Two things to consider together: - India has 23 IITs — all autonomous, with their own priorities, and they rarely work together. - Bengaluru has around 50,000 IIT graduates and no IIT. Now, a group of IIT alumni are attempting to change that at 'IIT Alumni Centre Bengaluru' (IITACB) in Bommasandra, on the far edge of Bengaluru. IITACB is a common ground for all 23 IITs. It is different from the usual models where a research park is owned by the campus that builds it. This one belongs to all. Each IIT has paid in to use it. - The oldest IITs, Rs 1 crore each - The second-generation institutes, Rs 50 lakh - The newer ones, Rs 25 lakh In return, each holds a space in the building and access to all of it. What it creates is a single door. A ministry or a company cannot knock on 23 campuses to find the right laboratory while seeking solutions. So, IITACB puts the request to all of them. "Whoever raises their hand first, that project goes there," says Ashok Misra, its president and a former director of IIT Bombay. Things are already up and running. Its accelerator picks 10 AI startups: - gives each Rs 10 lakh - takes no equity - leaves intellectual property with founders - runs 16 weeks of mentoring at 90 mins a week - the best can get up to Rs 1 crore after And because an algorithm is useless without the data to train it on, in August IITACB also built Tathyakosh — an open catalogue of more than 1.5 million datasets from 458 repositories, rated for quality and given away free. -------------------- But the problems the old hands keep returning to are heavier. - China supplied about 90 per cent of India's imports of metal permanent magnets in 2024-25, and fixing that needs metallurgy, materials, manufacturing and machine learning in one room, which is more than any single campus holds. - Ramesh Rao Nidambur, an alumnus who spent his career on welding and fabrication for defence, nuclear, and aerospace work, worries that the country has grown so enchanted with software that it has forgotten who makes things. - Dr Shyam S Rao, a metallurgist from IIT Bombay class of 1985, says Atmanirbharta cannot end with assembly, because the core knowledge stays with somebody else. -------------------- Most of these alumni are in their seventies and eighties. None of them draws a salary, and Ashok Kamath, who runs it as secretary, calls the work a debt of honour. Raj Varadarajan is 83. IIT Madras, mechanical engineering, 1966. He tells one story to show how difficult it was to start the habit of giving back. In the 1980s, IIT alumni in America put in $500 each, raised $25,000, and bought 13 personal computers, one for every hostel at their old institute. Two years later the machines were still stuck in customs. The director of the day wanted to know why the alumni were troubling him, since now he would have to house the computers and cool the rooms they were kept in. The institutes have travelled far since. In 2023-24, IIT Madras and its associated entities raised Rs 513 crore. Rs 367 crore of that came from alumni alone, and the habit of giving has taken hold. -------------------- Against 50,000 alumni in the city, the Centre has about 300 members, and a floor of desks paid for by the institutes sits largely empty. The ambition at IITACB is that instead of Indian projects going to universities overseas, they should go to the IITs. @astrokaran writes this feature after he spent a morning at the Centre. He reports what these veterans are betting they can do in the next five years, and why one founder there thinks the air conditioner has been the wrong machine for a century. Read below. swarajyamag.com/technology/t…