We Were Once That Good

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) is a prestigious group of autonomous public engineering and management institutes of India.

The IITs are governed by the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 which has declared them as "institutions of national importance", and lays down their powers, duties, framework for governance etc.


The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 lists sixteen institutes located at Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Delhi, Gandhinagar, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Jodhpur, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Mandi, Mumbai, Patna, Ropar, Roorkee and Varanasi.


Each IIT is an autonomous institution, linked to the others through a common IIT Council, which oversees their administration. The IITs award degrees ranging from B.Tech to PhD.


The IITs have a common admission process for undergraduate admissions. It was called IIT-JEE, which was replaced by Joint Entrance Examination in 2013.


The post-graduate level program that awards M.Tech degree in engineering is administered by the older IITs (Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, Delhi, Roorkee, Varanasi, Guwahati). M.Tech admission is done on the basis of Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE).


In addition to B.Tech and M.Tech programs IITs also award other graduate degrees such as M.Sc in Engineering, Maths, Physics and Chemistry, MBA, PhD etc. Admission to these programs of IITs is done through Common Admission Test(CAT), Joint Admission Test for Masters (JAM) and Common Entrance Examination for Design (CEED).


IIT Vision
To contribute to India and the World through excellence in scientific and technical education and research; to serve as a valuable resource for industry and society; and remain a source of pride for all Indians.
IIT Mission
To generate new knowledge by engaging in cutting-edge research and to promote academic growth by offering state-of-the-art undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes.
To identify, based on an informed perception of Indian, regional and global needs, areas of specialization upon which the institute can concentrate.
To undertake collaborative projects which offer opportunities for long-term interaction with academia and industry.
To develop human potential to its fullest extent so that intellectually capable and imaginatively gifted leaders can emerge in a range of professions.
IIT Values

• Academic integrity and accountability.
• Respect and tolerance for the views of every individual.
• Attention to issues of national relevance as well as of global concern.
• Breadth of understanding, including knowledge of the human sciences.
• Appreciation of intellectual excellence and creativity.
• An unfettered spirit of exploration, rationality and enterprise.

What is America's most valuable import from India? It may very well be brainpower.

Hundreds of thousands of well-educated Indians have come to the U.S. in recent decades - many to work in the computer and software industries.

The best and brainiest among them seem to share a common credential: They're graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, better known as IIT.

IIT has seven campuses throughout the country, and as we discovered when we traveled there last year, its students consider themselves the luckiest people in India. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports on this story which first aired March 2, 2003.

Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of IIT in India.

IIT is dedicated to producing world-class chemical, electrical and computer engineers with a curriculum that may be the most rigorous in the world.

A former student of India/American schools said:

"When I finished IIT Delhi and went to Carnegie Mellon 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," says Khosla.

Rama Ramakrishnan:

I graduated from both places (undergrad from IIT, MS and PhD from MIT) and TAed over a hundred MIT undergrads during grad school.

The only difference I saw was that the MIT students worked harder. That could well be because of external constraints (# of problem sets to be turned in, # of quizzes/tests to prep for) rather than anything innate.

I remember a college professor of mine telling me about a conversation that he had with a shoe salesmen. He asked the shoe salesmen would be prefer to be assigned a brand new market where there was no competition, where he could build clientele without the fear of competition taking them away; or, would the shoe salesman like to be assigned a market where there were a dozen or so other salesmen representing the best shoe companies in the industry.

The shoe salesman told my college professor that he would prefer the latter opportunity and when asked by the college professor why, his response was, “I want to be in a market where a foundation for buying shoes exist and that there is lots of competition because it provides me with the motivation to show the customer that my product is the best above all others... I don't have that in a brand new market.”

One could take his comment as being lazy and not willing to take the time to educate the people in a new market which would force him to work long hours; or, one could take his comments to mean that competition is economically healthy both for the seller as well as the buyer regardless of the amount of hours invested to make sales happen.

It is true that most economic models show that heavy competition associated with the right amount of supply based upon demand, will bring prices down... maybe temporarily or maybe over a longer period of time.

But, more importantly for me, at least, is this factor of competition. When I was teaching I knew I could out-teach anyone on campus and longed for the opportunity to have that belief tested but it never happened... other than the size of my classes grew and I oftentimes had to split my sections in order to accommodate all the students that wanted to take my classes.

So, the fact that some of America's BEST SCHOOLS are being challenged by schools like IIT is not scarey but healthy and I wish more would develop.

Our world will grow and thrive as it is driven by new knowledge which is a natural by product of education and the more education that we can provide citizens of the world, the better off we will be.

Education can be like driving a Lexus, Cadillac, or a Mercedes... or, it can be like driving a ROLLS ROYCE....