India’s Best Colleges | 50 Government engineering colleges in India

Kharagpur: The Indian Institutes of Technology at Mumbai and Delhi may be the most glamorous of the seven IITs, with their smattering of Silicon Valley-funded start-ups, lavish cultural festivals and urban backdrop—but somehow another one has managed to surpass them.

“Prior to Indian independence, there were researchers in universities, and there were engineers, who were little more than glorified technicians,” said M. Chakraborty, the institute’s deputy director, “and the IIT was set up so that India could have engineers capable of doing research.”

Fifty seven years down, the engineering college stands testament to that possibility. A 2007 ranking of the world’s 500 universities based on their academic prowess mentions only IIT Kharagpur and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

“Remember that the IISc is exclusively for hard-core post-graduate research. Here, we have to manage research as well as our enormous undergraduate teaching responsibilities,” said Chakraborty. With nearly 1,500 peer-reviewed research publications a year, this means that every faculty member from the institute churns out three publications a year on an average. “I don’t want to boast, but I doubt if other universities, let alone engineering colleges, can boast of such a track record,” Acharya adds.

The reason why the college can pull this off, is because a good number of their professors are either involved with research projects that involve industry, or are themselves part of companies. So, for example, when a processor-making company such as Intel is not sure if their newly developed chip is foolproof, they would approach, say, Pallab Dasgupta in the computer science department. He and a few research scholars, typically PhD students, and in some cases master’s and BTech students, try to design a program that can scan and stonewall the chip for bugs.

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So in a win-win sort of deal, the resulting knowledge ends up as research publications, and the project itself generates consultancy fees for the institute and professors. “To give you a ballpark figure, there are about 850 projects involving industry, worth Rs300 crore,” said Manoj Mondal, a senior administration officer at the institute’s Sponsored Research and Industrial Consultancy cell.