IIT Kanpur

IIT, Kanpur

Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India is home to the Indian Institute of Technical Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), a public technical institute. Under the Institutes of Technology Act, the Indian government designated it as an Institute of National Importance. One of India’s most esteemed academic institutes is IIT Kanpur.

One of the first Indian Institutes of Technology, the organization was founded in 1959 with the help of a group of nine US research universities as a part of the Kanpur Indo-American Programme (KIAP).

The Indian government built IIT Kanpur by a parliamentary act in 1960. The institute got its beginnings at Kanpur’s Agricultural Gardens in a room inside the cafeteria building of the Harcourt Butler Technological Institute in December 1959. The institute relocated to its current location in the Kanpur district’s Kalyanpur neighborhood in 1963. Achyut Kavinde fashioned the campus in a modernist manner.

A group of nine US universities, including MIT, UCB, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Carnegie Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Ohio State University, Case Institute of Technology, and Purdue University, assisted IIT Kanpur in establishing its research facilities and academic programs during the first ten years of its existence.

Program for Indo-Americans (KIAP). P. K. Kelkar served as the institute’s first director; in his honor, the Central Library was renamed in 2002.

IIT Kanpur was the first college in India to provide instruction in computer science, working under the direction of economist John Kenneth Galbraith. On an IBM 1620 system, the first computer course at the institution was launched in August 1963. The Electrical Engineering department, then led by Prof. H.K. Kesavan, who also served as the department’s chairman and director of the Computer Center, took the lead in developing computer education. Prior to Kesavan, Prof. Harry Huskey of the University of California, Berkeley assisted with the IIT-Kanpur computer activities. A separate academic program in computer science and mathematics,  Engineering, leading to MTech and PhD degrees, was launched by the institution in 1971.

The KIAP program came to an end in 1972, in part due to political tensions between Pakistan and India (because the USA backed Pakistan). In response to the perception that IITs were causing a brain drain, government funding was also cut.

Techkriti, the institute’s yearly technological festival, was established in 1995.