In the late 1940s, a 22-member committee, headed by Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, recommended the establishment of these institutions in various parts of India, along the lines of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with affiliated secondary institutions.
IITs are under the purview of the Ministry of Education of the Indian Government and are governed by the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961. The Act refers to them as Institutes of National Importance and lays down their powers, duties, and framework for governance as the country's premier institutions in the field of technology.
Each IIT operates autonomously and is linked to others through a common council called the IIT Council, which oversees their administration.
The 23 IITs in India, listed in the order of their establishment are as follows:
IIT Kharagpur (1951) - The first IIT to be established
IIT Guwahati (1994) - Established as part of the Assam Accord
IIT Roorkee (2001) - Upgraded from the University of Roorkee, established in 1847
IIT Bhubaneswar (2008)
IIT Gandhinagar (2008)
IIT Hyderabad (2008)
IIT Jodhpur (2008)
IIT Patna (2008)
IIT Rajasthan (2008) - Now known as IIT Jodhpur
IIT Ropar (2008) - Officially known as IIT Rupnagar
IIT Mandi (2009)
IIT Indore (2009)
IIT Tirupati (2015)
IIT Palakkad (2015)
IIT Bhilai (2016)
IIT Goa (2016)
IIT Jammu (2016)
IIT Dharwad (2016)
IIT Dhanbad (2019) - Upgraded from the Indian School of Mines, established in 1926
Currently, 23 IITs admit over 17,700 students at the BTech level. 6,500 new undergraduate seats at five IITs starting from the academic session in 2025 will be created over the next five years, at the IITs created after 2014— in Tirupati, Dharwad, Palakkad, Jammu and Bhilai.
The Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is an engineering entrance assessment conducted for admission to various engineering colleges in India. It comprises two different examinations: the JEE-Main and the JEE-Advanced.
IIT-JEE is conducted only in English and Hindi, making it harder for students with regional languages as their main language.
IITs practice affirmative action and offer reservation to the "backward and weaker sections" of the society that includes SC/ST/OBC-NCL/EWS/PWD/Girl candidates. About 50% of seats are reserved for candidates holding backward-caste certificates, and 10% seats are further reserved for candidates from general (unreserved) category who fulfill the economically weaker section criteria.
Since 1953, nearly twenty-five thousand IIT graduates have settled in the US. A 2023 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among the top 1,000 JEE scorers, 36% migrated abroad, while for the top 100 scorers, the rate was 62%, primarily to the U.S. and for graduate school.
The IITs, along with NITs and IISc, account for nearly 80% of all engineering PhDs in India.
In a January 2010 lecture at the Indian Institute of Science, the 2009 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan revealed that he failed to get a seat at any of the Indian engineering and medical colleges.
According to data obtained through Right to Information (RTI) applications, approximately 38% of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) graduates from the class of 2024 have not secured job placements.