Indian Institute Of Technology, Patna

IIT Patna is one of the second-generation IITs, set up in 2008, and it is the only Indian Institute of Technology in Bihar. In the 2025 National Institutional Ranking Framework it sits 36th overall and 19th among the country's engineering institutions, which places it in the middle of the IIT pack rather than at its head. Its permanent home is at Bihta, on the western edge of Patna, and every seat in its flagship B.Tech is filled through JEE Advanced and the JoSAA counselling that follows. What a candidate weighing it should understand first is that a mid-table IIT rank tends to mean more reachable closing ranks than the founding institutes, paired with the same statutory standing and the same national placement pipeline.

The institute is an Institute of National Importance, the statutory status the IIT Act confers on every one of the 23 IITs, so its degrees, its autonomy and its governance sit on the same legal footing as the older campuses. Teaching is organised into three schools, a School of Engineering, a School of Basic Sciences and a School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the institute carries the Sanskrit motto "One who aspires wisdom, attains it." Research infrastructure is a visible part of its identity for a campus this young: it runs the Aryabhatta Supercomputing Centre, home to the PARAM Rudra machine commissioned under the National Supercomputing Mission and the first supercomputer installed anywhere in Bihar. For a Bihar student, the practical significance is that a top-tier central technical institute now exists inside the state rather than only in Delhi, Kanpur or Kharagpur.

The core of the institute is its four-year B.Tech, backed by a two-year M.Tech, M.Sc and M.A programmes, and a large doctoral cohort; it does not run a B.Arch. Alongside these classic degrees, IIT Patna has recently opened newer, self-financed programmes on its own admissions portal, including a BS in AI and Computing, a BBA and an MBA, which sit apart from the JEE Advanced route and admit on the institute's own terms.

Undergraduate teaching is where most applicants start, and the fee that matters is tuition, which the government fixes at the same level across the IITs. The figures below are from the institute's own published B.Tech fee structure.

Two rules do most of the work in that table. Tuition of ₹1,00,000 a semester is the only large line, and a SC, ST or PwD student pays none of it. On top of that waiver, the institute remits tuition on family income: a student whose family earns below ₹1 lakh a year has the tuition fully remitted, and one whose family earns between ₹1 lakh and ₹5 lakh has two-thirds of it remitted. Hostellers pay mess charges separately on an advance basis, and because the published structure is a standing document, the binding number for any given year is the fee circular attached to that admission cycle.

The flagship B.Tech admits through one route only, and it is worth stating plainly because the search around it is full of shortcuts that do not exist. A candidate clears JEE Main, then qualifies in JEE Advanced, and is allotted a seat through the Joint Seat Allocation Authority, which pools the IITs, NITs and IIITs into a single preference-and-rank round. There is no institute-level B.Tech entrance at Patna, no CUET route into the B.Tech, and no direct or management path in; the JEE Advanced rank a student carries into JoSAA is the whole of it.

The graduate and doctoral programmes each admit on their own terms. A master's applicant needs a valid GATE score and applies to IIT Patna directly; the offer, when it lands, is settled through COAP, the acceptance portal the IITs share so a candidate juggling several IIT offers resolves them in one place, with the NIT-and-IIIT counselling of CCMT playing no part. The M.Sc streams take the IIT JAM route instead, and a PhD hopeful writes to a department and is shortlisted for its own written test or interview rather than allotted from any central pool. Set against all of that, the BS, BBA and MBA programmes on the institute's continuing-education portal are the single door into IIT Patna that never touches JEE or GATE, each admitting on eligibility the institute fixes for itself.

IIT Patna does not set or publish a cutoff of its own, so the number a student should chase is a JoSAA closing rank, produced round by round once counselling opens and different for every branch, category and quota. Those ranks are not fixed marks; they move each year with how many higher-ranked candidates place Patna above their other options, which for a rising campus tends to tighten them slowly over time.

The internal order is the useful part to plan against. Computer Science and Engineering closes at the sharpest ranks here, the electrical and allied circuit branches sit next, and the core engineering branches such as civil, mechanical and metallurgical close at the most forgiving ranks on the list. Because the institute ranks 19th in engineering rather than in the top handful, its closing ranks generally reach further down the JEE Advanced order than an older IIT's, which is precisely why it is a realistic target for a strong-but-not-exceptional rank. The honest way to use last year's closing rank is as the middle of a range for your branch and category, read for the counselling round you expect to be called in, never as a guaranteed line.

The figure worth trusting on placements is the median salary the institute reports to the national ranking framework, because a median describes the graduate in the middle of the class rather than the single largest offer a press release quotes. The three most recent undergraduate batches, as submitted to NIRF, are set out below.

Read across those rows rather than at any one of them. The 2023-24 undergraduate median of ₹22,50,000, with 320 of 335 graduates placed, was the strongest of the three years, while the dip to ₹17,00,000 in the middle year is the sort of swing a smaller graduating class produces and a reason to weigh the trend, not a single number. Postgraduate outcomes ran higher at the top: the 2023-24 master's batch reported a median of ₹28,00,000 with 120 of 130 graduates placed. None of this is a promise for an individual student, whose offer turns on branch and performance, but a median in the low twenties of lakhs at a mid-table IIT is a solid, verifiable outcome to plan against.

The number of B.Tech seats is set each year as a sanctioned intake, and it has climbed sharply as the campus has matured. The institute's NIRF submission records the recent undergraduate trajectory.

Postgraduate intake sat at 186 sanctioned two-year seats in 2023-24. That total is only the ceiling: the branch-by-branch split, the gender-neutral and female-only pools, and the reservation categories are all fixed inside each year's JoSAA seat matrix rather than in any figure the institute publishes ahead of counselling, so a student should read the current seat-matrix notification for the exact seats in their target branch.

IIT Patna's national standing is genuinely three-sided, and the engineering and research tables tell a better story about it than the overall one. Its placements across the 2025 frameworks are set out below.

The 19th place in engineering is the number that matters most to a B.Tech aspirant, because it is the table that ranks the institute against the peers a student is actually choosing between. The 39th place for research is the more striking one for its age: a campus that admitted its first students in 2008 already sitting inside the country's top forty for research output says the doctoral and sponsored-project base has scaled quickly. The 36th overall standing, which blends in perception and reach where a young regional institute is naturally weaker, sits a little below both.

IIT Patna groups its teaching into three schools rather than a long roster of standalone departments. Engineering is the largest school, and the six departments inside it are the ones a B.Tech applicant actually ranks in JoSAA: Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the competitive end, then Mechanical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, and Metallurgical and Materials Engineering. Basic sciences are handled by Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics, while a single Humanities and Social Sciences department supplies the economics, English and liberal-arts teaching the technical degrees draw on. The catalogue is deliberately tight for an IIT, so an undergraduate here chooses among a small set of established core branches instead of a sprawling menu of options.

The permanent campus at Bihta is a self-contained residential township on the western outskirts of Patna, a shift from the temporary premises in the city where the institute began. Its research facilities are the standout, and unusually advanced for the campus's age. The Aryabhatta Supercomputing Centre runs the PARAM Rudra machine under the National Supercomputing Mission, putting genuine high-performance computing on campus for work that ranges from computational science to materials design. Around it sit the departmental laboratories, a central library, hostels and sports grounds that make the campus a place a student lives on through the week rather than commutes to.

IIT Patna is a fully residential institute, so a B.Tech student is expected to live in a hostel on the Bihta campus for the duration of the degree, and the hostel and mess charges are billed alongside the academic fee rather than as an optional extra. Mess charges are collected separately on an advance basis each semester. Because hostel rooms, mess arrangements and their exact charges are set by the hostel administration and revised from time to time, the current cost and allotment rules are best confirmed from the institute directly at admission.

Behind those rankings sits a teaching staff the institute puts at 264 in its 2025 NIRF submission, a body that has had to expand as the B.Tech intake climbed through the early 2020s, with almost every post filled by a doctorate-holder and most on regular full-time rather than contract or visiting terms. Research is where those numbers turn into something a student can join, because doctoral study is a large part of the campus, with 636 full-time PhD scholars. The funded work behind the research ranking is real and recent: the institute ran 100 sponsored research projects backed by 51 funding agencies in 2023-24, a concentration of grant-funded work that makes joining a research group as an undergraduate a genuine option rather than a rarity.

With its first students admitted in 2008 and the earliest B.Tech degrees awarded around 2012, IIT Patna has behind it only a little more than a decade of graduates. That is too short a history to have produced the widely recognised public names that fill an older IIT's alumni page, and no dependable, verifiable roster of such figures exists to reproduce. Padding the section with people whose tie to the institute cannot be checked would be worse than leaving it honest and thin. The real signal of where a Patna degree leads is the placement and higher-study record above; for the fuller trail, the institute's own alumni association keeps the authoritative account of where its graduates have gone.

IIT Patna is located at Bihta, in the Patna district of Bihar, on the western side of the city. Its official website, iitp.ac.in, carries the full postal address, the department and admission-office contacts, and the current admission notices, and it is the authoritative place to confirm any date or fee before acting on it.

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