The Indian Institute of Science Began on 27 May 1909 With a Tata Endowment, 371 Acres From Mysore and a Government Grant, and Topped India's University Ranking Every Year From 2016 to 2025

The Government of India issued the vesting order that created the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) on 27 May 1909, in Bangalore, on land given by the state of Mysore. The Institute’s own history names three backers: an endowment from the industrialist Jamsetji Tata, land and money from the Regent Maharani of Mysore, and the rest from the Government of India. It took in its first 24 students in 1911, in two departments. In the India Rankings 2025, released on 4 September 2025, it stood first among universities for the tenth year running, 2016 to 2025.

Three payers and one site

In the 1890s, IISc’s history says, Tata decided to set up a world-class university in India with his own money. The Tata Group’s profile of him says he pledged Rs 30 lakh (Rs 3 million) from his personal fortune. IISc’s page on its origins counts the same gift differently, as an endowment of Rs 1.25 lakh a year. Neither page converts one figure into the other, so tuput gives both as written.

Mysore’s share came through the Regent, Maharani Kempananjammani Vani Vilasa Sannidhana, who ruled for her young son Krishnaraja Wadiyar. According to IISc, she provided 371 acres and 16 guntas (a local land measure) in Bangalore, plus money for buildings and an annual contribution. The origins page puts the sums at Rs 5 lakh for capital spending and Rs 50,000 a year, and says the Dewan, Seshadri Iyer, made the offer for the Durbar. The Government of India’s annual grant was Rs 87,500. Adding the three yearly figures gives Rs 2,62,500, which is tuput’s sum, not a number IISc prints.

Tata died in May 1904, five years before the vesting order. The longer route from his 1898 offer to 1909, through the Viceroy’s office and the Simla conference of 1899, is told in Jamsetji Tata and the steel and hydro dream. P. Balaram, a later director of the Institute, wrote in the journal Resonance in 2009 that Tata did not want his name tied to the institution, and that visitors to Bangalore still ask for directions to the “Tata Institute”. A statue by the British sculptor Gilbert Bayes, unveiled by the Maharaja of Mysore on 10 March 1922, shows Tata holding a replica of the Main Building. Making and shipping it, with the balustrade, cost Rs 79,500, IISc records.

Why the date is 1909 and the first class came in 1911

The legal birth is the vesting order of 27 May 1909, and IISc’s history, its page on its origins and Balaram all give it. Work had started earlier. Balaram quotes a journal notice that Morris Travers, the first director, left Marseilles on 2 November 1906 to take up the post, and he dates the Institute’s launch to a 1907 paper by Travers that carried an IISc byline. The Mysore land grant was realised in 1907, he adds, and construction of the Main Building began in May 1908.

Teaching came later. The foundation stone was laid on 1 February 1911, at a ceremony presided over by the Maharaja of Mysore, and the first students joined that year. The Tata Group’s page on Jamsetji says the Institute started functioning in Bangalore in 1911, which is the date that appears in many older accounts. Both dates are right. 1909 is when the Institute was created, and 1911 is when it opened its doors to students. IISc celebrated its centenary through a year of events that ended in May 2009.

It began with two departments, General and Applied Chemistry and Electrical Technology. Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry were among the first additions, Balaram writes. Students came from across India. Travers recalled in a letter of 1954 that he had planned for several messes (dining halls) and needed five on opening day. Balaram also calls IISc the second scientific research institution set up in India, after the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta in 1876, and says it grew on a pattern different from that earlier body.

The first director and his building

Travers was 34 when he took the job and had worked with William Ramsay on the discovery of the noble gases, IISc’s account says. He asked C. F. Stevens, an architect from Bombay, to plan the Main Building: silver-grey granite, a red-tiled roof, a 150-foot tower, a library on the first floor with chemistry labs in the east wing and electrical labs in the west. The estimate was Rs 13 lakh. The contractor T. C. W. Skipp’s bid for the foundations and plinths was accepted on 23 April 1908. Travers rode his horse, Peter Pan, to the site from his house on Avenue Road.

The Main Building was finished in 1919, after Travers had gone. IISc’s account says he resigned in June 1914 after a Viceroy-ordered enquiry, held in 1913, found no financial misappropriation but judged his continuing to be harmful to the Institute. Balaram traces the friction to a disagreement over direction: the educationist Burjorji Padshah wanted humanities and social science, Dorab Tata wanted bacteriology, and Travers favoured a narrower plan because, in Balaram’s words, resources would allow only a more limited approach. Between 1907 and 1913 there was little agreement, Balaram says, but Travers launched the Institute toward science and engineering.

When the Governor of Bombay, Lord Willingdon, toured the Institute in June 1914, Balaram records him saying he had no idea there was anything like it in India. Travers answered, as Balaram quotes him: “There is nothing like it in India; and nothing better in Great Britain.”

Research that became factories

In 1913 Sir M. Visvesvaraya, the Dewan of Mysore, was nominated to the Institute’s Council. He urged researchers to take up problems that would help an industrialised Mysore (his own career is in the profile of the engineer of Krishna Raja Sagara). In under five years, IISc says, six factories were started as a direct result of work done there: an acetone factory in Nasik, a thymol factory in Hyderabad (Sind), a bamboo straw-board factory in Bangalore, a soap factory in Bangalore, and sandalwood oil factories in Bangalore and Mysore city.

The soap and sandalwood oil plants were the most successful, IISc says, and together they made sandalwood and its products a byword for Karnataka. Visvesvaraya went on to preside over the Institute’s Court from 1938 to 1947. In 1941 he told it that missing the war years as a chance to build industry would waste an opportunity that comes once in several generations, IISc’s war-years page records.

Raman’s physics department and the cosmic-ray unit

C. V. Raman became the first Indian director on 31 March 1933 and set up the Department of Physics the same year, IISc says. He arrived with the Nobel Prize already won (the story of that work is in C. V. Raman and the effect that bears his name). In 1935 he invited Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize in 1954, to spend six months at the Institute as Reader in Theoretical Physics.

Homi Bhabha was appointed Special Reader in Physics in 1939, according to IISc, and set up a Cosmic Ray Research Unit with money from the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. He became a professor in 1942 and left in 1945 to found the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (see Homi Bhabha and the atomic programme). His students included the mathematician Harish-Chandra. Raman stepped down as director on 19 July 1937 but stayed as Professor of Physics until his retirement in 1948. His students there included G. N. Ramachandran, S. Ramaseshan and Vikram Sarabhai.

Balaram calls the Raman era a turning point, and adds that Raman’s term was turbulent and that Jnan Chandra Ghosh, director from 1939 to 1948, steadied the course and oversaw a great expansion in engineering. Ghosh later established the first Indian Institute of Technology, at Kharagpur, in the early 1950s, Balaram notes.

War work, a wind tunnel and a new engineering side

When the Second World War began, IISc had four departments. By the end of it, its war-years page says, it had added courses in Aeronautical Engineering (the department was set up in 1942) and Internal Combustion Engineering, and planned more. It worked with Hindustan Aircraft Limited to repair and maintain British and American war planes, trained electricians, carpenters and machinists, and gave land to the military. A 1943 photograph in the archive shows Electrical Technology students with a 300-watt transmitter they designed and built for the Royal Air Force to talk to London.

The architect Otto Koenigsberger, a German who fled Nazi Germany and reached India in 1939, designed several wartime buildings. One was a hydrogen plant that supplied up to 20,000 cubic feet of gas a month to Hindustan Aircraft. His 1946 design for the aerospace building included what IISc calls India’s first closed-circuit wind tunnel. The metallurgy building followed in 1948. Before the war, IISc says, lack of money had kept it to pure research; larger grants from Mysore, Bombay, Hyderabad and the Government of India made the applied turn possible.

Institutions that began on the campus

Balaram says the Indian Academy of Sciences and several scientific journals were conceived on the IISc campus, and that the Institute’s alumni and faculty helped found and lead many bodies across the country. He names Bhabha and TIFR, Sarabhai’s space programme, Brahm Prakash in metallurgy and P. K. Kelkar, who planned the Indian Institutes of Technology at Bombay and Kanpur.

Satish Dhawan, the aerospace engineer, directed IISc from the early 1960s until July 1981 and for much of that time also led the Indian Space Research Organisation, IISc’s director list says. Balaram credits him with building ISRO while holding both posts. IISc says that under Dhawan the Institute added the Centre for Theoretical Studies and the Cell for Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas, which continues as the Centre for Sustainable Technologies.

Where the sources differ

Four small discrepancies sit in the record. IISc’s history page gives Raman’s start as first Indian director as 1933 in one paragraph and 1934 in another, while its dated PDF and its director table say 31 March and April 1933. It also says Dhawan became director in 1962 in the text and January 1963 in the table. The Tata Group dates the Institute to 1911 and IISc to 1909, for the reason given above. And the Rs 30 lakh pledge and the Rs 1.25 lakh a year endowment are two descriptions that the sources do not reconcile.

Since the centenary

In 2011 IISc started an undergraduate programme, the BS (Research) degree, and a Talent Development Centre to train teachers on a temporary site in Chitradurga district. It has since added a 1,500-acre campus at Challakere in the same district, where, its growth page says, a skill development centre and solar power and climate research centres are to operate. Also in 2011 it opened a Centre for Excellence in Hypersonics, and in 2015 foundation stones were laid for the Centre for Brain Research and the Centre for Nanoscience and Engineering.

The Institute’s recent work includes a five-nanobody antivenom tested in mice, announced on 9 September 2026 and covered in A five-nanobody antivenom from IISc and Denmark.

The Ministry of Education’s release of 4 September 2025, carried by the Press Information Bureau, places IISc first in the Universities category for every edition from 2016 and first in Research Institutions from 2021. The NIRF tables score it 85.05 among universities and 85.01 among research institutions, and 85.00 overall, rank 2 behind IIT Madras on 87.31. As of 2 November 2026 the 2025 tables were the latest tuput could open on the NIRF site.