The First IIT Was Set Up in the Old Hijli Detention Camp at Kharagpur and Inaugurated in 1951, and India Now Has 23 IITs Under Acts of Parliament

India has 23 Indian Institutes of Technology, the Ministry of Education told the Lok Sabha in a written reply on 21 July 2025. The first, at Kharagpur in West Bengal, was set up in 1950 in the old Hijli Detention Camp, a prison where the British had held Indian freedom fighters, and was formally inaugurated on 18 August 1951.

Four of the first five IITs were built with foreign help: the Soviet Union through UNESCO at Bombay, West Germany at Madras, the United States at Kanpur and the United Kingdom at Delhi. Parliament declared each of the five an institution of national importance between 1956 and 1963. In the Ministry’s India Rankings 2025, IIT Madras was first in both the Overall and Engineering lists, and nine of the ten institutions in the Engineering list were IITs.

A committee of 1945 that asked for four institutes

The idea came from the Sarkar Committee, named after its chairman, Nalini Ranjan Sarkar. The Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council for Education, Health and Agriculture appointed it in 1945 to consider higher technical institutions for post-war industry. That is the date in IIT Delhi’s history and in a book excerpt on the origins of the IITs published by Scroll. IIT Kharagpur’s own history page places the committee in 1946, the year of its interim report.

In March 1946 the committee sent in an interim report, “in view of the extreme urgency of the situation”, the book records, and it never submitted a final one. The report asked for at least four higher technical institutions, in the east, west, north and south, on the pattern of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. Calcutta was to host the eastern one and Bombay the western one.

India started small. By the same book’s count, it had about 38 institutions awarding engineering degrees in 1947, together admitting about 3,000 students a year, with a postgraduate intake of 30. The committee proposed two undergraduates for every postgraduate student and, copying MIT, wanted physics, chemistry, mathematics and humanities taught to engineering students of every branch. One member, Dr Nazir Ahmed, filed a note of dissent asking for a survey of existing colleges before new ones were built; the book says no other member agreed.

Hijli: a detention camp that became a campus

The Hijli Detention Camp opened in 1930, according to IIT Kharagpur’s history page, and held people arrested in the freedom movement. On 16 September 1931, police fired on detainees there and killed two of them, Santosh Kumar Mitra and Tarakeswar Sengupta, the Netaji Research Bureau records. Subhas Chandra Bose came to claim the bodies, and Rabindranath Tagore condemned the shooting at a meeting at the foot of the Monument in Calcutta on 26 September 1931.

That page gives the sequence that followed. The institute began in May 1950 at 5 Esplanade East in Calcutta and moved to Hijli in September 1950, and the name Indian Institute of Technology was adopted before the formal inauguration on 18 August 1951 by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. August 1951 also brought the first session, with 224 freshers and 42 teachers, under Sir J. C. Ghosh, a scientist, as first Director.

Kharagpur sits in the state described in West Bengal at a glance, and Parliament gave the institute its own Act in 1956. That Act, dated 15 September 1956 on IIT Kharagpur’s page, declared the institute an institution of national importance, and the Schedule to the 1961 Act reproduces the declaration, which names the institution “Kharagpur in the district of Midnapore in the State of West Bengal”.

Four institutes, four partner countries

The Soviet offer came first. IIT Delhi’s history says the Soviet Union agreed to help set up an institute through UNESCO at Bombay. IIT Bombay’s website says it was established in 1958 with support from UNESCO and the government of the USSR, in the form of equipment, experts and fellowships, and that its campus covers 200 hectares at Powai.

At Madras the offer came from West Germany during Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit in 1956, IIT Madras says. The first Indo-German Agreement, signed in Bonn in 1959, provided German professors and five foremen, training for 20 Indian faculty members, and equipment for a central workshop and 20 laboratories. Humayun Kabir, then Union Minister for Scientific and Cultural Affairs, inaugurated the institute in 1959.

IIT Kanpur was registered as a society on 2 November 1959, and its first director, P. K. Kelkar, reached the city on 14 December 1959. Its own account says 100 students, chosen on school results from more than 7,500 applicants, began lectures in a new wing of the Harcourt Butler Textile Institute on 9 August 1960. American help came through the Kanpur Indo-American Program, which The Spark, an IIT Kanpur alumni publication, says drew on nine universities: MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Purdue, Michigan, Ohio State, California at Berkeley, Carnegie and Case. The same publication dates the announcement to 11 November 1961, four days after Nehru’s meeting at the White House with President John F. Kennedy. In July 1963 an IBM 1620 computer was flown in, and The Spark records that this made IIT Kanpur the first IIT with a high-speed digital computer.

Delhi began as the College of Engineering and Technology, set up with British help through a trust formed with the UK government and the Federation of British Industries. Prince Philip laid the foundation stone at Hauz Khas on 27 January 1959, the college was registered as a society on 14 June 1960, and Humayun Kabir inaugurated it on 17 August 1961, IIT Delhi’s history says. Until the 1963 amendment described below, it was an affiliated college of the University of Delhi.

The Acts of 1956 and 1961, and the later amendments

The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 (No. 59 of 1961) received the President’s assent on 19 December 1961. The Act declared the institutions at Bombay, Kanpur and Madras to be institutions of national importance and continued the 1956 provisions for Kharagpur. An amendment, No. 29 of 1963, received assent on 12 September 1963 and came into force the next day. That amendment brought in the College of Engineering and Technology, Delhi, renamed it the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and ended its affiliation to the University of Delhi.

The Act makes each institute a body corporate run by a Board of Governors and a Senate, with the President of India as Visitor. Its text says every institute “shall be open to persons of either sex and of whatever race, creed, caste or class”. A Council chaired by the Union minister in charge of technical education coordinates the institutes.

Later amendments added institutions. The consolidated text cites amendments of 1994 for Guwahati, 2002 for Roorkee and 2012 for nine more: Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Indore, Jodhpur, Mandi, Patna, Ropar and the Banaras Hindu University at Varanasi. IIT Delhi’s history gives 1995 as the year Guwahati was established and 2001 as the year the University of Roorkee became an IIT, so the dates of the Acts and of the institutes differ by a year. The Ministry’s Lok Sabha reply puts the number at 16 before 2014. Six more were established after the 2014-15 and 2015-16 Budget announcements, at Tirupati, Palakkad, Bhilai, Jammu, Goa and Dharwad, and the Indian School of Mines at Dhanbad was given IIT status in 2016, which makes 23.

The entrance examination

IIT Kanpur’s account says its first batch of 1960 did not sit the Joint Entrance Examination, which started the following year. The examination is run jointly by the IITs through a Joint Admission Board. The IIT Delhi team’s report on the 2012 examination called it a 50-year-old examination, with more than 500,000 applicants competing for about 9,600 seats in 16 IITs and the Indian School of Mines.

The 2026 edition, JEE Advanced, was held on 17 May 2026, and IIT Roorkee announced the results. Careers360 reported 1,87,389 registrations, 1,79,694 candidates who appeared in both papers and 56,880 who qualified. Admission to the IITs is pan-India, the Cabinet note of May 2025 says, so seats in the newer institutes are open to students from every state.

From 65,000 students to 1.35 lakh

The Budget announcement for 2025-26, quoted in a Cabinet release, said the number of students in the 23 IITs had risen from 65,000 to 1.35 lakh (135,000) over ten years. On 7 May 2025 the Union Cabinet approved Rs 11,828.79 crore (about Rs 118 billion) over 2025-26 to 2028-29 to expand the five IITs at Tirupati, Palakkad, Bhilai, Jammu and Dharwad. The release says their capacity will rise from 7,111 students to 13,687, an increase of 6,576, with 130 new professor-level posts and five research parks.

What the 2025 rankings say

The Ministry of Education released India Rankings 2025 on 4 September 2025. They are built on the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), launched in 2015, which scores teaching and resources (30 per cent), research and professional practice (30), graduation outcomes (20), outreach and inclusivity (10) and perception (10). The Ministry’s release says 14,163 applications came from 7,692 institutions, 1,584 of them in Engineering.

In the Overall list, IIT Madras ranked first for the seventh year running, followed by the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, then IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Roorkee. In Engineering, IIT Madras was first for the tenth consecutive year, followed by Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Roorkee, Hyderabad and Guwahati. National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli was ninth and IIT (BHU) Varanasi tenth. IIT Madras also led the Sustainable Development Goals list, introduced in 2025, and the Innovation list.

Alumni, named from their own institutions’ biographies

Alphabet’s 2026 proxy statement says Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet and Google, holds a Bachelor of Technology degree from IIT Kharagpur. IBM’s newsroom says its chairman and chief executive, Arvind Krishna, has an undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur. The Berggruen Institute says Nandan Nilekani received his bachelor’s degree from IIT Bombay, co-founded Infosys in 1981 and later chaired the Unique Identification Authority of India (Aadhaar is covered in our article on the system).