What’s the secret behind India’s IIT, which produced Twitter chief Parag Agrawal and other tech titans?

Above the imposing main entrance of the first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which opened back in 1951, is the motto “Service to the Nation”. For years, as many graduates of the country’s elite network of engineering schools headed off for greener pastures in the US, the joke among Indians was “which nation?”.

Twitter’s new chief Parag Agrawal recently joined a long list of talented IIT graduates who have become tech titans in Silicon Valley, including Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Micron Technology’s Nikesh Arora and Sun Microsystems’ Vinod Khosla to name just a few.

By global standards, IIT – which has grown to 23 campuses around India – is way down the academic league tables, according to the widely used QS World University rankings. IIT Bombay fared best of all Indian educational institutions in 2021, coming 177 out of the leading 200 universities in the QS global rankings. By contrast, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was in top position. While IIT scores well on employer reputation, with 70 out of 100 points, it loses heavily on its lack of international students and faculty.

IIT Delhi director V. Ramgopal Rao said the reason there are so few international undergraduate students (there are some at postgraduate level) is that it is so hard for foreigners to crack what he called “the most difficult admission exam on the planet”.

While IIT holds entrance exams in centres like Dubai and Singapore, foreign students have a “big disadvantage in that they haven’t attended an Indian school and completed the rigorous curriculum”, said Rao. In fact, IIT Delhi has only ever had one foreign student passing the entrance exam – a Korean who went to an Indian high school.