IIT Madras 2024 round-up: Advancing research & academic frontiers

IIT Madras witnessed many historic achievements during 2024. Establishing a record that has not been witnessed in Indian education history, IIT Madras retained its No 1 ranking in the ‘Overall’ category for the Sixth Consecutive Year and in ‘Engineering’ Category for the Ninth Consecutive Year, right from the first edition of the Rankings in 2016. The institute also improved its position in QS World University Rankings (QS WUR) from 285 last year to 227 in QS WUR 2025.

Further, among the numerous firsts for the institute, IIT Madras became the first-ever IIT in the country to introduce admissions for sportspersons in its undergraduate programmes. The institute introduced the ‘Sports Excellence Admission’ (SEA) from the academic year 2024-2025, under which it offers two supernumerary seats, of which one will be exclusively for female students, in each of its undergraduate programs for Indian Nationals.

IIT Madras also became the first IIT in the country to introduce ‘Fine Arts and Culture Excellence’ (FACE) Admission to undergraduate programmes from the academic year 2025-26. The objective of FACE admission is to reward and encourage students who have achieved excellence in fine arts and culture.

“Looking forward, 2025 is going to be a year of a lot of expectations and challenges. One of the biggest challenges that we have put in front of us is ‘Startup Shatam’ where we are looking at incubating 100 startups. We are also going to host the Pan-IIT, NIT, and top NIRF institutions in an invention fair called ‘IInvenTiv-2025’ in which these institutions will showcase some of their prominent inventions that could serve the society at large,” said Prof V Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras.