IIT Madras

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras or IITM) is a public institute of technology located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Along with being recognized as an Institute of Eminence, IIT Madras is widely regarded as one of India’s most prestigious higher education institutions, consistently ranking 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.

History

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:

• A workshop, laboratory equipment, and a library whose total value does not exceed ₹1.8 crore (equivalent to ₹166 crores or $20 million in 2024) .
• Twenty German professors to serve at the institute for a period of four to five years
• Four German foremen for the workshops of the institute for two years
• Facilities for the training of twenty Indian teachers in German institutions

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.

Campus

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). The campus is located 10 km (6.2 mi) from the Chennai Airport, 12 km (7.5 mi) from the Chennai Central Railway station, and is connected by city buses. Kasturba Nagar is the nearest station on the Chennai MRTS line.

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.

Student Hostels

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, 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.

Facilities

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. The Internet is available in the academic zone and the faculty and staff residential zone. Earlier, the Internet was limited in the hostel zone from 2:00 pm to midnight and from 5:00 am to 8:00 am. However, increasing demand during the academic semester led to round-the-clock Internet service.

IIT Madras also has supercomputing capability, with the IBM Virgo Super Cluster with 97 teraflops worth of computational power.

Satellite Campuses

IIT Madras set up an offshore campus in Tanzania in Africa as part of the Central government's IIT expansion plans abroad.

In July 2023, education officials of India and Tanzania confirmed that the IIT Madras satellite campus in the Tanzanian autonomous territory of Zanzibar began offering classes in October 2023. IITM - Zanzibar is also the first IIT to have a female director, with Prof. Preeti Aghalayam heading the Zanzibar Campus.

In 2024, IIT Madras proposed plans to establish a second satellite campus internationally in Sri Lanka.

Organisation and administration

Governance

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.

Departments

IIT Madras has the following departments

• Aerospace Engineering
• Applied Mechanics and Biomedical Engineering
• Biotechnology(Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences)
• Chemical Engineering
• Chemistry
• Civil Engineering
• Computer Science and Engineering (CSE)
• Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
• Electrical Engineering (EE)
• Engineering Design
• Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS)
• Management Studies (DoMS)
• Mathematics (MA)
• Mechanical Engineering (ME)
• Medical Science and Technology (MST)
• Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
• Ocean Engineering
• Physics

Academics

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.