On Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the 57th convocation of IIT Delhi, but the real story is the metamorphosis of India’s premier technical institutions. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are no longer assembly lines for engineers/technocrats, but are evolving into holistic centres of higher education.
Diverse degrees at IIT Delhi
At the 57th convocation, where 3,036 graduating students received their degrees, there were also IIT Delhi’s first-ever batches of non-traditional programmes, including 20 graduates of the Bachelor of Design (BDes), 21 graduates of the MA in Culture, Society, Thought, and new cohorts in the MSc in Biological Sciences, alongside executive MBAs.
Prof Rangan Banerjee, the director of IIT Delhi, had previously told this newspaper that the institute is embedding human-centred design, critical social sciences, and advanced life sciences, alongside core engineering disciplines, and is breaking down rigid disciplinary silos. Such an interdisciplinary approach equips students to tackle complex modern challenges – such as ethical AI, public policy, and biotechnology – where technological proficiency alone is no longer sufficient.
Rise of IIT B-schools
IIT Delhi is far from alone in this transformation. Older premier IITs like IIT Bombay, IIT Kharagpur, and IIT Madras have steadily expanded into humanities, public policy, biological sciences, and medical research.
Nowhere is this evolution clearer than in management education. For years, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) held a near-monopoly on business education. Today, B-schools housed within IITs – such as IIT Delhi’s Department of Management Studies, IIT Bombay’s Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, IIT Madras’s Department of Management Studies, and IIT Kharagpur’s Vinod Gupta School of Management – are regularly outranking established IIMs and elite private B-schools in rankings.
In 2021, then IIT Delhi director Prof V Ramgopal Rao famously noted that after the elite trinity of IIM Ahmedabad, Bangalore, and Calcutta, IIT Delhi’s DMS stands next in line. The 2022 National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) data validated his claim, placing DMS IIT Delhi at the fourth rank, outperforming legacy institutions like IIM Lucknow, IIM Kozhikode, and XLRI.
Mirroring global tech giants
This diversification mirrors the trajectory of global tech institutes. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) operates the renowned Sloan School of Management and humanities centres like the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Similarly, Stanford University and Imperial College London have long established world-class business schools, medical faculties, and policy institutes.
From NITs to IITs
Beyond broadening the scope of its own degrees, IIT Delhi has also partnered with 18 National Institutes of Technology (NITs), and has introduced an Early Admission Scheme that allows top-performing NIT undergraduates to bypass the GATE examination to gain admission into MTech, MS (Research), and PhD. Backed by credit transfers for final-year Special Exchange Students and the ALIGN (Academic Linkages for Innovation and National Growth) framework, which funds joint faculty seed grants, predoctoral fellowships, and shared infrastructure, the initiative breaks down institutional silos. By shifting from isolated engineering hubs to collaborative networks, the IIT ecosystem is entering a new era.