Indian Institute Of Technology, Delhi

Two students in the same IIT Delhi classroom can pay ₹1,00,000 and ₹33,333 a semester in tuition, and a third pays nothing at all. Declared annual family income decides which of those lines you sit on, and the institute profile IIT Delhi files with the Joint Seat Allocation Authority publishes all three. That table settles more of what a candidate has to budget for than any ranking does, and almost nobody quotes it.

IIT Delhi opened in 1961 as the College of Engineering, and the Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Act, 1963 declared it an Institution of National Importance and gave it the name it carries now. Prince Philip had laid the foundation stone at Hauz Khas on 27 January 1959, the first admissions followed in 1961, and students were asked to report on 16 August 1961, per the institute's own history. Institute of Eminence status came in 2018.

The alumni body is large enough to be a fact about the place rather than a boast. Close to 66,000 people have taken a degree here, among them 8,038 doctoral graduates and 22,336 who left with a B.Tech, per the prospectus for 2026-27; the rest hold master's degrees in engineering, the sciences, humanities, public policy or business administration.

Where the campus sits shapes the daily experience of studying here. The Hauz Khas campus covers 312 acres in south Delhi, with two Delhi Metro gates opening onto it, 21 kilometres from the Kashmere Gate inter-state bus terminal and 10 kilometres from the airport, per the same prospectus, which also records an extension campus on 50 acres in Sonepat, Haryana. The contact page gives that second site an address at Rajiv Gandhi Education City in Kundli. A third campus, at Abu Dhabi, has been running since January 2024 and fills its undergraduate seats inside the same counselling process as Hauz Khas, per the JoSAA profile.

Fifteen four-year B.Tech branches form the undergraduate core, from Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology and Textile through Computer Science and Engineering, Mathematics and Computing and Engineering Physics. Beside them the prospectus lists a four-year B.S. in Chemistry, a B.Des in Design, and dual degrees in Chemical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering and Mathematics and Computing that end with an M.Tech. Postgraduate study covers the M.Tech and M.S.(R), the M.Sc, the M.Des, postgraduate diplomas including one in naval construction for Indian Navy candidates, the MBA and the part-time Executive MBA at the Department of Management Studies, and doctoral work across every department, centre and school, as the postgraduate page sets out programme by programme.

Tuition here is not one number, which is the single most important thing to understand before you build a budget. For 2026 entrants the JoSAA institute profile sets tuition per semester at ₹1,00,000 for General, GEN-EWS and OBC candidates whose annual family income is above ₹5 lakh, ₹33,333 where that income falls between ₹1 lakh and ₹5 lakh, and nil below ₹1 lakh. SC, ST and PwD candidates pay no tuition at any income.

Everything outside tuition is flat, and a day scholar pays the same except the hostel line. The fee structure notice for 2026 entrants itemises each head: a one-time payment of ₹8150 covering admission fees, the student welfare fund, a modernisation fee, the benevolent fund, alumni fees and training and placement charges; other charges of ₹6250 spanning examination, registration, gymkhana, medical, internet and computer, transport, the student distress fund and insurance; a refundable caution deposit of ₹8000 split evenly between institute and library security; and hostel seat rent of ₹8600. Foreign nationals pay USD 1000 from SAARC countries or USD 2000 from elsewhere, plus the same ₹31000 in rupee charges.

There is a second figure on that notice worth more than the headline total, because it is the one your bank transfer actually carries. The ₹25000 a General, OBC or GEN-EWS candidate pays JoSAA at seat acceptance, or ₹10000 for an SC, ST or PwD candidate, is deducted from the institute bill instead of charged on top, so the same notice puts the balance payable at ₹1,06,000 for a hosteller above the ₹5 lakh line, ₹39,333 in the middle band and ₹6000 below ₹1 lakh. A day scholar in that lowest band finishes ₹2600 in credit, which is set against the next semester rather than refunded.

Continuing students pay on the same structure. For entry years 2022 to 2025 the fee circular for the first semester of 2026-27 puts the semester bill at ₹1,14,850 above the ₹5 lakh line, ₹48,183 in the middle band and ₹14,850 below ₹1 lakh, each being tuition plus ₹6250 in other charges plus ₹8600 seat rent. That circular carries the detail most fee tables drop: SC and ST students whose parental income is up to ₹8 lakh and who take the free messing facility owe no hostel seat rent either, and dual-degree students pay B.Tech fees only up to the eighth semester.

Every B.Tech, B.S. and dual-degree seat is filled by rank through JEE Advanced and the Joint Seat Allocation Authority, which leaves the institute's own part in undergraduate selection administrative rather than discretionary. Two design routes sit beside that and are easy to confuse: the prospectus admits to the B.Des through UCEED, while the B.Tech in Design is filled through JEE Main and Advanced with UCEED required as a qualification. The academic office's undergraduate page records the 2026-27 intake as drawn from JEE (Advanced) 2026, Preparatory 2025 and UCEED 2026 together, across the B.Tech, B.Tech plus M.Tech, B.Des and B.S. programmes.

The joining calendar published for that cycle ran early for an IIT. New entrants reported to their hostels from 09:00 on 20 July 2026, orientation was held on 21 July, induction ran from 21 to 25 July, and classes began on 27 July 2026, per the JoSAA institute profile. Candidates allotted the Abu Dhabi campus followed a separate schedule on the same profile: biometric and document verification at Hauz Khas on 21 and 22 July, a return to the Delhi campus for travel on 16 August 2026, a welcome event on 17 August, orientation in Abu Dhabi on 19 August and classes from 20 August. Anyone who missed physical verification in July was given a late session on 12 August 2026 outside Lecture Hall Complex 325, per the undergraduate page.

Which tuition slab you land in is settled by a document upload, not by the form you fill at counselling, and that deadline does not bend. After registration the Academic Section emails new entrants asking for parental income documents on the E-Academics portal, and the 2026 fee structure notice states that failure to upload by the stated date generates the full tuition fee, with no request for extension entertained. The same notice set the payment ladder for that cycle: dues cleared by 24 July 2026 carried no late fee, ₹250 applied from 25 to 29 July, ₹750 from 30 July to 3 August, and a student who had not paid by 3 August had registration terminated, the name struck off the rolls, the hostel vacated and all facilities withdrawn. Renewing registration then cost a further ₹1000 on top of the arrears.

Postgraduate entry is exam-specific and run by the departments. The M.Tech works on GATE with interviews for some specialisations, the M.S.(R) typically on GATE with an interview or written test, the M.Sc on the Joint Admission Test for Masters, and the M.Des on CEED with a written test or interview after it. For a PhD the postgraduate page sets the bar at a master's degree or equivalent in a relevant field, usually with a written test and an interview held by the department you apply to, and notes that many admitted candidates are eligible for fellowships from the institute or from external agencies. The MBA is the most formalised route of the lot, and it gets its own treatment below, because the Department of Management Studies tells you the score you need before you apply rather than after.

Two entirely different mechanisms decide entry here, and treating them as one question is why so much of the cutoff material circulating about IIT Delhi is unusable.

Nothing the institute itself publishes works as a B.Tech cutoff. Entry turns on a closing rank recorded by the Joint Seat Allocation Authority for one branch, one category and one round, and those move every year with how strongly that year's cohort ranks Hauz Khas in its choice list. The archive of opening and closing ranks lives on JoSAA's portal and is queried by year, round and programme; a rounded-off aggregator table is not a substitute for it. What the seat structure tells you in advance is where the pressure concentrates: Computer Science and Engineering carries 99 seats but only 30 gender-neutral OPEN ones, while Civil Engineering carries 110 seats with 34 gender-neutral OPEN, per the JoSAA seat breakup. A rank reaches a branch through that arithmetic, not through the institute's reputation.

The MBA works the opposite way round. The Department of Management Studies publishes its scoring rules and its minimum index before applications open. Its shortlisting and admission criteria for 2026-2028 weight the CAT score at 65 marks, gender diversity at 8, work experience at 7, bachelor's degree marks at 5, Class 12 marks at 5, Class 10 marks at 5, and a degree from a Ministry of Education funded technical institution, Institute of Eminence or Institute of National Importance at 5. Only candidates above the published index are called for a personal interview.

Clearing that index only gets you into the room. The DMS admission index then puts 40 marks on the interview and extra-curricular record and 40 on the CAT score, carrying the remaining parameters across pro rata, so a strong percentile that arrives with a weak interview does not survive the second stage. Work experience is scored on a hump rather than a ladder in the same document, and the hump falls away sharply: the 19-to-24-month and 25-to-36-month bands both take the full 7 marks, 37 to 48 months drops to 4, and past 48 months the score is 1. Applicants who left industry to prepare for CAT should read that line before they treat a longer stint as an advantage.

The only placement figures IIT Delhi puts its name to are the counts and medians in its annual ranking submission, which is why the three-year series is worth more than a December headline. For the four-year undergraduate cohort, 946 students graduated in the minimum stipulated time in 2023-24, 711 were placed at a median of ₹19,08,000, and 49 went on to higher study, per the NIRF 2025 data submission.

Set the first three rows side by side and the gap between two of the columns is the story. The 2021-22 batch put 685 students through in the minimum time and placed 621 of them; the 2023-24 batch put through 946 and placed 711, with the median down from ₹20,50,000 to ₹19,08,000. Neither figure says a Hauz Khas degree is worth less than it was; both say the batch grew faster than the offers did. A family sizing an education loan should size it against the median and against a real chance of finishing in the unplaced quarter.

The five-year dual degrees clear the four-year programmes on median pay, ₹24,30,000 against ₹19,08,000 for the same graduating year, per the institute submission. On placement rate the MBA leads everything: all 89 students who finished the two-year Department of Management Studies programme in the minimum time in 2023-24 were placed, at a median of ₹22,05,000, per the management data submission. Neither filing carries a recruiter roster. The institute reports how many were placed and at what median, and leaves the company lists to pages that cannot verify them.

The seat count is public and exact. IIT Delhi offers 1249 seats across 23 undergraduate programmes in the 2026 counselling, four of which belong to the Abu Dhabi campus and carry 10 seats each, per the JoSAA seat breakup. The gender-neutral OPEN column below is the one most candidates are competing in.

Two things in that table are worth carrying into a choice list. Civil and Electrical Engineering are the biggest programmes on the campus at 110 seats each, both larger than Computer Science and Engineering at 99, per the JoSAA seat breakup, so at Hauz Khas the branch that draws the tightest ranks is not the branch with the most room. The counselling table is also a different count from the sanctioned intake in the ranking filing, where the 2023-24 figures were 1113 four-year undergraduate seats, 116 five-year seats and 1668 two-year postgraduate seats, per the NIRF 2025 submission.

No other institution in the country sits inside the top four of the engineering, the research and the management tables at the same time. Here is where the Ministry of Education's 2025 framework placed IIT Delhi, list by list.

Second on one table and fourth on another comes down to two parameters out of five. On the Overall list the institute scores 92.23 on perception, among the highest any Indian institution records, while graduation outcomes sit at 74.71, and that second figure is what holds it at fourth. The engineering table gives it 93.47 on research and professional practice and 93.97 on perception, a profile weighted towards output and reputation rather than throughput. Abroad, a release dated 18 June 2026 in the institute's press archive reports 118th place in the QS World University Rankings 2027, an improvement on the previous edition, where IIT Delhi featured in the top 125 and was also the highest placed Indian institution.

Read the academic register and the engineering label starts to look narrow. Six of the sixteen departments teach something other than engineering, and the schools reach into public policy and artificial intelligence.

Two interdisciplinary research programmes run beside that register, one in Opto-Electronics and Optical Communication and one in VLSI Design Tools and Technology. Every unit on the list, department, centre and school alike, admits doctoral students.

A management applicant should read one line of the register structurally. Management Studies is a department of the institute, on the same list as Textile and Fibre Engineering, not a business school parked next to it, and that is how a technology campus comes to hold rank 4 on a management table otherwise occupied by the IIMs, ahead of IIM Lucknow at rank 5, per the NIRF 2025 management ranking. Its MBA students share the hostels, the library and the research culture with the B.Tech cohort.

The 312 acres are laid out in four zones, a residential zone for students, a second for faculty and staff, an academic zone for teaching buildings and workshops, and a cultural and recreational zone, and the campus carries the amenities of a small town: a hospital, shopping centres, banks, a post office, a community centre, a stadium and playing fields, per the prospectus. Sport is unusually well provided for, with an Olympic size swimming pool, a kid's pool, two multi-gyms, a flood-lit stadium with a 400 metre athletics track, two squash courts, a badminton hall and clay and synthetic tennis courts.

Health cover on campus is more substantial than the phrase "institute hospital" suggests. The prospectus describes a 20 bedded primary care facility run by eight full-time allopathic doctors, one homeopathic doctor and one dental doctor, with eight further doctors on contract covering OPD and emergency duty round the clock on all weekdays and holidays, an in-house pharmacy open from 8 am to 8 pm, a physiotherapy unit, digital radiography since February 2025, and part-time specialists from AIIMS and Safdarjung across cardiology, ENT, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, psychiatry, neurology, pulmonology, dermatology and paediatrics. Two ambulances are on call at all hours for referrals.

What the equipment layer buys an undergraduate is contact time rather than a line in a brochure. The prospectus names six central facilities: the Central Manufacturing Facility, formerly the Central Workshop; the Central Research Facility with SATHI; the Central Library; the Nanoscale Research Facility; Career Services; and the hospital. The research operation behind them is large, with 1011 sponsored projects drawing on 414 funding agencies in 2023-24 and 529 consultancy projects for 439 client organisations in the same year, per the NIRF 2025 submission, alongside 86 live international memoranda of understanding recorded in the prospectus.

Computing capacity took a step up in 2026. At the 57th convocation on 8 August 2026 the Prime Minister remotely inaugurated Param Pragya, an AI-powered high-performance supercomputing facility built at the Sonipat campus and running on 400 NVIDIA A100 80GB GPUs for about 250 AI petaflops, with 10 petabytes of parallel file system storage, per the institute's account of the ceremony. It sits at the extension campus, not at Hauz Khas.

Most of IIT Delhi's halls of residence are named after Indian mountains and ranges. The hall of residence page lists Aravali, Girnar, Jwalamukhi, Karakoram, Kumaon, Nilgiri, Shivalik, Satpura, Udaigiri, Vindhyachal and Zanskar for men, with Dronagiri and two floors of Saptagiri reserved for postgraduates; Kailash and Himadri for women, with Sahyadri and five floors of Saptagiri again postgraduate-only; and Nalanda used mainly as transit accommodation.

A seat is not a fixture, and that surprises people. The same page explains that a resident is allotted a seat at the start of every academic semester, that the seat may be a different one or in a different hostel, and that the institute tries to hold a resident in one seat for a full academic year before requiring it to be vacated, with cloakrooms provided for belongings in between. Accepting the allotment is optional; nobody is obliged to live on campus. The same page caps hostel tenure at 8 semesters on a four-year undergraduate programme and 10 on a five-year one, or completion of the programme, whichever comes first.

Budget for the hostel separately, because only one hostel line rides on the academic fee. Seat rent is ₹8600 a semester and non-refundable, per the prospectus, and it is billed with the academic dues. The Student Affairs section collects everything else: a one-time seat allotment charge of ₹7000 that is not refundable, a refundable security of ₹15000, and mess charges of ₹36000 a semester in the old hostels. Residents of the new hostels also pay centralised air conditioning charges of ₹15000 a semester for single occupancy or ₹7500 for double, and the fee circular names Drona Giri, Saptagiri and Sahyadri as the air-conditioned halls. The prospectus leaves the mess figures for the new hostels and for Nalanda blank, so ask the Board for Hostel Management rather than assuming the old-hostel number applies. All of these are cooperative charges, recalculated at the end of each semester with any excess carried forward.

The institute entered 705 faculty members in its 2025 ranking submission, 28 of them in the Department of Management Studies, per the overall and management filings. The doctoral roll beside that headcount is what gives it meaning. IIT Delhi had 2965 people registered full-time for a PhD in 2023-24 and 597 registered part-time, and it conferred the degree on 416 full-timers and 65 part-timers inside that one year.

Roughly four full-time doctoral scholars for every faculty member is a description of where attention goes. It puts working laboratories, live projects and supervision within reach of an undergraduate who asks for them, and it also means a large share of any department's week belongs to research students rather than to a second-year course. Students who do well here tend to be the ones who go looking for a group to join instead of waiting to be taught.

IIT Delhi stands behind exactly one alumni record, the Distinguished Alumni Award citations its alumni relations office posts year by year, and everything below comes off that roll. These are the 2026 recipients, with the degrees recorded for each.

Earlier names on the same roll include Srikanth Velamakanni, a 1996 B.Tech in Electrical Engineering; Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, a 1977 B.Tech who followed it with an M.S. in Civil Engineering in 1979; Gajendra P. S. Raghava, who took a master's in Energy Studies in 1986; Prabu Raja, a 1991 PhD in Plasma Physics; Ramya Venkataraman, a 1997 B.Tech; and Gargi Maheshwari, who holds a 1994 dual degree in Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology. Civil engineering, plasma physics, energy studies and biotechnology in one short roll is the useful signal, more than any single name is.

The dated press release archive is the clearest guide to what the institute is spending its attention on. Its 27 August 2026 entry sets out the steps already taken on student well-being and support infrastructure, and an 18 August entry reports a chemistry group's visible-light driven route to unnatural amino acids. Earlier in August the archive records Cisco and IIT Delhi launching a Cisco Technology Hub aimed at India's artificial intelligence and cybersecurity capabilities, and on 28 July a first Hindi version of Melodic Intonation Therapy for post-stroke aphasia, developed with AIIMS New Delhi and IHBAS. June carried the QS World University Rankings 2027 result and, on 10 June, a tie-up with 18 National Institutes of Technology on academics, research and innovation.

Set beside the institutes it is most often measured against, IIT Delhi's profile is lopsided in a way worth understanding before you order a choice list. In NIRF 2025 it stands second in engineering with 85.74, ahead of IIT Bombay at 83.65, while sitting fourth overall with 80.67, behind IIT Madras at 87.31, the Indian Institute of Science at 85.00 and IIT Bombay at 81.62, per the engineering and overall tables.

That inversion is the honest headline. On the table that measures engineering teaching and research it beats Bombay; on the broader institutional measure it does not. Where it stands apart from every other technology institute in the country is management, since none of them appears in the top five of the management table, where IIT Delhi's 78.94 sits above IIM Lucknow's 77.97. Judging this campus on engineering grounds alone leaves out the half of it a management or public policy applicant would come here for.

IIT Delhi answers from more than one address, and fee questions in particular are routed to a named section rather than to a general line.

For money questions the 2026-27 fee circular names a desk for each problem: fee generation goes to the Academic Section on 011-26597107, payments that have not updated go to the Accounts Section on 011-26597159, a fee portal that will not load goes to the Computer Service Centre on 011-26597141, and hostel seat rent queries go to the Office of the ADHM on 011-26591784. Undergraduate admission questions go instead to the Dean (Academics), the contact the institute names for admission on its JoSAA profile. The Hauz Khas campus has two gates opening onto the Delhi Metro.

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