Institute of Technology Madras

Indian Institute of Technology Madras
IIT Madras logo
Motto	Siddhirbhavati Karmaja
Motto in English	Effort Yields Success
Established	1959
Type	Education and Research Institution
Director	Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi
Academic staff	460
Undergraduates	2,900
Postgraduates	2,500
Location	Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Campus	Urban, 2.5 km² of wooded land
Mascot	Gajendra Circle (GC)
Website	www.iitm.ac.in

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (Hindi: भारतीय प्रौद्योगिकी संस्थान , मद्रास, IIT Madras) is an engineering and technology school in Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India. It is recognized as an Institute of National Importance by the Government of India. Founded in 1959 with technical and financial assistance from the government of the former West Germany, it is third among the Indian Institutes of Technology established by the Government of India through an Act of Parliament, to provide education and research facilities in engineering and technology.

IIT Madras is a residential institute that occupies a 2.5 km² (620 acres) campus that was formerly part of the adjoining Guindy National Park. The institute has nearly 360 faculty, 6,000 students and 1,250 administrative and supporting staff. Growing ever since it obtained its charter from the Indian Parliament in 1961, Much of the campus is a protected forest, carved out of the Guindy National Park, home to chital (spotted deer), black buck, and other wildlife. A natural lake, deepened in 1988 and 2003, drains most of its rainwater.

History

The entrance to the campus,showing the logo (a stylized lamp) and the motto "Siddhirbhavati Karmaja" (taken from the Bhagavad Gita, meaning "success comes through hard work").

In 1956, the German Government offered technical assistance for establishing an institute of higher education in engineering in India. The first Indo-German agreement was signed in Bonn, West Germany in 1959 for the establishment of the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras. IIT Madras was started with technical, academic and financial assistance from the Government of West Germany and was at the time the largest educational project sponsored by the West German Government outside their country. 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 program and Humboldt Fellowships exist.

The institute was inaugurated in 1959 by Prof. Humayun Kabir, the then Union Minister for Scientific Research and Cultural Affairs. In 1961, the IITs were declared to be Institutions of National Importance that include the seven Institutes of Technology located at Kharagpur (established 1951), Mumbai (established 1958), Chennai (established 1959), Kanpur (established 1959), Delhi (established 1961), Guwahati (established 1994) and Roorkee (established 1847, upgraded to an IIT in 2001). IIT Madras celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 2009.

Campus

The Gajendra Circle ("Elephant Circle") is a landmark seen after the main entrance. It has two painted elephants standing back to back on either side of a fountain inside a traffic circle.

The main entrance of IIT Madras is on Chennai's Sardar Patel Road, flanked by the residential districts of Adyar and Velachery. The campus is close to the Raj Bhavan, the official seat of the Governor of Tamilnadu. Other entrances are located in Velachery (near Anna Garden MTC bus stop, Velachery Main Road), Gandhi Road (known as Krishna Hostel gate or Toll Gate) and Taramani gate(close to Ascendas Tech Park).

The campus is located 10 km from the Chennai Airport, 12 km from the Chennai Central Railway station, and is well connected by buses.

Two parallel roads, Bonn Avenue and Delhi Avenue, cut through the faculty residential area shrouded under a canopy of green, before they meet at the Gajendra Circle, near the Administrative Block. Buses and electric mini buses ply between the gate, Gajendra Circle, the academic zone, and the hostels.

Location in Context

Areas of Chennai

	Kotturpuram	Kotturpuram	Kotturpuram
	Guindy		Adyar
		IIT Madras
	Guindy National Park	Guindy National Park	Taramani

Organization

Administration

Administrative block

The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, is an autonomous statutory organization functioning within the Institute of Technology Act. The seven IITs are administered centrally by the IIT Council, an apex body established by the Government of India. The Minister of Human Resource and Development, Government of India, is the Chairman of the Council. Each institute has a Board of Governors responsible for its administration and control.

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 Director from 2001 to 2011 was M. S. Ananth, who stepped down at the end of July 2011. As of September 2011, Bhaskar Ramamurthi has taken over as Director .

Three Senate Sub-Committees - The Board of Academic Research, The Board of Academic Courses and The Board of Students - help in academic administration and in the operations of the Institute. The Finance Committee advises on matters of financial policy, while the Building and Works Committee advises on buildings and infrastructure. The Board of Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research addresses industrial consultancy and the Library Advisory Committee oversees library matters.

Departments

IIT Madras has 11 engineering departments:

• Aerospace Engineering
• Applied Mechanics
• Biotechnology
• Chemical Engineering
• Civil Engineering
• Computer Science and Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• Engineering Design
• Mechanical Engineering
• Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
• Ocean Engineering

Five other departments offer studies in:

• Chemistry
• Mathematics
• Physics
• Humanities and Social Sciences
• Management Studies

Academics

IIT Madras offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 15 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 360 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

The institute has 15 academic departments and advanced research centres across disciplines of engineering and pure sciences, with nearly 100 laboratories. The IITs are rated among the best educational institutions in the world as ranked by their peers. The academic calendar is organized around the semester. Each semester provides a minimum of seventy days of instruction in English. Students are evaluated on a continuous basis throughout the semester. Evaluation is done by the faculty, a consequence of the autonomous status granted to the Institute. Research work is evaluated on the basis of the review thesis by peer examiners both from within the country and abroad. Ordinances that govern the academic program of study are prepared by the Senate, the highest academic body within the institute.

Admission tests

For the undergraduate curriculum, admission to the B.Tech programme is done through the Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE). Admission to the five year integrated Master of Arts (MA) programme is through the Humanities and Social Sciences Entrance Examination (HSEE), an IIT Madras specific exam.

For the postgraduate curriculum, admission to the M.Tech programme is through the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE). The Joint Admission Test to M.Sc. (JAM) is the entrance exam for the two year M.Sc. programme, and other post B.Sc. programmes. MBA candidates are accepted through the Joint Management Entrance Test (JMET).

Other academic activities

Academic research programs

The institute has departments and advanced research centres across the disciplines of engineering and the pure sciences, and nearly 100 laboratories.

Research programs concern work undertaken by faculty members or specific research groups within departments that award an MS or PhD degree. Research is carried out by scholars admitted into these departmental programmes, under the guidance of their faculty. Each department makes known its areas of interest to the academic community through handbooks, brochures and bulletins. Topics of interest may be theoretical or experimental. IIT Madras has initiated 16 inter-disciplinary research projects against identified focus areas.

The rigors of academic study at each level are balanced with co-curricular activities. Lectures on topics of academic relevance are held under the Extramural Lecture Series. Conferences, symposiums and workshops are organized by the faculty, attracting scholarly participation from around the world.

Partnership with other universities

The institute maintains academic friendship with educational institutes around the world through faculty exchange programs. The institute has signed Memoranda Of Understanding (MOUs) with foreign universities, resulting in cooperative projects and assignments.

Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research

The Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research building

Through industrial consultancy, faculty and staff undertake assignments for industry that may include project design, testing and evaluation, or training in new areas of industrial development. Industries and organisations request the IIT faculty to undertake assignments channeled through the Center For Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research (ICSR).

National organisations sponsor programs of research by funding projects undertaken by the faculty. Such research is time bound and allows project participants to register for a degree. Project proposals are usually prepared by the IIT faculty and forwarded to interested organisations, based on the nature of their research and their interest to fund such projects.

Sponsored projects are often vehicles for new resources within departments, and often permit their project staff to register for academic degrees in the institute. All sponsored research activities at the institute are coordinated by ICSR.

IITM Research Park

The IIT Madras Research Park is modeled along the lines of research parks at Stanford and MIT. It focuses not just on incubation efforts but also on propelling innovation in established R&D focused companies. IIT Madras Research Park facilitates a collaborative relationship between tenants/clients and IIT Madras.

The research park is adjacent to IIT Madras (within cycling distance) on an 11 acre campus. The facilities include 1,600,000 sq ft (150,000 m²) of office space with attendant services in three towers of 400,000 sq ft (37,000 m²) each. Each floor plate of the 12 storey towers is about 36,000 sq ft (3,300 m²) with the smallest office space module being around 3,000 sq ft (280 m²). Other facilities include incubation modules, shops, cyber cafes, restaurants, food courts, guest rooms, conference facilities, exhibition space, terrace gardens and landscaped front and back yards.

Student activities

Shaastra

Shaastra is the annual technical festival of IIT Madras. It is typically held in the first week of October and is the first ISO 9001:2000 certified student festival in the world. It is known for its organization and activities. Forums include the symposia, workshops, video conferences, lectures, demonstrations, and technical exhibitions. Competitive activities cover design events, programming, simulations, quizzes, applied engineering, robotics, junkyard wars and contraptions.

Saarang

Saarang is the annual social and cultural festival of IIT Madras. It is a five-day long event held towards the end of January every year and attracts a crowd of 100,000 students and young people from across the country, making it one of the largest such fests in India. Saarang events include speaking, dancing, thespian, quizzing and word games, professional shows (nicknamed proshows) and workshops on music, fashion, art, and dance. Saarang has been awarded ISO 9001:2008 certificate recently.

Saarang, is the new name of the festival that was once called "Mardi Gras". It was changed in the early 1990s in effort to reflect the cultural and environmental roots of this festival.

Department festivals

Several departments organize department festivals. ExeBit, Wavez, Mechanica, CEA, Chemclave, Amalgam and Forays are some of the festivals organized by the Computer Science and Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Metallurgical and Materials Engineering and Maths departments respectively.

Fest name	Department
Exebit	Computer Science and Engineering
Amalgam	Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
CEA	Civil Engineering
Chemclave	Chemical Engineering
Forays	Mathematics
Mechanica	Mechanical Engineering
Wavez	Ocean Engineering
Samanvay	Management Studies

The departments of Aerospace Engineering and Electrical Engineering organises events at the time of Shaastra itself.

Hostels

Most students at IIT Madras reside in the hostels, where extracurricular activities complement the academic routine. The campus has 17 hostels, of which two, Sharavati and Sarayu, are exclusively for women. In earlier times each hostel had attached dining facilities but they have since closed down. Sharavati and the four seven-storeyed men's hostels do not have mess halls. Dining facilities are provided in two centralized halls dubbed 'Vindhya' and 'Himalaya'. The hostels may accommodate undergraduate and graduate students, though they tend to keep the two apart. Students are assigned to hostels at the time of admission, where they usually spend their entire stay at the Institute.

The hostels are named after the principal rivers of India and the campus buses used to be named after mountains, resulting in an epigram about IIT Madras that it is the only place where the mountains move and the rivers remain still.

The hostels of IITM are:

• Ganga
• Krishna
• Cauvery
• Brahmaputra (Brahms)
• Tapti
• Godavari (Godav)
• Alaknanda (Alak)
• Jamuna (Jam)
• Saraswati(Saras)
• Narmada (Narmad)
• Mandakini (Mandak)
• Sharavati (Sharav)
• Sarayu
• Sindhu
• Pampa
• Tamraparani (Tambi/Tamra)
• Mahanadi

Sindhu, Pampa, Mahanadi and Thamirabarani are seven-storeyed whereas all the other (older classic) hostels are three- or four-storeyed. The older hostels were all three-storeyed till the early 2000s when extra rooms in the form of an extra floor and rooms above the common room were added. These four hostels can accommodate more than 1,500 students.

Extracurricular activities

Deer at IIT Madras, in the open ground between SAC and the stadium

The Open Air Theater screens movies and hosts rock shows and Carnatic music concerts.

Saarang, the annual cultural festival, is held in winter. The technical festival of the institute is known as Shaastra. The Open Air Theatre hosts the weekly movie, a Saturday night tradition, besides other activities. It seats over 7,000. The annual inter-hostel sports event is known as the Schroeter. Ganga Hostel has won Schroeter five times in a row, from 2006 to 2011.

Hobby clubs include the speaking club, the astro club, dramatics, music and robotics.

Two student bodies, the Vivekananda Study Circle (VSC) and Reflections focus on spiritual discussions.

The campus has evolved a slang, attracting a published Master's thesis at a German University. A mix of English, Hindi, Telugu(Gult), Malayalam(Mallu) and Tamil(Tam), aspects of the campus slang have been adopted by some other Chennai colleges.

Unlike its sister institutions, IIT Madras lacks a single uniting Indian language among its students: Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, English and Hindi all flourish. Consequently, all student participatory activities like debating, dramatics, short-film making, and others are held in English. This is even reflected in the slang that use more of English than Hindi, unlike in IITM's northern counterparts.

Facilities

The pavilion of the Chemplast Cricket Ground

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 temple), three bank branches,(SBI, ICICI, Canara Bank), a hospital, shopping centers, food shops, a gym, a swimming pool, cricket, football, hockey and badminton stadiums. Internet is available in the academic zone and the faculty and staff residential zone. Internet is available in the hostel zone from 2pm till midnight.

Placements

The number of companies registered with the placement office of the IIT in Chennai in 2011 nearly doubled over 2010 from 70 to 126.^[13]

Notable alumni

List of Indian Institute of Technology Madras alumni

Academia

• Anant Agarwal, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Anand Rajaraman, Founder of Junglee; Currently Heading Kosmix.com with Venky Harinarayan
• Venkatesan Guruswami, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
• Arun Sundararajan, Professor at Stern School of Business, New York University
• L. Mahadevan, Professor at Harvard, MacArthur Fellow 2009

Industry

• B. N. Suresh. (Director of Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram) [1969 MTME]
• Gururaj Deshpande (Founder of Sycamore Networks) [BT73 EE]
• B Muthuraman. (Managing Director of Tata Steel) [BT66 MT]
• Jai Menon (IBM Fellow, CTO and VP, Technical Strategy - IBM Systems and Technology Group) - awarded Distinguished Alumnus award.
• Krishna Bharat (Creator of Google News, Principal Scientist, Google)
• Arvind Raghunathan (Managing Director, Deutsche Bank)
• Ramanathan V. Guha (Inventor of RSS feed technology)
• Venky Harinarayan (Kosmix cofounder) [BT88]
• Venkat Rangan (Co-founder and CTO at Clearwell Systems) [BT81 ME]
• Raghu Ramakrishnan (Vice-President & Research Fellow, Yahoo! Research)

Others

• Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj (Noted spiritual leader and winner of Colombia's highest award medal of golden cross, various U.N. awards and speaker in World Parliament of Religions, retired from Bell Labs in 1989) [BT67].