The IITs in India: Symbols of an Emerging Nation

Abstract

This paper, based on policy documents of the Indian government and the UNESCO archives in Paris, tries to sketch the underlying dynamics of the decision to invest in a technologically intensive mode of moderni-sation in India in the 1950s by briefly focusing on the politics behind the setting up of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), specifically, IIT Kharagpur (1950, IIT status in 1951). This process had both national and international dimensions and reveals the complex internal dynam-ics of deciding to create a post-colonial knowledge society. It touches upon the international dynamics that enabled India to seek help from across the Cold War ideological divide and the link between IIT alumni who migrated and India’s Information Technology industry.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.