Top T-Schools: The Invincibles

It is useful to recall the circumstances in which the IITs were born, and
subsequently nurtured. The Nalini Ranjan Sarkar Committee report submitted in
1946 paved the way for India's biggest brand-the IITs, post independence.
The NR Sarkar Committee used global benchmarking to define standards, without
knowing the term, by stating that “the proposed institutes should attain a
standard not less than Manchester and Massachusetts”. There was value seen in
the use of international faculty as evidenced by the presence of Professor RA
Kraus and Professor H Tischner in the original academic team of IIT-Kharagpur,
the first in the league of IITs established in 1952.

Now more than five decades later, the IITs remain the undisputed torchbearers
with excellence in technology education in India. The IITs have given the world
more global Indians than any other institute in India. Vinod Khosla, co-founder
of Sun Microsystems and now a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers; Arun Netravali, former president of Lucent
Technologies' Bell Labs; Kanwal Rekhi, former CTO of Novell, one of the
founders of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) and CEO of the first Indian-led
company publicly traded on Nasdaq; Padmasree Warrior, executive vice president
& CTO for Motorola; Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone; Narayanamurthy, chief
mentor, Infosys and the man instrumental in putting the Indian software industry
on the global map....the list goes on. And these names are just a minuscule
proportion of the IITians in the Silicon Valley and the world over.

In the presence of the mighty IITs there is little chance for other
institutes to take a lead in the race. All the IITs in the survey stay right on
top with some shuffle in the ranks. IIT-Madras displaces IIT-Kanpur to take the
top slot while IIT-Delhi comes at #2. A significant highlight of our study this
year is that the difference in scores between the topper and IIT-Kanpur at Rank
6 is 10.1 points. This implies that IIT-Chennai has ramped up on all counts to
beat all the other IITs. On placements it comes a close second to IIT-Guwahati,
which is the surprise package of the survey-up three places from last year,
ahead of IIT-Kanpur. Academic environment emerges to be the biggest strength of
IIT-Madras, with the highest number of faculty on permanent rolls and with PhDs.
Several studies have lent credibility to the fact that it is superior faculty
that creates knowledge and a culture of research and development. IIT-Madras
also scores above all IITs on average salaries offered (Rs 6 lakh) this year
with 45% of recruiters being IT companies so far.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT-Guwahati, formed in
1995, has always been recognized all over the world for excellence in research
and teaching. Nearly 58% of the recruitment happened for the IT industry and the
highest offer received this year was Rs 24.4 lakh per annum, compared to Rs 7.7
lakh last year. Average salaries offered are up too, by 28%. The growing
importance of East in the IT map of India could also be doing the magic for
IIT-Guwahati, which enjoys strong industry interface. Besides theoretical
research, the faculty also maintains strong ties with many reputed national and
international companies involved in a large number of projects in the forefront
of cutting edge technology.  The institute filed one patent last year for its research and
development work.

IIT-Delhi has entered the DQ-IDC listing for the first time and has made it
to the #2 position. IIT-Kharagpur has pushed IIT-Bombay to the fifth place,
taking the third place this year. The largest and the oldest of the seven IITs,
IIT-Kharagpur, performed well on placements, infrastructure and academic
environment. In fact, IIT-Kharagpur's high culture of research and learning
gets reflected in the fact that it has to its credit the highest number of
research papers in the last two academic years. The institute is currently in
the process of setting up a separate unit for imparting studies in Intellectual
Property law-the first of its kind in the IIT system in the country. The
institute has already set up the Technology Incubator and Entrepreneurship
Training Society (TIES) comprising professors, researchers and corporate
personalities to encourage and assist talented engineers to examine projects.

Both IIT-Bombay and IIT-Kanpur have slipped in our study. IIT-Kanpur's dip
in performance could be attributed to its placements and HR perception score.
While handling employer expectation could be a dampener. IIT-Kanpur is also
known for traditional engineering that goes beyond just IT and attracts
recruiters from core sectors as well, something that might be partially
responsible for the institute slipping slightly this year. Interestingly, while
it was 129 companies that visited IIT-Kanpur for campus placements, it was 150
for IIT-Chennai. However, IIT-Kanpur stays ahead of the pack in terms of average
salaries offered by IT companies. IIT-Bombay too slipped largely on placements.
Prima facie, there was nothing really wrong in terms of IIT-Bombay overall
performance. However, on a relative scale, IIT-Madras, Kharagpur and Guwahati
performed far better to move up the table. Recruiter perception remains
extremely high for IIT-Bombay. IIT-Roorkee at #7 slips significantly on industry
interface but does fairly well on placements.