Remarkable Indian Institution and How its Alumni Are Reshaping the World IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) is India's biggest and the most powerful brand, and arguably the toughest and the most influential engineering school in the world.

Since the first IIT was set up in the 1950s, thousands of initiates have walked out of the campus gates of IIT Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai and elsewhere to become leaders in their chosen fields. In India, they head many of the biggest and most admired professionally managed companies. Abroad, they lead giant corporations, and their feats figure in the folklore of Silicon Valley. The power that the alumni of this one bunch of undergraduate schools wields in business, academicia and research is comparable to that of Cambridge and Oxford in the heyday of the British Empire.

Sandipan Deb, himself an IITian, delves into his own experience and those of scores of alumni to try and explain what makes IITians such outstanding achievers. In part, it may be that they cannot be anything else: only one in every hundred applicants gets admitted. Harvard, in comparison, takes one in eight. The unique village-like campuses peopled only by the super-bright and the intensely competitive hone the IITians' skills further. No wonder then that when they leave the campus, IITians look upon themselves as special people, capable of competing in their field with the best in the world. And, as their record shows, succeeding.

IIT: India's Intellectual Treasures - Passage Through the Indian Institutes of Technology by Ranjan Pant & Suvarna Rajgurua. A behind-the-scenes look into India's prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which are India's intellectual gift to the world. The book and the companion documentary highlight the history and evolution of the IITs and the extraordinary contributions of its graduates around the world.