IIT Madras
The Indian Institute of Technology Madras is a public research university and technical institute 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 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. 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 .
- 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
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, Gandhi Road and Taramani gate. The campus is located from the Chennai Airport, 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, 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 , three temples, three bank branches, 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 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
- Chemical Engineering
- Chemistry
- Civil Engineering
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
- Electrical Engineering
- Engineering Design
- Humanities and Social Sciences
- Management Studies
- Mathematics
- Mechanical Engineering
- Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
- Ocean Engineering
- Physics
Academics
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.
Grading System and Student Evaluation
The Indian Institutes of Technology have strict rules for grading. Depending on the course, the evaluation is based on participation in class, attendance, quizzes, exams and/or papers. Course instructors do continuous evaluation. The Evaluation System of IIT Madras which is also used in other IITs is the Cumulative Grade Point Average with a scale from 0 to 10 which is converted to letters:| Letter Grade | Grade Points | in Words |
| S | 10 | Excellent |
| A | 9 | Very Good |
| B | 8 | Good |
| C | 7 | Satisfactory Work |
| D | 6 | Below Average |
| E | 4 | Poor |
| U | 0 | Failed |
| W | 0 | Shortage of attendance |
CGPA then gets calculated as the cumulative credit-weighted average of the grade points:
CGPA = /
where:
N is the number of courses
Ci is the credits for the ith course
GPi is the grade points for the ith course
CGPA is the cumulative grade point average
The CGPA is not the same as the one commonly used in the United States.
In India, some credits might be awarded during Bachelor studies for Co-curricular and Extra-curricular Activities, while during the Master's Programme, this is not allowed.
Through agreements with numerous international organisations, IIT grades are accepted by many international organisations like NTU, NUS and DAAD.
Additionally, the attendance of the students is evaluated with VG for very good, G for good, M for marginal and P for poor.