Premier Institutes of India: IITs, IIMs and AIIMS for Exams

Questions on India's premier institutes are pure static general knowledge: the year an institute was founded, the city it stands in, the country or university that helped set it up, the Act of Parliament behind it and the entrance test that leads into it. The three families asked most often are the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Management and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and all three are Institutes of National Importance, a status given by an Act of Parliament which lets an institute frame its own courses and award its own degrees.

The Indian Institutes of Technology

The IITs grew out of the report of a committee headed by Nalini Ranjan Sarkar in 1946, which asked for higher technical institutions on the lines of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first of them opened at Kharagpur in 1951, in the buildings of the old Hijli Detention Camp in Bengal, and Jawaharlal Nehru addressed its first convocation in 1956. It was declared an Institute of National Importance by the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur) Act of 1956, and the Institutes of Technology Act of 1961 brought the IITs under one law; every new IIT is added to its schedule by an amendment. The next four were each built with the help of a foreign partner, which is the single most asked fact of this chapter: Bombay in 1958 with Soviet assistance routed through UNESCO, Madras in 1959 with West German assistance, Kanpur in 1959 under the Kanpur Indo American Programme with a consortium of United States universities, and Delhi, which opened in 1961 as the College of Engineering with British help and became an IIT in 1963. IIT Guwahati followed in 1994, and in 2001 the University of Roorkee became IIT Roorkee; that institution had begun in 1847 as the Thomason College of Civil Engineering and is counted the oldest technical institution of its kind in Asia. A large group of new IITs came up from 2008 at Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Indore, Jodhpur, Mandi, Patna and Ropar. The Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University became IIT (BHU) Varanasi in 2012, Palakkad and Tirupati opened in 2015, and in 2016 the Indian School of Mines at Dhanbad, founded in 1926, became an IIT, along with new institutes at Bhilai, Goa, Jammu and Dharwad. Admission is through JEE Main followed by JEE Advanced, with seats allotted by the Joint Seat Allocation Authority, and the IIT Council, chaired by the Union Education Minister, is the apex body.

IITs and the countries that helped

The Indian Institutes of Management

The IIMs were planned on the advice of a committee under Jivraj Mehta and were set up as autonomous societies. IIM Calcutta came first, in November 1961, built with the help of the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ford Foundation and the Government of West Bengal. IIM Ahmedabad followed in December 1961, in collaboration with the Harvard Business School; Vikram Sarabhai and the industrialist Kasturbhai Lalbhai were behind its founding and Ravi J. Matthai was its first full time director. IIM Bangalore opened in 1973, IIM Lucknow in 1984, and IIM Kozhikode and IIM Indore in 1996; IIM Shillong, named after Rajiv Gandhi, opened in 2007, and a further group of IIMs came up after that at Rohtak, Ranchi, Raipur, Tiruchirappalli, Udaipur, Kashipur, Nagpur, Visakhapatnam, Bodh Gaya, Sambalpur, Sirmaur, Amritsar and Jammu. The Indian Institutes of Management Act of 2017 is the turning point to remember: it declared the IIMs Institutions of National Importance, let them award degrees in place of the old post graduate diplomas, made their boards far more independent and named the President of India their Visitor. Admission to the flagship programme is through the Common Admission Test, which the older IIMs conduct by rotation.

AIIMS and the medical institutes

The Health Survey and Development Committee of 1946, better known as the Bhore Committee, recommended a national medical centre that would set the standard for medical education in India. Acting on it, Parliament passed the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Act in 1956, and AIIMS New Delhi was founded that year; Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the first Health Minister of independent India, drove the project, and New Zealand gave assistance under the Colombo Plan. AIIMS is an autonomous Institute of National Importance with its own hospital, and admission to its MBBS course is now through the national eligibility cum entrance test for undergraduates. New AIIMS were sanctioned under the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana, launched in 2003 by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare; the first six were at Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Jodhpur, Patna, Raipur and Rishikesh, and later rounds of the scheme added more, besides upgrading existing medical colleges. Two older institutes keep the same rank: the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research at Chandigarh and the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research at Puducherry.

Other institutes examiners ask about

The Indian Institute of Science at Bengaluru is the oldest of the group, founded in 1909 from an endowment of Jamsetji Tata, with land given by the ruler of Mysore; C. V. Raman became its first Indian director in 1933. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research at Mumbai was founded in 1945 under Homi Jehangir Bhabha, and the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata in 1931 by P. C. Mahalanobis. The Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research began in 2006, the first at Kolkata and Pune, to bring teaching and research together in the basic sciences. The National Institutes of Technology, mostly former Regional Engineering Colleges, were brought under the National Institutes of Technology Act of 2007, which also covers the Indian Institutes of Information Technology set up later. In law, the National Law School of India University at Bengaluru, founded in 1987, was the first of the national law universities and takes students through the Common Law Admission Test. Design has the National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad, set up in 1961, and the National Institute of Fashion Technology at Delhi, set up in 1986.

How the entrance tests pair up

A common question is simply which test leads where. JEE Main and then JEE Advanced lead to the IITs, JEE Main alone to the NITs and IIITs, the Common Admission Test to the IIMs, the national eligibility cum entrance test to the medical colleges including AIIMS, the Common Law Admission Test to the national law universities, and the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering to postgraduate engineering seats and to several public sector jobs. Pair each institute with its city, its founding year and its Act, and this chapter is secured.