Indian Institute Of Technology, Dharwad

IIT Dharwad has been in the national engineering ranking for three editions and has moved a long way in each: 93rd in 2023, out of the ranked hundred and into the 101 to 150 band in 2024, then 77th in 2025. On a campus whose largest graduating class so far is 154 students, a swing like that is arithmetic rather than drama, and the same smallness runs through every figure attached to this institute. What a semester actually costs, what GATE score each M.Tech specialisation admitted down to, and how many of each batch were placed rather than sent on to a master's are all published by IIT Dharwad itself, in fee circulars, round-by-round cutoff sheets and a ranking filing that most listing sites never open.

IIT Dharwad is one of the third generation IITs set up by the Ministry of Education, and it started in August 2016 under the mentorship of IIT Bombay, teaching three four-year B.Tech branches: Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering. The institute dates the classroom work slightly earlier: academic activities commenced in July 2016 in the transit campus. Nine B.Tech branches run today, and the sanctioned undergraduate intake has roughly doubled in five years, from 126 seats in 2018-19 to 248 for 2023-24.

The institute spent its first years as a guest. Its transit campus sat inside the 135-acre Water and Land Management Institute grounds, next to the Dharwad bench of the Karnataka High Court on the national highway between Mumbai and Bengaluru, while the Karnataka government allotted about 470 acres at Chikkamalligawad for the permanent campus, 67 acres of it natural forest. The permanent site has a datable timeline that matters when you read anything about the buildings: the foundation stone was laid on 10 February 2019 and the campus was dedicated to the nation by the Prime Minister on 12 March 2022, with Phase 1A budgeted at ₹852 crore, and construction did not stop there. The Main Gate Complex, the Knowledge Resource and Data Centre and the Central Learning Theatre were on the Vice-President of India's inauguration programme for a visit to the permanent campus on 1 March 2024. So a 2026 entrant walks onto a site where some of the main academic blocks opened barely two years before they did.

Two numbers describe who is actually here. The institute counts around 1,075 students, roughly a fifth of them women and roughly a fifth in master's or doctoral programmes, drawn from 20 of the country's 36 states and union territories, taught by 94 regular faculty alongside 12 adjunct, visiting and professor of practice appointments across ten departments. The second is sharper: of 771 students on the four-year undergraduate roll at the 2025 ranking submission, 62 came from within Karnataka and 709 from outside it. A Karnataka family reading this should register that properly. The state hosts the campus; it does not fill it.

One quirk shows up the moment you open the official site and is worth knowing rather than puzzling over. The institute writes its own name as "dhArwAD" in running text, and explains the capitalisation as its Indianization of Roman script project guidelines. It is a house convention, not a typo, and it appears across circulars and programme pages.

Nine undergraduate engineering branches, four science majors reached through two separate entrance exams, four two-year M.Sc programmes, seven M.Tech specialisations plus two executive ones, and doctoral work in ten disciplines make up the teaching, and the door in differs at each level.

The undergraduate branch list is Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Electronics and Communications Engineering, Engineering Physics, Mathematics and Computing, and Mechanical Engineering, all of them published on the institute's B.Tech programmes page.

The science entry is the unusual one and it splits in two. BS (Interdisciplinary Sciences) with a major in Mathematics or Physics is filled through JEE Advanced, with the major chosen during JoSAA counselling and fixed for the whole degree, while BS in Biology or Chemistry is filled through CUET-UG, with applications opening the day after the CUET-UG result and closing on 12 July 2026 by the institute's tentative schedule. An IIT admitting undergraduates on a CUET-UG score rather than JEE Advanced is rare enough that a science candidate who assumed JEE Advanced was the only way in should read that page before writing the wrong exam.

The B.Tech bill is printed in full, semester by semester, and it is higher than a tuition figure alone suggests because hostel rent and a mess advance sit inside the same transfer.

Three things inside those totals decide what a family actually transfers. Tuition is ₹1,00,000 a semester and is waived entirely for SC, ST and Divyangjan students, which is the whole ₹1,00,000 gap between the two columns above; the first semester carries one-time charges of ₹6,500 covering admission, academic service charges, the convocation fee and lifetime alumni membership, plus refundable deposits of ₹1,000 for the library, ₹5,000 for the institute and ₹5,000 for the hostel; and the non-academic block of ₹35,500 every semester is mostly a ₹20,000 mess advance. The autumn semesters run ₹1,500 above the spring ones because the medical insurance premium is charged once a year. A foreign national pays ₹3,00,000 in tuition, and the seat acceptance fee already paid to JoSAA is credited against the first semester bill.

Note what the circular does not contain: an income slab. It prints two columns and reduces tuition only for SC, ST and PwD students, so an EWS or OBC-NCL candidate is billed the full ₹1,00,000 and gets relief, if at all, through a reimbursement claimed afterwards rather than a lower invoice. The ranking filing records how far that route actually reaches.

Postgraduate tuition is a twentieth of the undergraduate figure. An M.Tech student pays ₹5,000 a semester in tuition, which puts the first semester at ₹68,500 for a general-category candidate and ₹63,500 for an SC, ST or PwD one; the second and fourth semesters run ₹49,500 and ₹44,500, and the third rises to ₹51,000 and ₹46,000 because the annual medical insurance premium falls in an autumn semester. An M.Sc student pays ₹3,000 a semester in tuition, with a first semester of ₹62,000 or ₹59,000. The mess advance is the head that moves against the tuition: it is ₹24,500 a semester for an M.Tech student and ₹20,000 for an undergraduate.

The payment window is fixed and penalised. For the autumn 2026-27 semester, fee payment for continuing students opened on 17 June 2026 and closed on 28 July 2026, with a flat penalty of ₹2,000 after that, instruction beginning on 3 August 2026 and course registration open from 4 to 10 August 2026 under the same ₹2,000 penalty. Registration is blocked until the fee clears, and studentship for the semester is liable to cancellation if it does not.

Nothing about an undergraduate seat here is decided at Chikkamalligawad. You qualify in JEE Advanced, you rank branches at this campus inside JoSAA, and the institute's part begins after the allotment. Its own step is a physical document verification, held on 27 and 28 July 2026 for the 2026 entering batch, with B.Tech and BS offer letters sent to registered email addresses beforehand. Admission questions go to b.tech.admissions@iitdh.ac.in or the academic office on 0836-2309753 and 0836-2309612, on working days between 1030 and 1630 hours.

One rule changes the calculus of the whole JoSAA choice list, and it is buried on the institute's own JEE Advanced page rather than announced anywhere prominent. The provision for branch change is discontinued at IIT Dharwad from the Academic Year 2024-2025 onwards. At most IITs a first-year student with a strong CGPA can move discipline after two semesters, and plenty of candidates accept a lower-preference branch on exactly that hope. Here that route is closed. The branch JoSAA allots is the branch you graduate in, so rank your choice list as though it is final, because it is.

Prospective students are allowed to look before they commit. The campus is open to candidates and parents on any working day from 1030 to 1630 hours, on production of a government photo identity document and the provisional JoSAA seat allotment letter.

Master's entry runs on national tests rather than institute application forms. The institute states plainly that M.Tech dates follow the timeline COAP sets, and that every applicant must register on COAP and quote the registration number when applying, so the GATE score gets you screened and the shared offer-acceptance portal decides what you end up holding. The 2026-27 M.Tech application window ran from 25 March to 26 April 2026, with document verification on 29 and 30 July, orientation and departmental interaction from 31 July to 2 August, and instruction beginning on 3 August 2026. M.Sc seats follow the JAM rank, and the institute publishes the exact JAM paper against each of its four programmes: BT for Molecular Medicine, CY for Chemistry, MA for Mathematics and PH for Physics.

The screening bar for a master's application is published rather than left to guesswork, and it differs sharply by department.

The relaxations are formulaic rather than negotiated: the brochure derives each one from the general bar, at 0.9 times it for OBC-NCL and two thirds of it for SC, ST and PwD candidates, which is why the computer science column is so much higher across the board.

Two further clauses in that brochure catch people out. A candidate admitted under OBC-NCL or EWS must produce a certificate issued after 1 April 2026, in the format applicable to Central Government institutions, and a state government format will not be accepted. And every full-time M.Tech seat is a teaching assistantship seat funded by the Ministry of Education, paying ₹12,400 a month for a maximum of two academic years against eight hours of assigned teaching, research or administrative work a week, which means an applicant already on an organisation's rolls must resign and produce a relieving letter before joining.

The institute also runs a standing warning worth repeating, because Dharwad sits in a region where admission agents are active. It states that it offers no management quota or special admission seats, authorises no individual, agent or third party to facilitate admissions, issues offer letters only from official institute email addresses, and will never ask for payment through personal contacts or phone calls.

There is no undergraduate cutoff to look up at IIT Dharwad, because the institute sets none. A B.Tech or BS seat is decided by the JoSAA closing rank for one branch, in one category, after one counselling round, and the official opening and closing rank archive is the only place those ranks carry authority.

At master's level the picture is unusually good, because the institute keeps its own admission cutoff history, publishing the GATE scores at which each M.Tech specialisation opened and closed for five admission cycles from 2022-23 to 2026-27. Very few institutes of any kind put that on the record. One thing to read carefully before using the table below: the electrical specialisations accept EE, EC and IN papers and publish a separate line for each, so the row here names the paper the figure belongs to rather than implying a single number per specialisation.

Read the computer science row against the screening table above and something clicks. The general closing score of 601 sits one point above the department's own application threshold of 600, which is to say CSE filled itself right down to the floor it had set for accepting applications at all. The mechanical specialisations are a different world: a general candidate closed Design Engineering at 333, a little over half the CSE line.

The sheets also record how long the counselling ran, and it ran long. CSE needed ten rounds plus two additional rounds to fill, moving the general line from 702 at the close of round one down to 601 by the twelfth. Anyone holding a GATE score in the low six hundreds should therefore not read a first-round list as a rejection.

Year on year the CSE line has barely moved. It closed at 606 for the general category in the 2025-26 cycle against 601 a year later, a difference of five points. The electrical and mechanical specialisations swung more, which is what a smaller seat block does.

The comparable series for this campus is its own filing to the national ranking framework, because one definition is repeated year after year: students who finished in the minimum stipulated time, and how many of them a recruiter took.

The 2023-24 row is the one to sit with, and the destination column is what makes it readable. The batch reached 154, placements reached 95, and the number going on to further study jumped to 39 from 12 the year before: placed plus higher studies accounts for most of that cohort, which is a fairer picture than the placement count alone paints. The median moved the other way in the same year, down to ₹11,62,000 from ₹14,85,000, and the filing puts no explanation beside it.

Master's rows come off cohorts small enough that a single student swings them, and one of those rows is a zero.

Nobody should forecast a salary from a group of five, seven or ten, and the zero row is the reason to say so out loud rather than quietly drop it. The filing also enters zero graduates and zero placements in the two-year postgraduate rows for 2021-22 and 2022-23, which is a programme that had not yet finished its first cohort rather than a programme nobody hired from.

A second and more current record exists. The Career Development Cell maintains a placement dashboard on the institute's own front page, broken down by branch and by academic year and running several seasons past the last ranking filing. Read it knowing it counts differently: its percentage is measured against students who registered for placement, not against everyone who graduated, so it is not comparable line for line with the placed column above. Electronics and Communications Engineering and Electrical and Electronics Engineering carry no row on it at all yet, which is what a branch looks like before it has sent a cohort out.

Neither record publishes a highest package. A top-offer figure attached to IIT Dharwad anywhere else therefore has no institute source standing behind it, and the branch view on the dashboard is the better thing to spend the same five minutes on.

Sanctioned intake has grown in steps rather than a curve, and the year the five-year science degree arrived is visible in the table.

The four-year undergraduate line rose from 180 in 2021-22 to 251 in 2022-23 and then eased to 248, so a candidate should read the recent pause as a plateau rather than a reversal. The institute has also consistently admitted slightly under its sanction: 117 joined against an intake of 126 in 2018-19, 127 against 137 in 2019-20 and 160 against 170 in 2020-21.

Dividing an institute total by nine gets nowhere near a real branch figure, because the branches did not open together and the category and female supernumerary blocks sit inside each year's JoSAA matrix. At master's level, though, the seat count is published per specialisation, which is unusual.

The supernumerary column has a specific occupant, and the rule attached to it is the most generous clause in the brochure. Those seats go to candidates holding a B.Tech or equivalent from an IIT, or a BS from IISc, with a minimum CPI of 8.0 on a ten point scale; all three departments waive the GATE requirement for them and select on CPI alone. An IIT graduate with a strong transcript can therefore reach a seat here without sitting the exam that governs every other applicant.

The mechanical streams then split their fifteen a second way. At least nine of the seats go to candidates holding a mechanical, aerospace, production or automobile degree who wrote the GATE ME paper, and at most six may be filled by candidates from any branch writing ME, AE, MT, PI or XE. If you are applying into Design, Thermal or Manufacturing from outside mechanical, you are competing for six seats, not fifteen.

The ranking history is short and it is not a straight line, which is the fact most summaries of this campus flatten.

The two non-ranks are different animals, and the difference is worth spelling out because "not ranked" gets used for both. The 2022 edition ranked 200 institutions and listed two further bands out to 300, and IIT Dharwad appears in none of them. The 2023 and 2024 editions each ranked 100 and then published bands: 93rd in the 2023 ranked list, then inside the 101 to 150 band in 2024, which NIRF publishes alphabetically with no rank and no score. So the institute did not vanish in 2024; it slipped a few places past the hundredth position, where the framework stops counting, and came back at 77th the year after.

Where the recovery came from is legible parameter by parameter.

Outreach and inclusivity did most of the lifting, rising from 39.17 in the 2023 table to 57.85 in the 2025 one, with teaching, learning and resources moving from 64.84 to 74.99 across the same pair of editions. That combination has a physical explanation: the campus moved into finished buildings and the student body widened in the same window.

Research and professional practice is the parameter holding the total down, and it barely moved. At 17.71 out of 100 it is the weakest of the five by a wide margin, and closing that distance runs on publications, patents and funded projects accumulating, which is the slowest clock on any campus this young. Perception went the other way, falling from 29.69 to 22.58, and an applicant should weigh that parameter least: it measures how far a name has travelled among recruiters and academic peers, and this one has had less than a decade to travel anywhere.

Beyond engineering, the 2025 tables carry no IIT Dharwad entry at all, in the overall, university, research or innovation lists. Each of those is a separate submission with its own qualifying bar, so what the blanks record is a young institute that has not yet entered them.

Ten departments carry the teaching, and how they group tells an applicant more than the count does.

That tenth name is worth pausing on. Most IITs run a humanities and social sciences department; putting rural technologies inside the same unit as economics and the arts is a deliberate choice for an institute sitting in north Karnataka rather than a metro, and it shows up again in the research the campus funds.

Age separates the departments more than size does. The M.Tech and the MS by research programmes are offered only by the three oldest departments, Mechanical Materials and Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Electronics and Communication Engineering, and Computer Science and Engineering, while the doctoral programme runs in all ten. A master's applicant therefore has three departments to choose from and a doctoral applicant has ten, which is the clearest single statement of where this institute has built depth first.

Two centres sit alongside the departments. The Centre of Excellence in Affordable and Clean Energy was set up with the Strategic Alliances division of the office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, built around the United Nations sustainable development goal on affordable and clean energy, and its stated work includes test and measurement facilities, a fabrication laboratory, skill development and outreach, and model clean energy village deployments. It was established with corporate social responsibility support from Honeywell Hometown Solutions India Foundation and Lowe's India, and its model clean energy village is Garag, in the vicinity of the campus. A second centre covers Indian Knowledge Systems.

The estate is large, deliberately unfinished, and organised around a single environmental commitment. The institute has committed to an academic campus that is net zero in water, energy and waste by 2030, a timeline its Board of Governors set for the 470 acre site, which is an unusually specific target for a campus still building its first phase. The numbers behind it are published.

The campus has an annual rainwater harvesting potential of 327 million litres against a projected future annual demand of 248 million litres for a population of 10,000, with harvesting pits already feeding an existing lake and three more lakes planned; a 1.25 MW rooftop solar photovoltaic system is proposed to meet the annual energy demand; and municipal wastewater is treated in a phytoremediation sewage treatment plant on the premises, with green, blue and red bins separating compostable, recyclable and landfill waste at source. The solar array is not only a plan on paper: laying its foundation stone was on the Vice-President's programme at the campus on 1 March 2024.

The library is the piece of infrastructure that best shows the institute's age. The Knowledge Resource Centre began in 2016, before the institute was formally inaugurated, in a modest room at the WALMI transit campus under IIT Bombay's mentorship, and now occupies the dedicated Knowledge Resource and Data Centre block with a 24x7 general reading area seating more than 300 and a first floor holding circulation, stacks and a further reading area for over 50 users. Its collection leans digital: access to more than 13,000 e-journals through the One Nation One Subscription scheme via INFLIBNET, databases including Scopus, JSTOR, MathSciNet, Indiastat and EPWRF ITS, e-textbook platforms from McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Cambridge, and research tools including Turnitin, Grammarly and Overleaf. A print collection assembled from nothing in ten years cannot compete with an older IIT's stacks, and the institute has evidently not tried; it has bought subscriptions instead.

The research facilities are named rather than generic. The institute runs a high performance computing facility called AnantGanak, a Space Data Science Lab, a Sophisticated Central Instrumentation Facility, a Fire Lab and a Manufacturing Process Lab, and the instrumentation side lists equipment including a universal testing machine, a vertical machining centre, a fluorescence microscope, gel documentation systems, refrigerated centrifuges, a live cell imager, a pool boiling setup, animal cell culture and molecular biology laboratories and a compression ignition engine setup. An undergraduate hunting for laboratory work has a named list to knock on rather than a notice board.

Sport is broader than the campus size would suggest, and it is listed facility by facility rather than promised in general. Aquatic sports, badminton, basketball, carrom, chess, cricket, football, gymnasium halls, kabaddi, powerlifting, squash, table tennis, tennis, throwball, volleyball, weightlifting and yoga all appear, alongside the Eklavya Dhyanchand Indoor Common Facility.

Residence is assumed rather than offered. A room is allotted on arrival and the key handed over at the hostel office, each room shared by roughly two or four students depending on prevailing conditions and carrying an attached bath and toilet, with a cot, chair, study table and wardrobe provided and mattress, bedding and buckets bought locally through an on-campus shopping arrangement.

Two rules on the same page shape daily life more than the furniture does. Motorised vehicles are not allowed on campus and bicycles are, and the institute warns arriving students that Dharwad rains from June to September and turns windy and cold from October to January. A campus on the outskirts of town with no scooter is a campus you cycle or take the shuttle across.

The cost sits inside the semester fee rather than beside it, which is why the totals in the fees table look high next to a bare IIT tuition figure. The B.Tech circular carries hostel room rent of ₹1,000, electricity and water charges of ₹2,500, hostel establishment and service charges of ₹2,500 and mess establishment charges of ₹1,000 every semester, a ₹20,000 mess advance every semester, and a refundable hostel deposit of ₹5,000 paid once. An M.Tech student pays the same room rent on a larger ₹24,500 mess advance and a refundable mess deposit of ₹5,000.

Living off campus is possible but is not a way to avoid the bill upfront. A student who wishes to reside outside may be permitted to do so only with institute permission and only after reporting to campus, with the hostel and mess components reimbursed later on the approval of the competent authority.

The institute's own headcount and its ranking submission disagree, and neither is wrong, because they were taken at different moments. The profile page lists 94 regular faculty alongside 12 adjunct, visiting and professor of practice appointments; the submission covering 2023-24 entered 112 faculty members. Either figure describes a teaching body smaller than the research community it supervises: 148 full-time and four part-time doctoral scholars were on the rolls at that submission.

Doctoral completions tell the same story from the far end: two full-time PhDs awarded in 2021-22, six the next year, 15 in 2023-24. That is a first substantial intake of scholars reaching submission together, not a change in what the departments can supervise.

Externally funded work has grown faster than any other line in the filing.

The agency count matters as much as the money: doubling from eight funders to 16 in a year is a wider base, not one large grant. Consultancy is smaller and moving the same way, from three projects worth ₹20,00,000 in 2021-22 to 10 projects for 10 client organisations worth ₹77,44,000 in 2023-24.

Capital spending in the same filing explains where the laboratories came from. The institute spent ₹36,83,95,935 on new equipment and software for laboratories in 2023-24 against ₹6,63,87,287 the year before, and ₹4,98,71,820 on books, journals and e-resources against ₹20,30,499. Those are not routine annual budgets; they are a campus being fitted out.

The institute is led by Prof. Venkappayya R. Desai, a civil engineer with more than 35 years in the field, over 27 of them at IIT Kharagpur, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture from 2020 to 2022; his doctorate is from Clemson University and his subject is hydraulic and water resources engineering. The net zero water target the campus has set itself is, on that reading, close to its director's own field.

No traceable list of well-known IIT Dharwad alumni exists, and none is invented here. The arithmetic explains why. Academic activities began in July 2016, so the earliest four-year graduates are only a few years into working life, and the research alumni are younger still: the institute awarded 15 full-time doctorates in 2023-24, six in 2022-23 and two in 2021-22. A public record of achievement takes longer than that to form.

What does exist is an alumni association with a functioning structure rather than a name list. Its governing body for May 2026 to April 2028 is chaired by the Director as patron with the Dean of Alumni and Corporate Relations as honorary president, alongside an elected president, vice president, treasurer, secretary and joint secretary drawn from former students, and it publishes plans for regional chapters and global meets. That association, rather than any third-party ranking of famous graduates, is where the first genuine roster will surface.

The most consequential recent item is a funding decision rather than a campus event. On 7 May 2025 the Union Cabinet approved Phase-B construction across five newer IITs including Dharwad, at a total cost of ₹11,828.79 crore over the four years from 2025-26 to 2028-29, together with 130 faculty posts at professor level and above and five research parks; combined student capacity across those five campuses is to rise from 7,111 to 13,687. That figure covers all five institutes and not Dharwad alone, but it is the clearest signal available that intake here is meant to keep climbing.

On campus, the institute has been building ties with the neighbour it is most often compared against. It signed a memorandum of understanding with NIT Karnataka, Surathkal on 6 August 2026, during that institute's 67th Foundation Day, covering joint research projects, faculty and student exchange, industry-sponsored research and development, consultancy and joint publications. Its own tenth Foundation Day, marked with the Deputy Director of IIT Bombay as chief guest, brought the mentorship it started under back onto the stage.

Research announcements are running to individual grants rather than institutional launches, which is what the ranking's research parameter is waiting on. Prof. Sai Ram Boggavarapu has secured an Anusandhan National Research Foundation Prime Minister's Early Career Research Grant, Prof. Ramesh Nayaka an ANRF intramural research grant as principal investigator, and the institute has announced a granted patent for a fractal textured rhombohexal multigrid for improved mechanical interlocking in soils.

The practical point for an applicant is that dated notices on fees, reporting days and counselling windows are replaced on the institute's own pages rather than amended, so a circular found anywhere else should be treated as provisional until it is matched against the current fee circular page.

For a north Karnataka candidate the real fork is not IIT against IIT. It is this campus against the state's older engineering institution at Surathkal, and the ranking answers bluntly.

NIT Karnataka finishes 60 places and just under 16 points ahead, but the parameter breakdown shows the gap is concentrated rather than general. On teaching, learning and resources the two are almost level, 75.38 against 74.99: what a first year meets on arrival is comparable. The distance is in research, 51.80 against 17.71, and in perception, 45.70 against 22.58. Research output and reputation are the two things that take longest to build, and they are also the two a 2026 entrant benefits from least directly during four years on campus.

There is a footnote to that comparison no ranking records. IIT Dharwad's own director took his M.Tech at Surathkal in the 1986 batch, and went back there in August 2026 as guest of honour to sign the memorandum of understanding between the two institutes.

Against its actual peer group the placing is last but tight. The Union Cabinet funds five institutes as a single expansion cohort, IIT Tirupati, IIT Palakkad, IIT Bhilai, IIT Jammu and IIT Dharwad, and all five sit inside the 2025 ranked hundred: Jammu 56th, Tirupati 57th, Palakkad 64th, Bhilai 72nd and Dharwad 77th. Twenty-one places separate the top and bottom of that cohort, which is close for institutes of the same age and funding line.

The rest of the Karnataka table is the part that catches people out. Three Bengaluru institutions and one in Manipal finish ahead of this IIT, and Christ University sits immediately above it on 49.03 against 48.61, a margin that a single edition could reverse.

None of it settles a branch-level decision, and an institute score cannot: the branch view on the placement dashboard spreads much wider than any single figure for the campus. Weigh the seat you are actually being offered.

The postal address is Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad, Permanent Campus, Chikkamalligawad, Dharwad 580 011, Karnataka, with general enquiries handled by the Public Relations Officer at pro@iitdh.ac.in. The institute publishes a full telephone directory on the same page, including the Registrar's office on +91 8362309615, the Dean of Academic Programmes on +91 8362309611 and the Dean of Students' Welfare on +91 8362309613. Undergraduate admission questions go to b.tech.admissions@iitdh.ac.in and postgraduate ones to pgadmissions@iitdh.ac.in.

Getting there is easier than a rural campus address suggests, because Dharwad is half of a twin city. Hubballi and Dharwad sit about 20 km apart, Hubballi is a major railway junction with roughly a dozen daily trains to Bengaluru on an 8 to 9 hour run, and Hubballi is also the nearest airport at about 30 minutes from the campus, with Belagavi about 50 minutes away and Goa airport about 160 km off. The institute's own directions put Dharwad railway station 15 km from the campus and Hubballi's 35 km.

The town itself is a genuine part of what a candidate is choosing. Dharwad spreads across seven hills at an elevation of about 750 m, takes roughly 700 mm of rain concentrated between June and September, peaks near 35 degrees Celsius in summer and drops to about 15 in winter; it is a cradle of Hindustani classical music that nurtured Gangubai Hangal, Bhimsen Joshi and Mallikarjun Mansur, and the home of Jnanpith awardee D. R. Bendre. The Hubballi-Dharwad agglomeration is the second largest in Karnataka and carries more than 1000 small and medium industries, among them Tata Motors, Tata Hitachi, Kirloskar Electric, Infosys and Sankalp Semiconductors. That last list is the practical half of the picture for an engineering student looking for an internship within driving distance.

At a glance

Quick facts