Hello Lrp,

According to what I believe, IITs are superior than NITs being different in the following ways:

Global Recognition of Brand IITs:  IITs have always featured in the global chart of engineering colleges from India whereas NITs do not appear in the same list.

Better Student Quality in IITs: Higher cut-off marks during selection process at IITs draw better quality of students in IITs rather than NITs. Superior student intake results into excellent placement for IITians.

Better Faculty in IITs : IITs have one of the best engineering faculty in India. However IITs established recently, are undergoing a terrible shortage of faculty. IIT-Hyderabad has a requirement of 85 faculty members while it currently has 74 faculty members.

IIT-Bhubaneswar has total 50 faculty members against its requirement of 62 members. Owing to this serious concern, most IITs have already started aggressive communication campaigns across the country to reach out to post docs and graduate students of top universities worldwide. NITs have also been facing shortage of quality faculty for a while now.

Stronger Academic Collaboration in IITs : IITs undertake greater number of projects with esteemed institutions like ISRO, DRDO, BARC etc.  NITs research work is not at the same magnitude of IITs.

Better Infrastructure at IITs: IITs have better Infrastructure with spacious campus, good research labs etc. The popularity of IITs among Engineering aspirants is highly driven by its educational and college environment. The ambience of IITs campus is both inspiring and vibrating with perfectly planned and aligned layout for the whole campus, libraries, and hostels.

NITs are definitely second to IITs in terms of infrastructure. They also have great computing facilities.

Better Placements at IITs: Top Notch companies prefer IITians over NITians and also salaries offered are well differentiated. Going through last 5 years placement records of both, the average pay package offered to any IITian (B.Tech) is anywhere between Rs 43,750 and 48,000 monthly compared with average pay package offered to any student from NIT in (B.Tech) which is anywhere between Rs 40,000 and 42,000 monthly. However, there is a lot of variance among the salary packages depending on ability of candidates and academic performances.

Conclusion:

The Indian Institutes of Technology remain a top brand, but their standing as centres of excellence can no longer be stated as convincingly with inclusion of new IITs. The brand has also taken a hit with the increase in the number of IITs. There is a definite distinction between the “new” and “old” IITs.

The demographic dividend and our target of achieving 30% enrolment in higher education till 2020 implies that we should not have just some IITs in order to cash in on IIT brand name. The lack of domestic competition has resulted in depreciation in the output of the IITs both in terms of research output and overall grooming of the students. The core industry demands have remained low which has resulted in engineering students from IIT & NIT ending up as investment bankers and management consultants. The big packages that IITians bag every year is just one side of the story.

The other side of the story is the IITs enjoy media publicity images for the proliferation of entrepreneurs out of IITs. Overall, brand IIT, though still on a high pedestal, is on the way downhill. We need to make NITs more strong in terns of faculty, infrastructure and placement so that NITs give IITs a run for the much applauded IIT BRAND.

For any other queries, feel free to comment below. Have a great day!!