IIT Madras funding, revenue up Rs 1,000 crore for first time in FY

Premier engineering college clocks highest number of job offers received during campus placements in academic year

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) generated more than Rs 1,000 crore in funding and revenue in 2021-22, the first time it made such an amount in a financial year. It got Rs 1,081 crore in 2021-22: a 51 per cent increase from Rs 714 crore in 2020-21.

This sum includes Rs 768 crore of funds from projects sanctioned by the state and central governments and Rs 313 crore in industry consultancy. “The performance of the Centre for Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research is very encouraging and perfectly aligned with the Strategic Plan of IIT Madras. This is a reflection of our increased interaction with funding agencies and industry,” said V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras.

Major projects that drove funding in 2021-22 include education through information and communication technology using direct-to-home (Rs 300.28 crore), centre of excellence for road safety (Rs 99.5 crore), speech technologies in Indian languages (Rs 50.6 crore) and collecting datasets and benchmarks for building Indian language technology (Rs 47 crore).

Funding and revenue during the financial year 2019-20 was just Rs 570 crore. “IIT Madras has been the digital education hub for the country for quite some time with the NPTEL programme, and more recently, the online BSc. The recent Direct-to-Home initiative has brought in a new dimension. The high-calibre faculty from the institute have been pushing the boundaries for the applications of their research, which brings in more and more industry funding,” said Manu Santhanam, dean, industrial consultancy and sponsored research, referring to the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning.

In 2021-22, IIT Madras recorded the highest number of job offers received during campus placements in an academic year. A total of 1,199 job offers were received from 380 companies. In addition, 231 pre-placement offers (PPOs) were also received from students’ summer internships. This has led to a total of 1,430 job offers, significantly higher than the previous highest of 1,151 offers in the 2018-19 academic year. In 2021-22, the institute also retained its top spot among institutes in the country for the fourth consecutive year based on the National Institutional Ranking Framework rankings.

“The consistent performance in the NIRF rankings have also boosted the stature of IIT Madras as a top education and research institution, and that is clearly the major force behind the excellent growth in R&D funding,” Santhanam said.

“IIT Madras has clearly emerged a leader in the country in Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research with the large value projects mostly from the Computing and 5G sectors, which are expected to grow further. The total funding typically shows a growth rate year-on-year of around 5 to 8 percent, but the industry funding has seen a greater spurt in recent years,” Santhanam said.

"A key reason for the growth in industry-sponsored funding is the increased contribution in the form of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for research. This is expected to grow significantly in the future. Also, ICSR is planning large-scale industry outreach activities in the near future that will help these numbers further,” he said.