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Founding
Founding of Indian Institute of Technology Madras
autonomous public engineering and research institution located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu
- 1959
- South Asia
Founding
autonomous public engineering and research institution located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-Madras or IIT-M) is a public research university and technical institute located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. It is recognized as an Institute of Eminence. It has also ranked first nationally in engineering and overall categories by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) for many years.
As an Indian Institute of Technology, IIT Madras is also recognized as an Institute of National Importance by the Government of India. Founded in 1959 with technical, academic and financial assistance from the government of West Germany, IITM was the third Indian Institute of Technology to be established.
In 1956, the West German Government rendered technical assistance to establish a state-of-the-art engineering institute in India. Soon, the first Indo-German agreement was signed in Bonn, West Germany, in 1959 for the establishment of the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (now Chennai). IIT Madras was started with technical, academic and financial assistance from the Government of West Germany. It was at the time the most significant international educational project sponsored by the Federal Republic of Germany. As part of the agreement, the West German government committed to providing various forms of assistance for the development of the institute in Madras:
This has led to several collaborative research efforts with universities and institutions in Germany over the years. Although official support from the German government has ended, several research efforts involving the DAAD programme and Humboldt Fellowships still exist.
The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras started functioning with the first batch of 120 students being admitted in July 1959 to the first year of the Engineering Course. The institute was inaugurated in 1959, by the then Union Minister for Scientific Research and Cultural Affairs. The first batch had an overall strength of 120 students from across India. In 1961, the IITs were declared to be Institutes of National Importance. The first convocation ceremony was held on 11 July 1964, with Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, then the president of India, delivering the convocation address and awarding the degrees to the inaugural batch of students. The institute got its first women students in the BTech batch of 1966. IIT Madras celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 2009, and its Diamond Jubilee in 2019.
The main entrance of IIT Madras is on Sardar Patel Road, flanked by the residential districts of Adyar and Velachery. The campus is close to the Raj Bhavan, the official residence of the Governor of Tamil Nadu. Other entrances are located in Velachery (near Anna Garden MTC bus stop, Velachery Main Road), Gandhi Road and Taramani gate (close to Ascendas Tech Park).
Two parallel roads, Bonn Avenue and Delhi Avenue, cut through the faculty residential area before they meet at the Gajendra Circle, near the Administrative Block. Buses regularly ply between the Main Gate, Gajendra Circle, the Academic Zone, and the Hostel Zone.
Most students at IIT Madras reside in student hostels, where extracurricular activities complement the academic routine. The campus has 21 hostels, of which six —Sabarmati, Sarayu, Sharavati, Swarnamukhi, and the convertible Tunga-Bhadra—are currently exclusively for women. In earlier times, each hostel had attached dining facilities, but all of them have been closed down starting around 2010. Dining facilities are provided in three centralised halls: Nilgiri, Vindhya and Himalaya. Recently (2023), a new mess has been opened in the old Cauvery hostel mess for Jain food. Students are assigned to hostels upon matriculation, where they usually reside for the entire duration of their course of study.
The hostels of IITM are:
Mandakini is nine storeyed, Sindhu, Pampa, Mahanadhi and Tamiraparani are seven-storeyed, whereas all the other hostels are three or four-storeyed. The latter four hostels can accommodate more than 1,200 students. The older hostels were all three-storeyed till the early 2000s, when extra rooms were added. An additional new floor in the three-storeyed hostels, which generally house the undergraduate students, and a new block in place of the mess halls of these hostels have been constructed to accommodate the increased intake of students. These new blocks could be used as entrances for these hostels. As of 2022, the old Mandakini has been demolished and a new multi-storey block opened, with provision to accommodate approximately 1200 students.
IIT Madras provides residential accommodation for its students, faculty, administrative and supporting staff, and their families. The residential houses employ private caterers. The self-contained campus includes two schools (Vanavani and Kendriya Vidyalaya), three temples (Jalakanteshwara, Durga Peliamman and Ganapathi), three bank branches (SBI, ICICI, Canara Bank), a hospital, shopping centres, food shops, a gym, sleeping room and cricket, football, hockey and badminton stadiums.
IIT Madras also has supercomputing capability, with the IBM Virgo Super Cluster with 97 teraflops worth of computational power.
Following the long discussion to setup an offshore campus by the IITs, IIT Madras became the first to establish its campus in Zanzibar, Tanzania. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India, IIT Madras and Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT) Zanzibar-Tanzania on 5 July 2023, in the presence of Dr. Hussein Ali Mwinyi, President of Zanzibar and Dr. S. Jaishankar, External Affairs Minister of India.
It was announced that classes would be starting from October same year, from a temporary campus in Bweleo, Urban West in Zanzibar. The first batch started with 50 students in BS and 15 students in MTech in Data science and AI programmes. In an interview in 2024, director of IITMZ, Prof. Preeti Aghalayam, first female director of IIT, signalled that the institute could move into a 225-acre permanent campus by 2025.
In April 2017, IIT Madras secured 163 acres of land from the Government of Tamil Nadu for establishing additional research facilities. The land is located at Thaiyur 'B' village, Thiruporur Taluk, Chengalpattu District, Tamil Nadu and named as IITM Discovery campus. Hon'ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi Inaugurated IIT Madras 'Discovery Campus'.
Discovery campus houses national important research facility Port center by NTCPWC consisting Asia's largest shallow wave basin to cater to research and industry requirements and some startups such as ePlane, Agnikul, Hyperloop etc.
IIT Madras is an autonomous statutory organisation functioning within the Institutes of Technology Act. The twenty-three IITs are administered centrally by the IIT Council, an apex body established by the Government of India. The Minister of Human Resources and Development is the chairman of the council. Each institute has a board of governors responsible for its administration and control. The finance committee advises on matters of financial policy, while the Building and Works Committee advises on buildings and infrastructure.
The Senate comprises all professors of the institute and decides its academic policy. It controls and approves the curriculum, courses, examinations, and results. It appoints committees to examine specific academic matters. The director of the institute serves as the chairman of the Senate. The current director (appointed in 2022) is Kamakoti Veezhinathan, who obtained his Ph.D. and M.S in CSE from IIT Madras. He was conferred the Padma Shri award in 2026 January.
Three Senate Sub-Committees – The Board of Academic Research, The Board of Academic Courses and The Board of Students – help in academic administration and the operations of the institute. The Board of Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research addresses industrial consultancy, and the Library Advisory Committee oversees library matters.
IIT Madras has the following departments
IIT Madras offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 18 disciplines in Engineering, Science, Humanities and Management. About 600 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.
The institute has 18 academic departments and advanced research centres across disciplines of engineering and pure sciences, with nearly 100 laboratories. The academic calendar is organised around the semester. Each semester provides a minimum of seventy days of instruction in English. Students are evaluated continuously throughout the semester. The faculty does evaluation, a consequence of the autonomous status granted to the institute. Research work is evaluated based on the review thesis by peer examiners, both from within the country and abroad. The Senate, the highest academic body within the institute prepare ordinances that govern the academic programme of study.
IITM is also gearing up to launch a new and completely online BEd degree programme in Maths and Computing to improve maths teaching in schools, as said by the director at the G20 seminar at IIT Madras.
For the undergraduate curriculum, admission to the BTech and Dual Degree (BS + MS or BTech + MTech) programme is done through the Joint Entrance Examination – Advanced (JEE-Advanced). IIT Madras was the organising institute of JEE Advanced in 2017 and 2024.
However, admissions to the BS Chemistry and BS Medical Sciences and Engineering (MSE) courses are not done through JEE Advanced but are done from a separate merit list made based on the rank obtained in IAT, upon separate registration on the IITM website.
Admissions to the 4-years hybrid BS degree programmes for Data Science and Applications and Electronic Systems are taken through 2 channels: JEE-based entry (students clearing cutoff of JEE(Main) to be eligible to write JEE(Advanced) are eligible for direct entry to this course); Regular Entry through Qualifier Exam which is their entrance test, any student from any background and even professionals can sit in this test.
In 2025, IIT Madras introduced a new admission process for undergraduate programs, allowing students who have excelled in national and international Olympiads to secure seats without a JEE score. Moreover, they have also introduced a sports quota and fine arts and cultural excellence quota through which a candidate with national level achievements in various sports and cultural fields can apply for admission, after having qualified for JEE advanced.
For the postgraduate curriculum, admission to the MTech and MS programmes are through the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE); after 2022, with the discontinuation of 5-year integrated MA program and the same becoming a 2-year PG program, admissions is through GATE for the MA program also. The Joint Admission Test to MSc (JAM) is the entrance exam for the two-year MSc programme, and other post BSc programmes. MBA candidates are accepted through the Common Admission Test (CAT).
The institute has departments and advanced research centres across the disciplines of engineering and the pure sciences, and nearly 100 laboratories.
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