Question
What are the best IITs / Indian Institute of Technology campuses?
Answer
Physically, Madras is the nicest. Food-wise Kanpur. Kharagpur is ugly and in the middle of nowhere. Bombay (my alma mater, 1993-97, BTech, Mech) is in arguably the best city, but the campus is just okay and the food is awful. Haven't been to the Delhi campus, but I've heard it is not as sprawling as the others and has the most urban vibe. Delhi-ites are uniformly disliked in the rest of the country for their loud and pompous airs, and that perception transfers somewhat to IIT-D people, even though most of them, like IITians on all campuses, are mostly not locals. I was on the Bombay swim team, so got to go to Madras and Kanpur for swim meets, and got to sample the food and campuses that way. I grew up near Khargapur, so I visited that campus for my physical after being accepted to the system. So I've physically been to 4 of the 5 old campuses.
Dunno about the new campuses designated as IITs since my time. I suspect some are likely much nicer. The original 5 are kinda old. The monsoon does a number on the buildings, so they are all kinda dingy.
Academically/culturally, Bombay is Gryffindor, Kanpur and Chennai tie for Ravenclaw, Delhi is Slytherin and Kharagpur is Hufflepuff. The rest frankly haven't yet aged enough to make it into the School of Magic inner circle. I am no elitist, so I am rooting for the young 'uns like Guwahati to pull off some history-making stunts and show up the older campuses. But as a practical matter, it's going to take time, a couple of generations of successful alumni, and a slow increase in faculty quality.
The de facto academic ranking is determined by where most of the top-ranked JEE (Joint Entrance Exam, the legendary trial by fire you must pass to get in) students choose to go, since you get to pick in rank order. Since faculty and campus quality are all comparable (faculty are mostly mediocre, but a notch above the rest of the country, with a few outlier superstars, while the campuses tend to be much worse than many richer private institutions with lower reputations), the effective quality tends to be entirely a function of intake quality.
In my time, Madras was just starting to steal the lead from Kanpur. Delhi, Bombay came next and Kharagpur came in last, as it has for a long time (as the oldest campus, KGP has sort of had time to peak and start to decline). The raw ranking is messed up by the ranking of majors, since major trumps campus within the main 5. So Kharagpur Computer Science will outrank Chennai Mechanical Engineering, and so forth. If you wanted to, you could average the JEE ranks of all students who pick a given campus, and rank these averages. In the eyes of prospective students, this is the only ranking that matters, due to the imitation/social proof based way students pick campuses/majors. Almost nobody in my time broke the 2-element ranking (campus/major) whatever their personal preferences. I pride myself on picking Bombay for a reason other than campus/major ranking -- I wanted to pick the campus near the fewest family members. If you're curious, the major ranking back in my years was CS>EE>CH>ME>Mat. Sci.>Civil. I doubt it's changed much. Chemical may have slipped below Mechanical perhaps, or maybe Mat Sci has climbed. CS is still undisputed king.
A final cut is preferred career paths. Back in the day, Madras and Bombay grads were relatively more likely to apply to US grad schools and had the best-developed alumni networks abroad. Delhi and Kanpur grads were relatively more interested in the Indian Civil Service (a brutally competitive exam like the JEE, but a gravy train for life if you get in). Delhi and Bombay grads were relatively more likely to take a job in India and apply to the IIMs for an MBA (past yet another brutal test, the CAT).
Now, 15 years since I left, I am told entrepreneurship is a major draw. I expect that's added another wrinkle to the drama.
Random factoid: the movie "Three Idiots", one of the biggest recent Bollywood hits, was based on the book "Five point someone" by Chetan Bhagat, which was based on IIT Delhi. A good look at some of the cultural evolution issues people have been discussing in the last decade.
The way students pick campuses is rather sad. I'd like to see the IITs differentiating consciously on other variables and each establishing a more unique brand identity rather than a rank-obsessed one.
tl;dr: Pick Bombay if you can get it, as both student and prospective employer :)
Dunno about the new campuses designated as IITs since my time. I suspect some are likely much nicer. The original 5 are kinda old. The monsoon does a number on the buildings, so they are all kinda dingy.
Academically/culturally, Bombay is Gryffindor, Kanpur and Chennai tie for Ravenclaw, Delhi is Slytherin and Kharagpur is Hufflepuff. The rest frankly haven't yet aged enough to make it into the School of Magic inner circle. I am no elitist, so I am rooting for the young 'uns like Guwahati to pull off some history-making stunts and show up the older campuses. But as a practical matter, it's going to take time, a couple of generations of successful alumni, and a slow increase in faculty quality.
The de facto academic ranking is determined by where most of the top-ranked JEE (Joint Entrance Exam, the legendary trial by fire you must pass to get in) students choose to go, since you get to pick in rank order. Since faculty and campus quality are all comparable (faculty are mostly mediocre, but a notch above the rest of the country, with a few outlier superstars, while the campuses tend to be much worse than many richer private institutions with lower reputations), the effective quality tends to be entirely a function of intake quality.
In my time, Madras was just starting to steal the lead from Kanpur. Delhi, Bombay came next and Kharagpur came in last, as it has for a long time (as the oldest campus, KGP has sort of had time to peak and start to decline). The raw ranking is messed up by the ranking of majors, since major trumps campus within the main 5. So Kharagpur Computer Science will outrank Chennai Mechanical Engineering, and so forth. If you wanted to, you could average the JEE ranks of all students who pick a given campus, and rank these averages. In the eyes of prospective students, this is the only ranking that matters, due to the imitation/social proof based way students pick campuses/majors. Almost nobody in my time broke the 2-element ranking (campus/major) whatever their personal preferences. I pride myself on picking Bombay for a reason other than campus/major ranking -- I wanted to pick the campus near the fewest family members. If you're curious, the major ranking back in my years was CS>EE>CH>ME>Mat. Sci.>Civil. I doubt it's changed much. Chemical may have slipped below Mechanical perhaps, or maybe Mat Sci has climbed. CS is still undisputed king.
A final cut is preferred career paths. Back in the day, Madras and Bombay grads were relatively more likely to apply to US grad schools and had the best-developed alumni networks abroad. Delhi and Kanpur grads were relatively more interested in the Indian Civil Service (a brutally competitive exam like the JEE, but a gravy train for life if you get in). Delhi and Bombay grads were relatively more likely to take a job in India and apply to the IIMs for an MBA (past yet another brutal test, the CAT).
Now, 15 years since I left, I am told entrepreneurship is a major draw. I expect that's added another wrinkle to the drama.
Random factoid: the movie "Three Idiots", one of the biggest recent Bollywood hits, was based on the book "Five point someone" by Chetan Bhagat, which was based on IIT Delhi. A good look at some of the cultural evolution issues people have been discussing in the last decade.
The way students pick campuses is rather sad. I'd like to see the IITs differentiating consciously on other variables and each establishing a more unique brand identity rather than a rank-obsessed one.
tl;dr: Pick Bombay if you can get it, as both student and prospective employer :)