N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder Infosys: "My son wanted to do Computer Science. But to be in the IIT he had to be among the top 200 in the country. So he chose Cornell."
"I do know cases where students who couldn't get into Computer Science at IIT, they have gotten scholarship at MIT, at Princeton, at Caltech."
During mid 1940's, a need was felt to set up technical institutes of higher education for post-war industrial development of India. The Govt. of India established five IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology) at Chennai, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Mumbai and New Delhi after recommendation from Sarkar Commitee. Later, one more IIT was established at Guwahati. Recently, University of Roorkee has been upgraded to an IIT as well. IIT are the institutes of national importance. Since inception these IIT have made their presence felt not only in India but also in the whole world by providing structured pedagogy of imparting state-of-the-art education and by attracting the best brains as their students.
The best students are selected by a national level exam called JEE (Joint Entrance Examination). IIT have an acceptance rate of around 2% against 8% of Harvard making JEE one of the most challenging exams in the world.
