History of Indian Institutes of Technology - The Next Four IITs

The Next Four IITs

To counter the criticisms of setting up IIT in West Bengal, the draft report suggested that a second IIT may be located in the Western Region to serve the process industries concentrated there. It also added that a third IIT should be considered for the North to promote the vast irrigation potential of the Gangetic basin. Not willing to leave South out (and to make it politically correct), the draft report hinted that a fourth one might be considered for the South too. However, it offered no specific economic justification for the same.Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is one of the main architect in setting up the institute in India.

When the pressure started building up to set up IIT in the West, Jawaharlal Nehru sought Soviet assistance in order to set up the institute in Mumbai. Krishna Menon (the then Defence Minister) and closest to the Russians, got Brig Bose appointed the first Director of IIT Bombay when it got established in Powai in 1958. As a fallout of the prevailing Cold War, the Americans offered to help to set up yet another IIT. The way the Sarcar Committee had suggested, it was established in the North as IIT Kanpur (in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh) in 1959. Dr Kelkar was the first Director of the institute.

At that time, the Germans had run up large trade surpluses, and they were persuaded to support an IIT in the South. The Germans had initially decided on Bangalore as the location but when they visited Madras, C. Subramaniam, the Education Minister, took them round the Governor's estate with frolicking deer roaming among hundreds of venerable banyan trees, and offered the space across the table. The visiting German team was considerably impressed by it and Madras got the fourth IIT in 1959 itself as IIT Madras.

R. N. Dogra the Chief Engineer of Chandigarh persuaded Prof M. S. Thacker, then Member of the Planning Commission to set up an IIT at Delhi on the ground that the country was divided into five regions, and all but the North had an IIT each. It was done on the basis of the logic that Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh constituted the Central Region. Hence, officially, Kanpur was located in the Central Region, not the North. This led to the establishment of IIT Delhi in 1961. The Indian Institutes of Technology Act was suitably amended to reflect the addition of new IITs.