In 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundation stone of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay on the banks of Powai Lake in Mumbai. The institute, established with Soviet technical assistance and modelled on MIT, was part of an audacious national project: to build world-class technical education in a country that had only just achieved independence and was still dependent on foreign expertise for almost every advanced technology. Sixty-six years later, IIT Bombay consistently ranks among the top 50 engineering institutions globally and sends disproportionate numbers of graduates to the leadership of technology companies worldwide. How this happened, and what it means for India’s relationship with engineering talent, is a story that India simultaneously celebrates and insufficiently understands.
The JEE: Coaching Mafia and All
Entry to IITs happens through the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE Advanced), one of the most competitive examinations in the world. Approximately 900,000 to 1.2 million students sit for JEE Mains each year; roughly 150,000 qualify for JEE Advanced; approximately 17,000 are admitted to IITs nationally. The acceptance rate is under 2 percent. This selectivity is both the IIT system’s greatest strength – it ensures an extraordinarily talented incoming class – and its greatest distortion. The preparation for JEE has given rise to a massive coaching industry centred in Kota, Rajasthan, and in coaching hubs in virtually every large city. Conservative estimates put the coaching market at over 60,000 crore rupees annually. Coaching has become so central to JEE success that a student without 2-3 years of intensive coaching is at a severe disadvantage, even if they are intrinsically more capable than a coached peer.
This creates several distortions. Students from economically privileged backgrounds who can afford multiple years of coaching at 2-5 lakh rupees per year have a structural advantage. Students from rural areas, tribal communities, or educationally disadvantaged backgrounds are systematically underrepresented. The Kota coaching system, specifically, has been associated with a mental health crisis among students – extreme competitive pressure, isolation from family, and the psychological burden of single-exam success. Suicide rates among JEE aspirants in Kota have been a persistent public concern, leading to multiple institutional responses and state government interventions that have so far failed to address the root cause. The IIT system’s extraordinary output is partly a function of the genuine difficulty of its training and partly a function of selection – choosing students who would have succeeded under almost any educational environment.
Faculty Vacancies: The Hidden Problem
IIT Bombay’s public reputation as a world-class research institution is substantially accurate – it has strong research output in computer science, chemical engineering, materials science, and other fields, and its faculty includes researchers with impressive publication records by international standards. What is less publicised is the chronic problem of faculty vacancies across the IIT system. As of 2023, the 23 IITs collectively had a faculty vacancy rate of approximately 40 percent – meaning that two out of every five sanctioned faculty positions were unfilled. IIT Bombay itself has had persistent vacancies, particularly in newer departments and at the junior faculty level.
The causes are multiple: the salaries offered to IIT faculty, while better than most Indian academic institutions, are not competitive with private sector or overseas academic positions for candidates with strong research credentials. The tenure process is demanding. Many IIT graduates who could return as faculty choose to remain in industry or take positions at foreign universities. The government has expanded the IIT system from the original 7 institutes to 23, adding 16 new IITs in smaller cities since 2008, without providing proportionate increases in faculty recruitment infrastructure or the senior academic mentorship that new institutions need to develop research culture. The result is that the IIT brand is geographically expanded but the average quality, particularly of the newer IITs, is considerably lower than the brand name implies. See also our analysis of the broader education challenge in India in our piece on why India’s middle class has given up on government schools.
The Silicon Valley Pipeline
The claim that IIT Bombay “produces half of India’s tech CEOs” in this article’s title is an approximation that reflects a real but hard to precisely quantify phenomenon. IIT alumni have founded or lead a disproportionate share of Indian technology companies and occupy leadership positions in major global technology firms. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai is an IIT Kharagpur alumnus. The co-founders of numerous unicorn startups in India’s booming tech ecosystem are IIT graduates. The IIT alumni network, particularly in the United States, is among the most powerful professional networks in the technology industry globally – providing mentorship, co-founding partnerships, angel investment, and hiring connections that amplify the career trajectories of IIT graduates far beyond what their education alone would produce.
This network effect is one of the IIT system’s great unacknowledged assets. It is also a significant driver of brain drain – the concentration of IIT alumni in the United States means that much of the human capital produced by one of India’s most heavily subsidised educational institutions benefits the American economy more directly than the Indian one. This is not a moral failing on the part of the graduates, who are responding rationally to the opportunities available to them. It is a policy problem: India has invested enormous public resources in producing exceptional technical talent that then migrates because the domestic environment does not offer commensurate opportunities, prestige, or institutional support for high-quality research. The connection between graduate emigration and domestic opportunity gaps is part of the broader story we examine in our analysis of India’s youth unemployment crisis and its demographic consequences.
The Return-to-India Question
The question of whether IIT graduates will return to India in greater numbers has been debated for decades. The short answer is: some do, and the number has been rising since the mid-2000s. The expansion of India’s startup ecosystem – particularly in Bengaluru, but also Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Pune – has created a viable professional environment for some returning IIT alumni. Deep tech startups in AI, biotechnology, clean energy, and defence technology are increasingly founded by returning IIT alumni who can access both Indian talent and Indian capital. The government’s policies supporting startups – tax benefits, the Startup India programme, the funding environment created by India’s growing institutional investor community – have reduced some of the friction that previously made returning to India professionally unattractive.
But the return-to-India narrative is still largely a partial story. Most IIT graduates who migrate do not return. Those who do often return because they have built enough capital and network abroad to insulate themselves from the structural difficulties of operating in India – regulatory friction, infrastructure gaps, talent pipeline limitations outside the metro cities. India’s IIT system continues to be more effective at producing talent for global use than at creating conditions that retain or return that talent. The privatisation debate – proposals to charge full-cost fees at IITs and reduce government subsidy – remains politically contentious, with arguments about both equity and the system’s public investment rationale that have not been resolved.
| IIT Bombay Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1958 |
| Annual UG intake (B.Tech) | ~880 students |
| QS World University Ranking 2024 | 118 |
| Faculty vacancies (system-wide) | ~40% |
| Research papers (annual) | ~3,000+ |
| Notable alumni | Nandan Nilekani, Rajiv Gupta, Manohar Parrikar |
Beyond IIT Bombay: The Broader Higher Education Crisis
IIT Bombay’s excellence, real as it is, should not obscure the state of Indian higher education overall. Approximately 43 million students are enrolled in India’s higher education system across roughly 1,000 universities and 40,000 colleges – the largest higher education system in the world by enrolment. The quality distribution across this system is extraordinary: at the top are a handful of institutions (IITs, IIMs, AIIMS, a few central universities) with genuine international standing. Below them is a vast middle tier of state universities and private colleges with highly variable quality. At the bottom is a large number of institutions that are essentially credential factories producing degrees that the labour market does not value and that students cannot use to enter skilled employment.
The National Institutional Ranking Framework, the New Education Policy 2020’s emphasis on research universities, and the Higher Education Financing Agency’s funding model are all attempts to improve quality across the system. Their impact has been limited by the political dynamics of state-level higher education governance, the patronage system in college appointments in many states, and the sheer scale of the problem. What India needs is not more IITs but a fundamental improvement in the average quality of its higher education – which requires better school education as the foundation, better-paid and better-trained teachers at the college level, and accountability frameworks that are credible rather than paper exercises. The IIT success story is real, but it is not a template for the system as a whole.
A Question Worth Asking
India’s IIT system is genuinely excellent at what it does. The question worth asking is whether excellence at the top is a substitute for quality throughout – and the answer, in education as in healthcare, is clearly no. The fate of the 99 percent of young Indians who don’t go to IIT is determined by the quality of the institutions they do attend. Track the annual AISHE (All India Survey on Higher Education) data, which is public, for trends in faculty vacancy rates, research output, and enrolment patterns across the system.
The Research Output Question
IIT Bombay’s research reputation rests on genuinely strong output in several areas: computer science (particularly systems, computer architecture, and machine learning), chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and materials science. By publication volume and citation impact measures, IIT Bombay ranks consistently among the top 50 engineering institutions globally and is by far the most cited Indian institution in these fields. Its faculty have published in the top journals in their disciplines, hold significant patents, and have industry research collaborations with major technology companies. The Centre for Research in Nanotechnology and Science (CRNTS), the Interdisciplinary Programme in Climate Studies, and several other interdisciplinary research centres represent genuine research excellence that would be competitive at any global institution.
The caveat is the comparison baseline. India’s total research output – measured by publication volume, citations, or patents – is substantially below what a country of its size, educational investment, and scientific talent would predict. China, which had comparable publication volumes to India in 2000, now publishes roughly five times as many papers annually and dominates several engineering research fields. The United States’ advantage over India in research intensity is so large that it operates in a different category. Within India, IIT Bombay and a handful of other institutions (IIT Delhi, IISc, IIT Madras) account for a disproportionate share of the country’s internationally competitive research – which is itself a symptom of the concentration problem rather than simply a reason for celebration. The research quality at IIT Bombay is real; the research ecosystem that would make IIT Bombay’s excellence typical rather than exceptional does not yet exist.
Startups and the Innovation Ecosystem
IIT Bombay’s contribution to India’s startup ecosystem is substantial and growing. The Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) at IIT Bombay is one of India’s oldest and most active technology incubators, having supported over 200 startups since its founding in 2004. Alumni of IIT Bombay have founded companies across a wide range of sectors – fintech (Zerodha was co-founded by an IIT Bombay alumnus), e-commerce, edtech, healthtech, and deep tech including AI and materials science startups. The campus’s proximity to Mumbai’s financial and corporate ecosystem, and its alumni network’s density in the city, gives IIT Bombay-founded startups access to funding and mentorship networks that are deeper than those available to startups from any other Indian engineering institution outside Bengaluru.
The question of whether IIT Bombay’s startup ecosystem is producing companies that will become globally significant technology businesses, or primarily generating well-funded Indian market-focused ventures, is still open. India’s startup ecosystem has produced unicorns at a rate that suggests it can create globally competitive technology businesses. But the deep-technology startups – those working on quantum computing, advanced materials, biotechnology, or semiconductor design – that would represent India’s transition from service delivery to technology leadership are fewer and more fragile than the fintech and consumer internet companies that dominate headline valuations. Sustaining IIT Bombay’s research excellence, retaining more of its graduates in India through competitive opportunities, and connecting the campus research more effectively to industry translation are the three levers most likely to change this trajectory. All three require deliberate policy choices that India has so far made only partially.