National Institute Of Technology, Karnataka

National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal is the same institute that search results label NITK, NIT Karnataka and NITK Surathkal, and it is the unusual case of a centrally funded engineering school built on a beach, its campus running down to the Arabian Sea on National Highway 66 north of Mangalore. A B.Tech seat here is decided by a JEE Main rank fed through JoSAA counselling and divided between a Karnataka home-state pool and an all-India pool, so the fee, the branch closing rank and the placement median are the three things worth pinning down before you list it on a preference order. Every number below is tied to the institute's own filings, the NIRF 2025 tables or the JoSAA record you can open yourself.

The institute dates its founding to 6 August 1960, when the foundation stone for Karnataka Regional Engineering College was laid as a joint venture of the central and state governments, and generations of alumni still call it KREC and its campus Srinivasnagar after those years. Its coastal setting is the part no other engineering school in the country quite shares: the 295.35-acre campus sits on National Highway 66 about 22 kilometres north of Mangalore, with a private beach and a lighthouse on the Arabian Sea shore inside its own boundary. Surathkal became a National Institute of Technology in 2002, and a subsequent Act of Parliament gave every NIT the standing of an Institute of National Importance, which is the legal status its degrees carry today.

The teaching population is large and heavily postgraduate. NITK's own NIRF 2025 data return records 3987 undergraduates and 1514 postgraduates on the rolls, with a further 647 full-time doctoral researchers, which is why a place at Surathkal reads as much like a research campus as an undergraduate college once you are inside the gate.

The four-year B.Tech is the degree most applicants are chasing, taught across the core and computing branches, and it sits beside a wide M.Tech and M.Tech (Research) spread, an MCA, an MBA run by the management school, integrated and two-year M.Sc programmes and a large PhD cohort. Unlike several of the older NITs, NITK runs no B.Arch programme, so the JEE Main Paper 2 architecture route plays no part in its admissions.

Tuition is the single fee students ask about first, and it is fixed across the NIT system rather than set by the campus. A B.Tech student pays Rs 62,500 a semester in tuition, which works out to about Rs 5 lakh over the eight semesters of the degree. Adding the hostel rent and mess charges pushes the running cost of a semester higher, and one widely used aggregate puts a general-category hosteller's all-in semester bill near Rs 87,500 once roughly Rs 10,000 of hostel rent and Rs 15,000 of mess are counted on top of tuition.

That headline overstates what many households actually pay. Under the institute's own fee circular, Open, EWS and OBC students whose family income falls below one lakh rupees a year owe no tuition at all, those in the one-to-five lakh band pay only a third of it, and SC, ST and PwD students are exempt from tuition entirely, so the real bill turns on category and declared income far more than on the sticker figure.

There is one door into the B.Tech, and it is JEE Main. A candidate sits the National Testing Agency's exam, converts the score into an All India Rank, and enters that rank into the Joint Seat Allocation Authority, which allots NITK's seats in the same counselling that fills the IITs, the other NITs, the IIITs and the government-funded technical institutes. NITK holds no admission test of its own and has no role for JEE Advanced, and seats still vacant when JoSAA closes roll into the CSAB special rounds. A student who wants NITK is really deciding where to place its branches on a single ordered choice list.

The Karnataka connection from its KREC founding survives in the seat pool. Like every NIT, Surathkal halves each branch into a Karnataka home-state quota and an all-India quota, and because the two groups are ranked only against themselves, a Karnataka candidate and an out-of-state one meet different bars for one and the same seat. Inside each pool the standard central reservations apply, and a separate tranche of supernumerary seats is filled only by women applicants. Postgraduate entry runs on separate national tests, a GATE score through CCMT for the M.Tech, CAT for the MBA and IIT JAM or CCMN for the M.Sc, while doctoral admission is decided on the institute's own written test and interview.

A NITK cutoff is not a bar published in advance; it is simply the rank of the last candidate an allotment round reaches, and here that number splits cleanly along the home-state line. In JoSAA 2025's first round, general-category Computer Science and Engineering closed at an All India Rank of about 2726 for Karnataka home-state candidates and 1528 for other-state applicants, so the state quota is the softer of the two pools for the flagship branch. The full round-one picture, general-category and gender-neutral, is below.

Two things follow from those numbers. The gap between computing and the founding core branches is wide, with mining and metallurgy admitting tens of thousands of ranks below CSE, which is exactly where a core-minded applicant finds a realistic Surathkal seat. And a round-one figure is only the tightest reading of the year, since closing ranks loosen as candidates upgrade and withdraw through the later JoSAA and CSAB rounds, so the number to act on is the one against your own category and quota on the current-year counselling board.

The honest anchor for placements is the median, not the top offer. NITK's NIRF 2025 return records a B.Tech median salary of Rs 14 lakh for the 2023-24 graduating class, with 756 of its 986 qualifying graduates placed and another 114 leaving for higher study, a median the placement aggregators also report for the most recent drive. On the postgraduate side the same return puts the two-year master's median at Rs 10 lakh and shows 550 of 665 qualifying students placed.

The 2024-25 season, reported through the Career Development Centre and the listing aggregators, ran busier at the top of the table. The B.Tech median held at Rs 14 lakh while the average climbed to Rs 17.48 LPA and the highest domestic B.Tech offer reached Rs 63.3 LPA, with the M.Tech high at Rs 55.57 lakh. Recruiters clustered around software and product companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, Adobe and Qualcomm alongside the core and hardware firms.

The distance between that Rs 14 lakh median and the Rs 63.3 LPA peak is the whole story of a Surathkal placement season: a strong middle, pulled up at the tail by a handful of software offers, and softer in the core mechanical, metallurgy and mining branches that give the campus its character.

How many seats each branch holds, and how they break down by category, is fixed afresh in the JoSAA seat matrix every admission cycle, so the count is only reliable at the moment the counselling authority publishes it. Half of every branch is ring-fenced for Karnataka domiciles and half is open to the country, with the central category quotas and the women-only seats applied within that split. For scale, the NIRF 2025 return records a sanctioned undergraduate intake of 740 across the B.Tech branches and 579 across the two-year master's programmes, and the per-branch breakdown lives on the live JoSAA matrix at choice-filling time.

NITK is a consistent presence near the top of the NIT block without leading it. In the NIRF 2025 engineering ranking it holds 17th place in the country on a score of 64.59, which puts it third among the National Institutes of Technology, behind NIT Tiruchirappalli and NIT Rourkela. Across every kind of institution it sits 54th on the overall table with a score of 55.21.

Broken into its five NIRF pillars, that engineering score takes a lopsided shape. Graduation outcomes and teaching resources hold the total up, while the perception score sits well below them, the mark of a campus whose student results run ahead of its national name recognition.

Teaching is organised into fourteen departments plus a management school, and the department list carries the coastal identity in a way most engineering schools cannot. Water Resources and Ocean Engineering is a full department here, a rarity that follows directly from the campus sitting on the sea, and it stands beside the older heavy-industry strengths of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering and Mining Engineering. Around those sit the computing cluster of computer science and engineering, information technology and electronics and communication, the branches that draw NITK's tightest cutoffs. The classical core of electrical and electronics, mechanical, civil and chemical engineering fills out the rest, taught beside the science departments of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematical and Computational Sciences, the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Management, and a newer Department of Design and Entrepreneurship. Because the whole degree is spent inside one of them, the department you land in shapes your Surathkal far more than the shared institute name does.

The campus is a self-contained residential township rather than a set of blocks on a city road, and its landmark is the shoreline. Inside the boundary sit a private beach and a lighthouse on the Arabian Sea, an unusual backdrop for laboratories and lecture halls. The Central Library runs to a floor area of 2,758 square metres with three reading halls seating 600 students between them, and departmental and central research laboratories, workshops and sports grounds fill out the academic core. Campus life turns on two long-running festivals, the technical symposium Engineer, first held in 2005, and the cultural festival Incident, running since 1980, both large enough to draw students from well beyond Karnataka.

Almost the entire student body lives on the seafront campus, in hostel blocks assigned by the institute's hostel office once a JoSAA seat is confirmed, not as part of the allotment itself. Room rent and the mess deposit are charged on top of tuition and are revised each year, and because the mess runs on a deposit-and-adjust basis rather than a flat annual fee, the figure worth quoting is the current one on the hostel office's own pages.

NITK does not put out one consolidated count of its teaching staff, so the number you see quoted swings from page to page; the dependable source is the roster each department keeps, read by rank and by named subject. What the official data does show is how research-weighted the place has become: the NIRF 2025 return counts 647 full-time doctoral researchers alongside the undergraduate classes, so most teachers here supervise theses as well as lecture. The heaviest-publishing groups sit in ocean and water-resources engineering, in metallurgy and materials, and in the computing departments, and their output is what lifts the institute's research and graduation-outcome pillars in the NIRF score. A branch decision is really a department decision, so the roster that matters is the one on that specific department's page.

The KREC and NITK years have produced alumni whose records are publicly documented, and they cluster in finance, science and academia rather than entertainment. The best known is K. V. Kamath, the former chairman of ICICI Bank and of Infosys who went on to head the BRICS-founded New Development Bank. Alongside him the campus counts the wildlife biologist K. Ullas Karanth, long associated with the Wildlife Conservation Society's India programme, Sunil Kumar, who became provost of Johns Hopkins University, and Pramod Viswanath, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton. We name only alumni whose association with the institute is traceable in reliable records and stop there.

NITK posts its own fee circulars, JoSAA and CSAB counselling notices, the seat matrix and the Career Development Centre's placement reports on its website across the year, and those are the versions that actually bind. Nothing time-stamped is reproduced on this page on purpose, because a fee line or a deadline copied onto a secondhand listing is the kind of detail that goes wrong within months.

On the NIRF 2025 engineering table NITK sits at 17, third among the NITs after Tiruchirappalli and Rourkela, and the choice against those two usually comes down to fit rather than rank. What Surathkal offers that neither of them does is the coastal setting and a full ocean and water-resources engineering department, alongside the Karnataka home-state pool that makes its flagship branches more reachable for a state domicile than for an outsider. Set beside an IIT, the question is narrower than the rank gap suggests: an IIT seat is gated behind JEE Advanced, whereas NITK is reachable on the JEE Main rank alone, and on the softer home-state pool for a Karnataka student, so the honest deciding factor is whether the exact branch you want runs deeper here or at the IIT you could reach.

The institute is at Srinivasnagar, Surathkal, on the coastal highway north of Mangalore in the Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka. The details below are the ones to use for any binding query on fees, seats or documents.

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