Indian Institutes of Information Technology

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This article is about the Indian education institutes agency. For other uses, see International Institute of Islamic Thought.

IIIT is the generic name for several Institutes of Information Technology in India, each a mini university in itself. Many of these institutions have been subsequently renamed to better identify their affiliations and goals. The IIITs were conceived to be forerunners in the information technology education sector, at a time when India was going through a phase of unprecedented boom in the software industry (Years 1998 - 2000). The course curriculum at these institutes is at par with similar offerings at the Computer Science departments of Indian Institutes of Technology. Due to the competitive nature of the admission at these institutions, only a selected few make it to these universities.

IIIT Gwalior the first among the IIITs and pioneer among these institutes was established by Government of India and was recently rechristened Atal Behari Vajpayee IIITM Gwalior in honour of India's former Prime Minister. It offers a world class education and is consistently rated among the top T-schools in India.

IIIT Bangalore was part of the IT Policy of the Government of Karnataka (the first for any State government). Though planned earlier than IIIT-Hyderabad, this Institute started functiong a year later than IIIT Hyderabad in September 1999. IIIT-Bangalore created a unique model of focusing on graduate studies (Master's and Doctoral programs)

IIIT Hyderabad and IIIT Bangalore follow a Public Private Partnership model with significantly larger participation from industry (unlike the Institutes in Gwalior and Allahabad that are fully government owned). Both the Institutes became full-fledged Universities in 2004-05 and were required by Universities Grant Commission (UGC) to change their names to "International" Institutes instead of "Indian" Institutes.

Under the lines of IIIT Hyderabad and Bangalore, other IIITs have been established, some by Ministry of HRD(Govt. of India)and some by different state governments.

IIIT Allahabad was started by Ministry of Human Resource Development (Govt. of India) to provide an outstanding and highly rated educational experience with state-of-the-art infrastructure. IIIT-A is also rated among top Engineering Schools in India

IIITM-K, IIIT Calcutta are the other institutes offering diverse courses and graduating brilliant engineers every year. IIIT Calcutta estd in 2000 by Govt of West Bengal has been renamed to SIT (School of Information Technology) and has been made the Information Technology Department of WBUT(West Bengal University of Technology-Kolkata) in the year 2004.

IIIT Bhubaneswar has been established in 2007 with a to be a knowledge seeking Institution of higher learning that will educate students in technology and other disciplines of scholarship. The Institute will work closely with the Industry and other users of the technology to develop and deliver technological solutions to enhance their competitive position. The Institute is committed to the entire value chain of knowledge creation, diffusion and preservation to meet the challenges of the century. The Institute will borrow best practices in education delivery systems, research and consulting practices. Leveraging technology to bring about next generation of practices will be a key to this strategy.

Following a pure private model another IIIT at Pune got established.

[edit] IIITs in the 11^th Five Year Plan

As per the Budget 2008 20 more IIIT's under the Public-Private Model, are to be launched soon for every major state of India. Nasscom recently submitted a detailed project report to the Govt. of India on the establishment of new IIITs. If these are accepted, it could be quite a contrast to the functioning of existing higher learning institutes. The Nasscom report has identified a major role for private organisations in terms of finance, faculty and resources.^[1]

Each of the IIITs has been proposed to be set up as a fully autonomous institution, through the PPP model. The partners setting up IIITs will be the ministry of human resource development, the governments of respective states where each IIIT will be established and industry members. The report is learnt to have suggested that private organisations should play an equal or slightly greater role in bringing investment for the new IIITs.

While required investment into the IIITs could vary depending on the city, close to Rs 100 crore has been estimated for each IIIT. The suggested locations for the new IIITs include

Ahmedabad
Jammu
Chandigarh
Dehradun
Delhi
Lucknow
Patna
Shillong
Kolkata
Indore
Nagpur
Bhubaneshwar
Pune
Vishakapatanam
Mysore
Bangalore
Mangalore
Coimbatore
Chennai
Thiruvanathapuram.

The locations of IIITs have been arrived at on the basis of how well connected they are in terms of transport and facilities and their prominence to industrial hubs. Considering the dire faculty crunch in the country, Nasscom has made it clear that faculty members must be be given salaries prevalent in the market.It has been suggested that each IIIT must have the autonomy to decide its own salary structure to compete with private educational institutes. Collaborating private organisations would be requested to send their experienced employees as visiting faculty members. A higher number of visiting faculty and faculty-exchange programmes with universities in India and abroad have been suggested.

Private organisations are expected to collaborate with the IIITs for knowledge manpower, giving projects to students and for curriculum guidance.The associated company would look into the role of private organisations and enabling optimum rate of returns for them.

The development of the PhD programme, according to one of the suggestions, is vital to the growth of IIITs as these doctoral students could be groomed for teaching positions in IIITs, creating a strong pool of candidates for top academic positions.It has been recommended that the undergraduate programme of IIITs could be scaled up to 600 students, the post-graduate programme could take about 400 students and the PhD programme could have an intake of 100 students.A faculty-student ratio of 1:14 has been suggested. The report has suggested an integrated campus model and a hub-and-spoke campus model, depending on the IIIT.

Consulting major KPMG would look into existing policies and legal framework before suggesting how private institutes could contribute in the physical and services part of developing an institute of higher learning.