How Asia’s oldest engineering college, IIT Roorkee, is staying ahead of the curve

One of the most striking aspects of the department of hydro and renewable energy at IIT Roorkee is a real-time digital simulator for hydropower plants. It responds in real time, just like a hydropower plant, and uses training consoles and controls identical to those used for day-to-day operations—so, the simulated environment and real-time system share the same look and feel.

The simulator was sponsored by the ministry of new and renewable energy and is a vital addition to the department because hydropower plant engineers need training to develop a feel for the dynamic behaviour of a plant under normal and abnormal conditions. They also need to make decisions under abnormal operating conditions to avoid damage to the plant. The department also has a facility for real-time testing of turbines in real conditions. Tests are conducted on scaled models on scaled hydraulic conditions.

The BTech course started last year and Vatsal Jain, who hails from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, is one of the engineers in the making. He said it was dynamic and has “parts of electrical engineering and chemical engineering, as energy can be generated trough different sources”. Jain's long-term vision is to become an entrepreneur in the energy field.

IIT Roorkee, which started as Roorkee College in 1847, was the first engineering college in Asia. It was rechristened the Thomason College of Civil Engineering in 1854 after James Thomason, the East India Company’s lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces, who had died in 1853. After about a century, the college was elevated to the University of Roorkee, the first engineering university of independent India, on November 25, 1949, and to an IIT on September 21, 2001.

IIT Roorkee has played a pivotal role in advancing India's technological landscape, fostering industrial growth and shaping policies in infrastructure, water resources, energy and sustainability. It now has 23 academic departments covering engineering, architecture and planning, humanities and social sciences, and management. It also offers 55 postgraduate programmes at the doctoral level. Apart from Roorkee, it has campuses at Saharanpur and Greater Noida.

The civil engineering department, the oldest department and the British motivation to start such a college (to train officers and surveyors to be employed in the construction of the Ganges Canal near Roorkee), has produced several eminent engineers. There are multiple areas of specialisation—environmental, geospatial, geotechnical, hydraulic, structures and transportation engineering. Currently, there are 56 faculty members and close to 11,000 students, including overseas citizens, across BTech, MTech and PhD programmes.

Prof Narendra Kumar Samadhiya, head of department, civil engineering, organised a comprehensive session for THE WEEK that had faculty members explaining their specialisations and projects they undertook in recent times. “We have MoUs with reputed organisations across the country and abroad, like ISRO, the Indian Railways, BHEL, CSIR and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in the US,” said Samadhiya. “We have done some unique projects. Geospatial engineering did time-lapse camera imaging to track Himalayan glaciers in Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh and mapped glacial lakes in the Himalayas using satellite remote sensing. There is an ongoing project with the transport ministry and we are in the process of developing guidelines for instrumentation and real-time monitoring of hill slopes in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh. This will last till 2029 and will use satellite-based observations, drone-based periodic monitoring, sensor-based sub-surface monitoring and camera-based real-time AI system.” IIT Roorkee also has collaborations with institutes in Singapore, Norway, Canada, the UK, France and Taiwan.   

The institute’s Technology Incubation and Entrepreneurship Development Society runs an incubator—Technology Innovation and Development of Entrepreneurship Support. IIT Roorkee is also providing an end-to-end support ecosystem, offering mentorship, IPR and legal assistance, investor networking, access to cutting-edge labs, regulatory guidance and market entry strategies. It also has partnerships with leading venture capital firms, angel investors and corporate accelerators, enabling startups to secure funding and expand their operations. Notably, startups incubated at IIT Roorke raised around Rs1,050 crore in follow-on funding, demonstrating their market potential and scalability. They have also created more than 3,000 jobs in emerging technology sectors.

Prof K.K. Pant, director, IIT Roorkee, said that because Uttarakhand has many issues like landslides, glaciers, cloud bursts and earthquakes, the institute has departments such as earth sciences and engineering, hydrology, water resource and management.

“We also have an international centre for dam safety aiming at rehabilitating dams,” said Pant. “Every course has an AI component. Our research is multidisciplinary and we give students value in terms of the connect of branches of engineering, science, technology, management and economics. Societal and community acceptance of technology is important—technology may be good from a business point of view, but acceptance from the carbon footprint point of view is also very important.”

Pant said that there is an effort to ensure that the research benefits the goals of Viksit Bharat. He emphasised the work of the earthquake engineering department. “We have developed sensors that can give a 45-second early warning,” he said. “There is an app that uses this information to issue a warning. But, 45 seconds is not long enough and we are trying to extend it to around a minute.”

Prof Manish Shrikhande, HoD of earthquake engineering, gave THE WEEK a demo of how a structure, if built scientifically, can have earthquake-proof tendencies. For the same, a brick structure was pushed down a slope using a bogie-like mechanism. When it eventually crashed, it sustained the impact easily; not a single brick fell.

Pant said that the department of architecture and planning is working on the design of lightweight building material and soil testing to gauge the quality of land. He added that the institute is also working on semiconductor material design.

IIT Roorkee has an MoU with the DRDO and there are more than 100 projects already running on the campus, including anti-drone technologies. The institution has a centre for disaster management that focuses on data utilisation to minimise disasters, implement preventive measures and save lives. The civil engineering department, which has historically contributed to bridge and road construction, is currently researching new concrete materials, including those for carbon dioxide capture. IIT Roorkee provides training for officers of the Indian Army (on emerging technologies). It is looking at a green hydrogen centre of excellence and prioritising e-vehicles, with numerous startups exploring green energy. Research is on to extend the shelf life of fruit juice using bio-enzymes and there is a National Honey Centre.

IIT Roorkee updates its courses every three years, and introduces new ones based on industry needs.

The institution has forged strategic alliances with ministries. Besides establishing a centre of excellence and industry accelerator for e-mobility and automotive research with the ministry of heavy industries, it is conducting critical mineral research with the ministry of mines. The institute partners with the ministry of new and renewable energy via the National Institute of Solar Energy for solar energy research and education. With the ministry of earth sciences, it has conducted farmer workshops on climate change resilience. It contributes to the ministry of education’s Virtual Labs project. Additionally, it collaborates with the Bureau of Indian Standards to integrate standardisation education into curricula.