M. Tech Education from NIT's

National Institutes of Technology (NITs), are premier colleges of engineering and technology education in India. They were originally called Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs). In 2002, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, decided to upgrade, in phases, all the original 17 Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs) as National Institutes of Technology (NITs). There are currently 20 NITs, the latest being NIT, Agartala. The Government of India has introduced the National Institutes of Technology (NIT) Act 2007 to bring 20 such institutions within the ambit of the act and to provide them with complete autonomy in their functioning. The NITs are deliberately scattered throughout the country in line with the government norm of an NIT in every major state of India to promote regional development. The individual NITs, after the introduction of the NIT Act, have been functioning as autonomous technical universities and hence can draft their own curriculum and functioning policies.

The NIT brand is regarded very highly as one of the premier technical education institutes in India. Before getting the NIT status from MHRD, the RECs were under respective state governments control. Consequently, lesser funds and, at times, regional politics resulted in a lack of direction. But despite the problems, NITs have churned out quality graduates who can compete with the best. The student community has started seeing NITs as a quality alternative to IITs and as a result, NITs have some of the best students from all over India. Since REC days, students from these institutes have been achieving great success in their careers. Many of them have become entrepreneurs and have floated their own companies.

The reputation of NITs as centres of excellence has gained acceptance in industry as well as in academia, primarily because the standard of education and quality of NIT students has been consistently better than most other colleges in India. This has led to the establishment of a so-called brand name for the institutes. Various nationwide college surveys rate most of the NITs over other colleges in India, except for the IITs and a few other institutions, confirming the eliteness of NITs in the field of technical education. The NITs function autonomously, since their upgradation from being an REC, sharing only the entrance tests between them. The autonomy in education enable the NITs to set up their own curriculum, thereby making it easier to adapt rapidly to the changes in industry requirements.

The course schedules are divided into semesters with evaluation on the basis of the credits system, which allows for proportional weighting of subjects based on their importance. For each semester, the students are graded on a scale from 0 to 10 based on their performance throughout the semester. Each semester's evaluation is done independently and then the weighted overall average of all the semesters is used to evaluate the cumulative grade point average (CGPA).

The NITs, like the IITs, are also planning to start a special dual degree programs. It is an integrated postgraduate program that completes in a total of 5 years rather than 6 years in the conventional track of a BTech followed by an MTech degree. The dual degree programs encourage academic research, therefore, based on their success in the IITs, this integrated program is being introduced for various new courses in NITs, especially for mathematics and computing. Some NITs have recently started offering 'Research Scholar' programmes to encourage research oriented thinking in young minds. IIT Kanpur has recently started an undergraduate research scholar programme (10-week long summer program) for their own students as well as for all sophomore and prefinal year NIT students. It is part of a Quality Improvement Programme (QIP) and the IITs are doing a good job in improving the quality of staff in NITs under this programme.