Indian Institute Of Technology, Guwahati

IIT Guwahati had held seventh place in the national engineering ranking for a ninth consecutive year when the 2024 table appeared. In 2025 it finished eighth, a fraction of a point behind the institute above it. The more useful document is the one its career centre publishes every year, because it prints a median salary for every branch: those medians ran from Rs 34.1 lakh in computer science to Rs 13 lakh in biosciences and bioengineering, on one campus, in one recruiting season. The fee sheet, the postgraduate seat matrix and the intake figures filed with the ranking framework are public as well.

IIT Guwahati is the sixth IIT, and the numbers behind that sentence are small. The institute was established in 1994 by an Act of Parliament and its academic programme started in 1995 with 65 students across three undergraduate programmes; the roll now stands at around 8,600.

The campus is the part no brochure has to exaggerate. It occupies 285 hectares on the north bank of the river Brahmaputra, roughly 20 km from the heart of Guwahati, with the river on one side and hills and open spaces on the others. Teaching is organised into eleven departments, seven interdisciplinary academic centres and five schools, which is a wider spread than the engineering label suggests: healthcare, management and humanities all admit here.

The institute states a regional purpose plainly, saying it has been able to fulfil the aspirations of people of the North East region to a great extent since its inception. That purpose is not discharged through the admission list. The four-year undergraduate roll runs to 3,914 students, of whom 3,759 came from outside Assam and 140 from inside it. An IIT seat carries no home-state quota, so what the North East gets from this campus is the laboratories, the research output and the outreach, not the seats. An Assam family that reads the north-bank address as a local edge at counselling has misread it.

Several separate examinations open separate doors here, and only one of them is JEE Advanced.

The B.Tech list is broader than the classical five. The disciplines are computer science and engineering, electronics and communication engineering, electronics and electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, biosciences and bioengineering, chemical engineering, engineering physics, chemical science and technology, mathematics and computing, data science and artificial intelligence, and energy engineering. Two of those, data science and artificial intelligence and energy engineering, are taught by schools rather than by departments. A B.Tech student may also take a minor, and each minor is five courses, with south and southeast Asian studies and language and literature on the list alongside the technical ones.

Fees are published as one total payable at admission, which is unusually easy to plan against.

What sits inside that total is worth reading, because the residential half of it is bundled in rather than billed apart. The one-time non-refundable charges come to Rs 10,800, covering admission, certificates, a medical examination, an identity card, modernisation, a one-time alumni fee and hostel admission; refundable deposits add Rs 12,000 in institute, library and hostel caution money; and the recurring semester block is Rs 42,450 plus tuition, which already includes an adjustable mess advance of Rs 21,250, hostel rent of Rs 2,000, a hostel fund of Rs 2,200, maintenance of Rs 3,500 and electricity and water of Rs 3,500. Food and a room are therefore not a second bill to budget for at Guwahati; they are lines inside the first one.

Tuition itself is the only component that changes with the programme. A B.Tech, B.Des or BS student outside the SC, ST and PwD categories pays Rs 1,00,000 a semester, an M.Tech, M.Des or MS(R) student Rs 15,000, an MA or M.Sc student Rs 5,000, a PhD student Rs 15,000 and an MBA student Rs 2,00,000, while SC, ST and PwD students pay no tuition at all.

Two income bands cut the undergraduate tuition without any scholarship application. A general, EWS or OBC-NCL student whose annual family income is below Rs 1 lakh is treated as Most Economically Backward and the tuition fee is waived in full; between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 5 lakh the student is Other Economically Backward and two thirds of the tuition is waived, on production of a family income certificate from the District Magistrate, Revenue Officer or Tehsildar and an income affidavit on Rs 100 stamp paper. That single rule is why the B.Tech line in the table above has three different totals rather than one.

A B.Tech family transfers less than the headline in July, because the counselling deposit is carried across. JEE (Advanced) 2026 deducts Rs 5,000 as a reporting centre processing charge and sends the rest of the seat acceptance fee on to IIT Guwahati, leaving a balance of Rs 1,40,250 for general, EWS and OBC-NCL candidates, Rs 73,583 for OEB candidates, Rs 40,250 for MEB candidates and Rs 55,250 for SC, ST and PwD candidates. B.Des balances are struck separately against the UCEED deposit and come out lower at every line.

The B.Tech gate is the one everybody knows about and also the one IIT Guwahati controls least, since a JEE Advanced rank is converted into a seat by JoSAA before the institute meets the candidate. What it does run itself is everything else, and those routes have their own calendars, their own fees and their own traps.

Start with the undergraduate degree that never touches JEE. Admission to the BS in Biomedical Science and Engineering, run by the Jyoti and Bhupat Mehta School of Health Sciences and Technology, is decided on merit in the IISER Aptitude Test 2026 together with Class 12 performance, and a candidate needs physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology in Class XII with a minimum 75 per cent aggregate in those four subjects. Applications ran on the institute's own portal from 09 March 2026 until 5 pm on 15 June 2026, selections were held in June, registration fell on 21 July 2026, and the fee was Rs 1,000, or Rs 800 for female, transgender, SC, ST and PwD candidates. An IIT that admits undergraduates on an IISER examination is unusual enough that a school student aiming at it should be tracking the IAT calendar a year ahead, not the JEE one.

Master's entry runs through the institute's own portal and then, for part of it, through the shared offer platform. Applications for the M.Tech, M.Des, MS(R) and MA programmes opened on 20 March 2026 and closed at 5 pm on 10 April 2026, selections ran from 5 May to 25 June 2026, registration fell on 21 July and classes began on 23 July; the processing fee was Rs 600, or Rs 300 for female, transgender, SC, ST and PwD candidates, payable separately for every programme applied to.

Which route a master's candidate falls into changes what the selection actually weighs. Regular-category seats for GATE-qualified candidates in biotechnology, bioengineering, civil engineering, computer science and engineering, chemical engineering, electronics and electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, data science, robotics and artificial intelligence and biomedical science and engineering are offered through COAP 2026, and selection for those is typically on the GATE score alone, though an academic division may add a written test or interview carrying at most 30 per cent weight. Every other M.Tech discipline, and inside that list every applicant who is not a regular-category GATE qualifier, including anyone entering on an IIT degree, is decided on past academic performance plus the division's own test or interview. The mode can be offline, online or hybrid, decided division by division and announced with the selection schedule.

One reservation rule catches Assam candidates in particular, and it is stated bluntly. Submitting only an OBC or MOBC certificate will not be treated as OBC-NCL: without a valid Other Backward Classes Non-Creamy Layer certificate in the Government of India format, issued on or after April 01, 2025, the candidate is processed as General and non-EWS. MOBC is a state-level classification in Assam and it does not substitute for the central one at an institute of national importance.

Joining is a fixed week, and the room is settled before anyone travels. Hostel rooms were allotted to all new undergraduates by 18 July 2026, reporting at the hostel was on 19 July, registration and document verification ran at the Conference Centre on 20 July from 10 am to 5 pm, orientation was on 21 July and instruction began on 27 July; new postgraduate and doctoral students reported a day later, registered on 21 July and started classes on 23 July. A selected postgraduate who changes their mind should move early: a withdrawal request received by 20 July 2026 costs Rs 1,000, and after that only the refundable portion comes back, processed in October 2026.

IIT Guwahati publishes no undergraduate cutoff of its own, and a number lifted from anywhere else would be guesswork wearing the clothes of a fact. The figure that binds a B.Tech seat is the closing rank of the particular counselling round that allotted it, and only JoSAA's opening and closing rank archive settles that, branch by branch and category by category.

At master's level the institute has published closing ranks, though the most recent set it has put on its own website is now several cycles old. Read the table below for the shape of the competition between specialisations rather than as a target for this year, and note that these are merit-order ranks among eligible applicants, not GATE scores.

Two things in that table still hold. A lower number is a harder seat, so data science closing at 37 in the open category against communication engineering at 731 shows the gap between a small new programme and a large established one. And the reserved lines do not sit uniformly below the open ones: robotics and artificial intelligence closed at 88 in the open category and at 164 for OBC-NCL, which is what a handful of category seats filling without a queue behind them looks like.

For the current cycle the mechanism matters more than any old number. The institute reserves the right to shortlist on additional criteria drawn from GATE, NET or CEED performance, from marks in the qualifying degree, and from academic records going back to Class 10. If two candidates tie, the higher Class 12 aggregate ranks first, then the higher Class 10 aggregate, then the older candidate by date of birth. School marks you thought were behind you can decide a master's seat here.

The Centre for Career Development publishes a full report each year, and the 2024-25 edition is candid about direction of travel. Around 260 companies took part, 1,606 students registered and 1,001 were placed, an overall rate of 62 per cent; 193 pre-placement offers were made, 26 per cent of them to female students, and the highest package was Rs 1.25 crore. The report also states that the percentage of registered male students placed was the same as that of registered female students, 62 per cent, which is not something most campuses can print.

Programme by programme, the spread is wide enough that an aggregate rate tells you very little.

The single most decision-relevant page in that report is the branch-level compensation table, because it answers the question a JoSAA choice list actually turns on.

Computer science reports a median of Rs 34.1 lakh against Rs 13 lakh in biosciences and bioengineering, on the same campus in the same season, and places 90.68 per cent of its registrants against 57.38 per cent. The branches clustered at the top are the computational ones rather than the oldest ones: data science and artificial intelligence, taught by the Mehta Family School, placed 90.91 per cent from 22 registrants, a percentage worth reading with that small denominator in mind.

The master's picture is harder, and the report does not hide it. VLSI and nanoelectronics placed 91.67 per cent and power engineering 83.33 per cent, while food science and technology, earth system science and engineering, and water resources engineering and management each placed nobody at all. Anyone weighing an M.Tech offer here should look up their own specialisation in that document rather than the institute-wide 44.65 per cent.

The year before was materially better, which is the context the 2024-25 numbers need. In 2023-24, 1,584 students registered for placement and 1,124 were placed for an overall rate of 71 per cent, 229 pre-placement offers were made, 102 students secured a CTC of 50 LPA or more, 14 public sector undertakings came on board and the highest package was Rs 2.05 crore. Recruiter turnout is the one thing that did not move: that report also describes around 260 companies participating, the same figure as the season after it, so the fall in the rate came from what those companies hired rather than from how many of them showed up.

One outsized offer drags an average, which is why the medians IIT Guwahati files with the ranking framework are the series to track instead. Both have gone down in each of the last three graduating cohorts.

The undergraduate line in that table moves twice over. The median fell from Rs 22,50,000 to Rs 19,48,000 across three cohorts, and the count going on to higher studies rose from 43 to 51 and then to 179. A jump of that size in a single year is a cohort choosing further study in numbers the campus had not seen before, and it is the honest counterweight to any single placement percentage.

The postgraduate matrix is published in full before applications open, division by division and category by category, which is more than most institutes disclose.

By division the same sheet totals 132 seats in civil engineering, 131 in mechanical, 97 in electronics and electrical, 75 in chemical, 68 in computer science and engineering, 44 in biotechnology, 40 each in robotics and artificial intelligence and in biomedical science and engineering, 20 in data science, 12 in rural technology, 10 in bioengineering and 5 in food science and technology. Civil engineering therefore carries the largest master's block on campus. Seat count and difficulty do not track each other, though. Data science holds 20 seats against 68 in computer science and engineering, and in the last cycle for which IIT Guwahati published closing ranks, data science was the tighter of the two to get into.

Two notes on that sheet change how it should be read. Five per cent of the total seats are reserved for PwD candidates, applied across the matrix rather than as a separate column, and non-regular category candidates may occupy at most 10 per cent of the total seats in each discipline. The same document flags structural change in progress: the Centre for Intelligent Cyber Physical Systems is proposed to be merged into a new academic entity tentatively titled the School of Sustainable Urban Development, and the M.Des in Electronic Product Design is suspended until further notification. The other master's blocks are smaller: M.Des in design carries 33 seats, the MS(R) in energy science and engineering 18, and the MA programmes 90 between liberal arts and development studies.

Two small programmes publish their own matrices instead. The BS in Biomedical Science and Engineering offers 20 seats, split as 8 OPEN including 1 for PwD, 2 GEN-EWS, 5 OBC-NCL, 3 SC and 2 ST, and the MBA offers 30, split as 12 open merit, 3 GEN-EWS, 8 OBC-NCL, 5 SC and 2 ST.

Undergraduate intake is not published branch by branch, but the institute-wide sanction is, and the two levels have moved in opposite directions. The sanctioned four-year undergraduate intake held at 1,008 in both 2023-24 and 2022-23, having been 902 in 2021-22 and 978 in 2020-21; the two-year postgraduate sanction went the other way, down to 795 in 2023-24 from 993 in 2022-23. Roughly a fifth of the master's sanction went in one year while the school-leaver intake stayed put, which is why an offer here reads differently to a GATE candidate than to a Class 12 one, and why the matrix above rewards a close reading before you rank specialisations.

The rank held still for years while the parameter scores underneath it moved a great deal, and then the rank moved too.

The score went up and the rank went down, which is the whole story of 2025. IIT Guwahati scored 72.24 and IIT Hyderabad 72.31, a difference of well under a tenth of a point, and that was enough to end a streak the institute had been counting publicly: it retained seventh position for a ninth consecutive year in India Rankings 2024. Nothing collapsed. The field above it simply improved faster.

The other two tables put the same institute in a different light. It ranks 10th in the NIRF 2025 research table on a score of 64.18, with quantity of research at 71.16, quality at 64.19 and sustained funding at 66.70, and 11th overall on 67.67, where graduation outcomes reach 82.12.

Read the three tables side by side and the same parameter sits lowest in every one. Perception comes in at 52.06 in engineering, 43.52 overall and 39.63 in research, while graduation outcomes clear 82 in two of the three tables. Nothing in the teaching or the research output accounts for that spread. Perception measures how recruiters and academic peers rate a name attached to a campus 20 km outside Guwahati on the far bank of the Brahmaputra, a long way from where those opinions get formed, and a candidate weighing an offer inherits that lag rather than causing it.

International placings are the institute's own to report and it does. It records overall rank 334 in the QS World University Rankings 2026, and entry into the top 100 young universities of the world under 50 years of age in 2014.

Most of the teaching sits in eleven departments, and it is worth seeing which of them a school leaver can actually be allotted to, because two of the eleven admit no B.Tech student at all.

Design holding full departmental rank is the row most applicants skim past. It is not a service unit attached to engineering, and it runs an M.Des of its own alongside the B.Des.

The schools admit students under their own names, and between them they cover the areas the departmental list does not. The Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence runs a B.Tech, the School of Energy Sciences and Engineering runs a B.Tech in energy engineering and an MS(R), the Jyoti and Bhupat Mehta School of Health Sciences and Technology runs the BS in biomedical science and engineering plus two M.Tech specialisations, the School of Business runs the MBA, and the School of Agro and Rural Technology runs an M.Tech in rural technology.

One master's line is a joint degree with a partner abroad rather than a domestic programme. The M.Tech in Food Science and Technology is an international joint degree programme of IIT Guwahati and Gifu University, Japan, and it is the smallest block in the postgraduate matrix at five seats.

The teaching estate is large and it is documented in square metres rather than adjectives. The Academic Complex covers 74,000 square metres and houses the departments, centres, laboratories and classrooms; a lecture hall complex holds four halls seating 250 each, alongside an auditorium of 1,500 capacity, a mini-auditorium and a conference complex with four conference halls.

Computing is the standout. The institute hosts two supercomputing facilities, PARAM-Kamrupa at 838 TF and PARAM Ishan at 250 TF, used for weather and climate forecasting, bioinformatics, computational chemistry, molecular dynamics, artificial intelligence and data science. The Computer and Communication Centre stays open almost round the clock, and the campus network runs on a gigabit ethernet backbone with access points in every hostel room.

The Lakshminath Bezbaroa Central Library is housed in a four-storey building of about 7,500 square metres, with its in-house services fully computerised and wi-fi through the building for the institute's electronic resources.

Sport and health are provided at a scale that suits a residential campus 20 km from town. The sports complex has an indoor stadium with synthetic badminton, table tennis and squash courts, a gymnasium, an eight-lane 50 metre swimming pool and flood-lit fields for the major outdoor games; the campus also carries a hospital with 30 beds, a commercial complex, a food court, three community halls and two activity centres.

Equipment spending backs that up. In 2023-24 the institute spent Rs 50,84,54,775 on new equipment and software for laboratories and Rs 13,57,65,692 on library books, journals and e-resources.

Residence here is single-occupancy, which is the detail most likely to decide between two offers for a student who has never shared a room. There are eleven men's hostels and two women's hostels, all with individual single-seater rooms, each hostel carrying its own mess, canteen, stationery shop, juice centre, pantry, indoor games, gymnasium, music room, library, TV room and laundry, with high-speed LAN in every room, and the institute states that all its students have been provided with hostel rooms on campus.

There is no separate hostel invoice to plan for, because the residential lines are printed inside the same semester schedule as the academic ones. A hosteller pays a hostel fund of Rs 2,200, hostel rent of Rs 2,000, a maintenance charge of Rs 3,500, electricity and water of Rs 3,500 and an adjustable mess advance of Rs 21,250 every semester, on top of a one-time hostel admission and establishment fee of Rs 2,900 and refundable hostel caution money of Rs 4,000 paid at admission. The word doing the work there is adjustable: the mess advance settles against what a student actually eats over the semester, so the figure printed is an opening balance and not the final charge.

Rooms are allotted before arrival, not on arrival. The allotment for new undergraduates was published with roll numbers ahead of reporting, and the institute committed to allotting rooms to all of them by 18 July 2026. Married student flatlets and two guest houses for visiting parents sit on the same campus, and parents can request guest house accommodation subject to availability.

The submission for India Rankings 2025 counted 460 faculty members at IIT Guwahati. Alongside them sits a doctoral population unusually large for an institute of this size: 2,146 full-time and 174 part-time PhD students were on the roll, and full-time doctorates awarded ran 195 in 2021-22, 240 in 2022-23 and 241 in 2023-24.

Divide that doctoral roll by that faculty count and a PhD applicant has the number that matters more than any departmental headcount. Groups here are full, and the annual doctorate output has already flattened at the top of its range, so the question to put to a prospective supervisor is how many scholars they are carrying right now and when the next one is due to submit.

Externally funded work is substantial and steady rather than growing. Sponsored research ran to 348 projects from 74 funding agencies worth Rs 1,30,90,86,996 in 2023-24, against 326 projects worth Rs 1,44,10,08,219 in 2022-23 and 304 projects worth Rs 1,39,88,00,000 in 2021-22. Consultancy has moved differently, and the count and the cash tell different stories. Projects rose from 193 to 278 to 366 and client organisations from 155 to 244 to 336 across those same three years, while the money peaked in the middle year at Rs 35,03,93,610 and came in at Rs 30,51,68,068 in 2023-24. More companies are commissioning this faculty in smaller pieces, which is the pattern that puts short applied briefs within reach of a master's project.

The institute maintains a formal award record rather than an informal list, which is the version worth quoting. Its recent alumni awardees include Mr Jaspreet Singh, Distinguished Alumni Award 2025; Mr Himanshu Upreti, Young Alumni Achiever Award 2025; Prof. Prateek Mittal, Distinguished Alumni Award 2024; Mr Saurabh Nangia and Mr Aayush Thakur, Young Alumni Achiever Awards 2024; and Mr Mohit Bansal, Outstanding Service Award 2023.

The award record is short because the practice is recent, not because the network is. The Alumni Relations office is currently inviting nominations for the Alumni Awards 2026, so the citation list is still being built out. For a prospective student the useful question is not who has been honoured but where this campus actually places its graduates, and the department you are joining can answer that from its own recent cohorts rather than from a roll of famous names assembled somewhere else.

Research coming out of this campus keeps landing on problems the Brahmaputra valley actually has. In February 2026 the institute reported an electrocoagulation system, developed under Prof. Mihir Kumar Purkait of the Department of Chemical Engineering, that removes 99 per cent of arsenic from contaminated groundwater using a rotating iron anode and a stationary cathode, treating one cubic metre of water on about 0.36 units of electricity. Arsenic in groundwater is a live public health problem across the state, and a low-power treatment method is the kind of output that justifies putting a national institute here.

The rest of the 2026 press record runs in the same direction. Announcements over the year covered a low-cost water treatment technology for arsenic and fluoride in August 2026, research on blue-green algae removing lead from water in July 2026, an M.Tech degree programme in Flood and Water Resources Management opened for applications in June 2026, and two decades of RuTAG at the institute marked in April 2026.

International tie-ups have been the other constant. The same record lists a letter of intent signed at an Indo-Japan symposium in March 2026 on North East region collaboration, a strategic partnership with Japan on research and student mobility, and a memorandum of understanding with the Coventry University Group in the United Kingdom on artificial intelligence and healthcare.

The NIRF 2025 engineering table carries IIT Guwahati at rank 8 and NIT Silchar at rank 50, and the distance between those two Assam campuses is the largest single fact about engineering education in the region.

IIT Guwahati leads on every parameter, but the size of the lead varies enormously, and that variation is the useful part. On teaching, learning and resources the two campuses are close, 73.60 against 66.60. On perception, the parameter that tracks what recruiters and academic peers think, it is 52.06 against 9.92, the widest gap anywhere in that comparison. A student choosing between the two is not mainly buying a better classroom; they are buying the name that follows them out of it.

Beyond engineering the field thins out fast. IIT Guwahati is the only North East institution in the NIRF 2025 research table at all. The overall table admits two more from Assam, Gauhati University at rank 52 and NIT Silchar at 97, against IIT Guwahati at 11. For a student who wants to stay in the region and cannot get a seat here, the honest position is that the next option is a long way down the same list.

The postal address is Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati 781039, Assam, India, on +91-361-2583000. Which office to write to depends entirely on what you want, and the institute keeps them separate.

Getting there needs a moment's planning that a city address would not. The campus is on the north bank of the Brahmaputra, roughly 20 km from the heart of Guwahati, so the river sits between the institute and the railway station, the airport and most of the city. Budget for the crossing when planning a reporting day or a parent's visit, and book the guest house rather than assuming a same-day return.

At a glance

Quick facts