HOW THEY SHOT UP

Despite initial struggle, the eight second-generation IITs set up in 2008 have matured in under a decade. Careers360 looks at how they did it.

Abhay Anand

Pine needles, abundant in the Shivalik Hills, were used as fuel on a small scale by families of the Kamand area of Mandi district, Himachal Pradesh. Indian Institute of Technology Mandi (IIT Mandi) turned it into a business for the region’s women.

Since 2016, when the institute started its Empowering Women of Kamand (EWOK) programme, it has helped women set up units that cost about Rs. 6 lakh that form briquettes out of pine needles for use as biofuel.

“Researchers at IIT Mandi worked on making the process [of using biofuel] more efficient for the users,” said Timothy A. Gonsalves, former IIT Mandi director. By 2019, when EWOK was registered as a society, it had helped 12 women entrepreneurs set up businesses.

Similarly, IIT Indore got its area put on the bus route benefitting all residents around them and IIT Patna is organising biogas plants for surrounding villages.

In just 10 years, the new entrants to the network of IITs have settled in.

Nearly six decades after the first IIT came up in Kharagpur, West Bengal, in 1952, eight new IITs were established over 2008-09. These were at Ropar, Punjab; Bhubaneswar, Odisha; Gandhinagar, Gujarat; Hyderabad, Telangana; Patna, Bihar; Indore, Madhya Pradesh; Jodhpur, Rajasthan; and Mandi, Himachal Pradesh. The IIT Act was amended in 2012 to include them.

The eight have progressed more rapidly than most institutions despite being set far from metropolises and facing many challenges in the initial years. Careers360 spoke to some of them to trace their decade-long journey.

Old and new

In 2003 the Centre formed the SK Joshi Committee to assess the suitability of seven engineering colleges for conversion into IITs. Of these, only Banaras Hindu University’s engineering college was converted into an IIT in 2012.

A number of factors contributed to the expansion of the IIT network in the early 2000s. The Indian software and information technology (IT) sector was booming and engineering jobs were plentiful. India’s youth population had risen dramatically, straining existing education resources. And there was a “regional imbalance” in the distribution of these premier technical institutions.

To address all of these concerns, in 2008, the government announced eight entirely new IITs in states that didn’t have any. They were mentored by established IITs that set standards and guided the new ones.

New paths Starting from scratch, the new IITs chose to do things differently.

IIT Mandi starts its B.Tech programme with a “reverse engineering” project. Disassembling products to see the functions and interactions of the constituent parts allow students a clearer understanding of scientific and engineering principles.

The institutes are also quick to react to the industry’s needs. In 2019, IIT Mandi became the first institute to introduce a full-fledged B.Tech degree in data science and engineering to ensure its graduates have “future-proof expertise”, said Gonsalves.