India's Oldest IIT Turned 75. Its Youngest Got an Astronaut.

The week in stories

An astronaut gave the convocation address at one of the newest IITs

TL;DR — IIT Tirupati held its 8th convocation on 22 August, awarding 457 degrees, with Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla delivering the address the day after giving a student lecture that needed two overflow rooms.

Shukla, the Axiom-4 astronaut, told the graduating cohort to keep learning, recognise the right opportunities, embrace change and step out of their comfort zones. The degree breakdown: 220 BTech, 125 MTech, 43 MSc, 15 Master of Public Policy, eight MS (Research) and 37 PhD, plus dual degrees, diplomas and BSc programmes. Eighteen students took medals. T. Mokshith Reddy of Computer Science received the President's Prize for best academic performance among the 2026 BTech graduates; Subham Mohanty took the Governor's prize for all-round excellence. JSW Group chairman Sajjan Jindal, who chairs the institute's Board of Governors, joined virtually.

The day before, Shukla gave a student lecture titled India From Orbit — Space through an Astronaut's eyes, scheduled for 4:00 PM on 21 August in LHC-CR211 with live streaming to two additional lecture halls and seating on a first-come basis. That logistical detail is the story underneath the story: an institute still counting its convocations in single digits had to open two overflow rooms for a talk about space.

Why this matters: convocation speakers are a status signal, and they usually flow to the top five. This one did not. Sources: Deccan Chronicle (22 Aug 2026); The Hans India (23 Aug 2026); IIT Tirupati lecture notice (21 Aug 2026).

IIT Palakkad now runs a DGCA-approved drone pilot school, and Kerala's press missed it

TL;DR — IIT Palakkad and its I-Hub Foundation, with Jet Aerospace, inaugurated a DGCA-approved Remote Pilot Training Organisation on campus on 18 August.

The facility is approved for Small and Medium Class drone pilot training, and the inauguration included the release of the RPTO logbook, training manuals and training procedures manual — the paperwork that distinguishes a licensed training organisation from a lab with drones in it. Director Prof. A. Seshadri Sekhar opened it, with Christi V Jacob, Joint Programme Director at DRDO's Aeronautical Development Establishment, as guest of honour.

It did not run alone this week. IIT Jodhpur's campus drone centre was profiled in the Rajasthan press as a national drone hub working on heavy-lift drones carrying 50 kg or more, anti-drone technology and passenger drones, with Amar Ujala reporting that a modern drone centre has been established on the campus of IIT Jodhpur. And AlgoFET, founded by an IIT Guwahati alumnus, raised ₹15 crore for autonomous drone ground infrastructure. Three separate drone stories at three IITs in seven days.

Worth noting: we could not find a single Malayalam-press pickup of the Palakkad RPTO — not Mathrubhumi, Manorama, Madhyamam or Deshabhimani. A DGCA licence granted to an IIT in Kerala went uncovered in Kerala. Sources: IIT Palakkad (18 Aug 2026); Amar Ujala (17 Aug 2026).

A student died at IIT Delhi on Saturday

A 31-year-old MSc Physics student died on the IIT Delhi academic campus on the morning of Saturday 22 August. Delhi Police received a call at around 8:33 am and opened an investigation through Kishangarh police station. No suicide note was recovered.

The institute issued a statement: The institute deeply mourns the tragic and untimely demise of the MSc student on August 22, 2026. The Delhi Police are investigating the sad incident. Our deepest thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family. The institute is providing all support to them.

We are not naming him. Several outlets carried his name within a day of the death; one day on, that detail serves no reader. We are also not reproducing the circumstantial detail that every outlet is carrying, and we are not reproducing the ranked framing — "second such incident this year", "third in the capital" — that several reports lead with. Counting deaths against a campus scoreboard is not reporting.

One note for anyone searching this: the top results for it include a piece with an almost identical headline shape about a different IIT Delhi student, published in October 2024. Attaching that to this week is wrong. Sources: The Tribune (23 Aug 2026); India TV (22 Aug 2026).

If you are struggling: Tele-MANAS, the national mental health helpline, is 14416, free and 24×7. Every IIT also runs a counselling cell.

GATE 2027 gave back the month it took, and JAM 2027 quietly opened

TL;DR — GATE 2027's registration window was re-cut at both ends, not just delayed — the closing date moved with the opening one. Separately, IIT Kharagpur launched JAM 2027.

We reported the 13-day slip last week. The part that was not clear then: the closing date moved too. The regular window now runs 27 August to 27 September 2026, with a late-fee window of 28 September to 5 October, and application rectification open on GOAPS until 3 November. Earlier coverage had the regular window closing on 21 September. Candidates got the full month back rather than a compressed window. Fees are ₹1,000 per paper for female, SC, ST and PwD candidates and ₹2,000 for everyone else, rising to ₹1,500 and ₹2,500 in the extended window; two papers cost double. IIT Madras is the organising institute.

The DigiLocker requirement from last week still stands, and it is still the thing most likely to generate a support ticket on the 27th. Verify it before, not during.

Meanwhile IIT Kharagpur opened the official JAM 2027 site during its own Foundation Week. Registration runs 5 September to 12 October 2026, the exam is 14 February 2027, results 18 March 2027, and the institute lists roughly 3,000 postgraduate seats across participating IITs. Sources: GATE 2027 official portal; JAM 2027 official site; Business Standard (18 Aug 2026).

Three states hired three IITs to check their infrastructure

TL;DR — Himachal Pradesh asked IIT Mandi to vet 22 bridge designs, Bihar handed IIT Ropar a river survey, and IIT Roorkee co-hosted a workshop on national building standards. Same role, three states, one week.

Himachal's PWD has completed detailed project reports for 22 bridges designed for a 100-year service life, and Amar Ujala reports that experts from IIT Mandi will carry out the technical examination of these DPRs and proposed designs before they go to the Centre. In Bihar, the Water Resources Department has assigned IIT Ropar a bathymetric survey of silt accumulation in the Son river at Indrapuri Barrage — notably without draining it, since officials said the water stored in Indrapuri Barrage will not need to be emptied for the survey. Silt has built up there for around fifteen years.

And IIT Roorkee ran a workshop with the Bureau of Indian Standards on the National Building Construction Standards 2026, with Director Prof. K.K. Pant as chief guest saying the institute has a long-standing commitment to strengthening the foundations of safe, resilient and sustainable infrastructure in the country.

Why this matters: none of this is research in the way research gets covered — no journal, no patent, no press-released breakthrough. It is three state governments treating IITs as the technical authority of last resort on infrastructure they cannot check themselves. A Punjab-based IIT surveying a Bihar barrage is not a local story. Sources: Amar Ujala (20 Aug 2026); Dainik Jagran (17 Aug 2026); The News Mill (20 Aug 2026).

The research week: ocean bacteria, dusty plasma and a nitrogen argument

TL;DR — IIT Madras found that rare marine bacteria hold ecosystems together, IIT Jammu and IIT Kanpur simulated a billion dust particles, and IIT Gandhinagar argued India is optimising its farms for the wrong resource.

IIT Madras analysed more than 4,600 publicly available ocean samples and found the ecological work is being done by the microbes nobody counts. Prof. Karthik Raman's team reported that rare 'specialist' bacteria contribute far more to ecosystem stability than previously recognised — remove them computationally and the network's stability collapses, despite their low abundance. Published in mSystems; one co-author is an undergraduate.

IIT Jammu and IIT Kanpur ran molecular-dynamics simulations of up to a billion dust particles to show that strongly coupled dusty plasma — the stuff of Saturn's rings and fusion reactors — dissipates turbulent energy like an elastic solid rather than a gas, and that stronger coupling means slower heating. Most of the simulations were two-dimensional; the researchers flag 3D as future work.

The one with policy teeth comes from IIT Gandhinagar with the Helmholtz Centre (UFZ). Modelling cereal cultivation across 664 districts, the team found that optimising crop placement for nitrogen surplus rather than water would cut agricultural water use 18.6% — around 86.8 billion cubic metres a year — while holding calorie output flat. Prof. Udit Bhatia's framing: Indian agriculture pulls two emergency levers at the same time, too much fertiliser and too much groundwater. We have been trying to fix this one at a time... When we optimise for nitrogen surplus, water savings follow on their own. One caveat worth stating: the paper itself published in Nature Communications on 4 August. It is the Indian press cycle that landed this week, not the science.

Also this week: IIT Delhi chemists published a visible-light route to 43 unnatural amino acids in Organic Letters; IIT Bombay reported an earth-abundant cobalt–nickel phosphate catalyst that ran 72 hours of water splitting with almost no performance drop, in Small; IIT (ISM) Dhanbad was granted a patent for a temperature-independent optical tilt sensor, filed back in February 2025; and IIT Patna researchers, with the Department of Telecommunications, proposed a phone-based voting model using blockchain-recorded encrypted ballots and a re-vote mechanism where only the latest vote counts, which they argue could help reduce coercion and vote-buying. Sources: IIT Madras (17 Aug 2026); Research Matters (17 Aug 2026); The Blunt Times (21 Aug 2026); Times of India (22 Aug 2026).

Insects in the mess food, in the same week as the anniversary

TL;DR — A video of IIT Kharagpur students confronting mess staff over insects in the food circulated during the institute's 75th Foundation Week.

The thread ran on r/iitkgp and drew 98 upvotes. The most useful comment is not the outrage but the shrug: Ye bc kgp tha yehi hota hai problem har hall me hai bas dikhti nahi h koi dikhati h to sahi nahi hoti — roughly, this is KGP, this happens, the problem is in every hall, it just is not visible, and when someone does show it nothing gets fixed. Another student put the institutional question directly: The Institute has 1000 Crore to invest in new infrastructure but not fix the old?

Why this matters: this is student testimony on Reddit, not an inspection finding, and we are not presenting it as verified fact about any specific kitchen. But the timing is the point. The same seven days produced a 75th-anniversary ceremony with the ISRO chairman in attendance and a video of students photographing their dinner. Both are true, and a roundup that ran only the first would be doing PR. Source: r/iitkgp (20 Aug 2026).

Careers Watch: the interns cost more and there are fewer of them

The 2026–27 internship cycle opened, and the headline number everyone is sharing is real but misleading on its own.

IIT-linked funding and corporate tie-ups, 17–23 August 2026

Company	Event	IIT link	What it builds
AlgoFET	₹15 Cr pre-Series A, Piper Serica	Founder is an IIT Guwahati alumnus	Autonomous drone docking and charging infrastructure
Atomberg	DRHP filed, ₹450 Cr fresh issue	Founded by IIT Bombay alumni	BLDC fans and appliances
Peeko	₹67.4 Cr Series A, Chiratae Ventures	"IIT alumni" founders — campus not specified in any source	Babycare quick commerce
Jindal Steel	MoU, Centre of Excellence	IIT Hyderabad campus	High-strength value-engineered steel
Tata Power	Master Research Agreement	IIT Bombay	Smart grids, storage, EV mobility, carbon capture

On internships: students at IIT Kharagpur reported 38 quant-trading offers in the first two days of the season, against roughly 20 last year and about 10 the year before. An IIT Kanpur student said international high-frequency-trading firms opening India offices are offering Rs 50 lakh to Rs 70-80 lakh for two months, while smaller firms are offering Rs 10-15 lakh.

Read the second half of that story. Those figures are for a two-month internship stipend, not an annual package, and rendering them as CTC is the single most common error circulating right now. More importantly, an IIT Bombay student described the opposite trend on volume: Several large firms reduced the number of interns in comparison to last year but they hired with substantially increased stipends. Companies which took 20 people last year took only five or six this year with some firms raising stipends from Rs 5 lakh per month to nearly Rs 30 lakh per month. Fewer seats, higher prices. That is a barbell, not a boom, and if you are not in the top slice of a CSE cohort it is a worse market than last year, not a better one. All of these numbers come from unnamed students — no IIT has published official 2026–27 internship data yet.

Live vacancies: IIT Delhi Project Scientist, two posts, closes 27 August. IIT Guwahati Assistant Professor Grade I/II, closes 31 August, verified on the institute's own faculty recruitment page. IIT Mandi Deputy and Assistant Registrar posts close 28 August. IIT Bombay lists 27 non-teaching posts closing 4 September — four aggregators agree on that date but the institute's own portal is JavaScript-rendered and we could not confirm it directly, so check before you rely on it. IIT Dharwad's free one-year residential AI course under PM-VIKAS, with a ₹1,000 monthly stipend for graduates aged 18–45 from minority communities, closes 31 August.

Sources: Outlook Business (19 Aug 2026); Careers360 (18 Aug 2026); Telangana Today (21 Aug 2026); IIT Bombay (18 Aug 2026).

The trend: the alumni came back with cheques

Three separate stories this week are the same story in different clothes — people who left an IIT returning to it with money or authority.

The clearest is IIT Roorkee. Avathon, an industrial-autonomy company, announced plans to establish the Avathon Physical AI Lab in the institute's Department of Computer Science & Engineering. Its CEO, Pervinder Johar, is an IIT Roorkee alumnus, and he did not pretend it was a neutral commercial decision: IIT Roorkee shaped how I think about the world and what's possible within it. Returning to build something lasting here is deeply personal. […] Physical AI is how we bring autonomy to the industrial economy, and there is no better place to advance that science than where my own journey began. The lab's principal investigator, Prof. Sugata Gangopadhyay, framed the value as access to real problems: it gives our researchers both the problems and the ambition worthy of them. Note the tense throughout the announcement — plans, proposed, envisaged. Nothing has opened yet.

At IIT Bhubaneswar, Tega Industries chairman Madan Mohan Mohanka pledged ₹2 crore to establish a Centre on Mineral Processing during a World Entrepreneurs' Day session, one of the few hard rupee figures anyone disclosed all week. Director Prof. Shreepad Karmalkar used the occasion to note the institute is now mentoring around 140 startups, against roughly 18 two years ago, under a target of 100 startups valued above ₹100 crore each by 2036 — Odisha's centenary year.

And Anurag Jain, a 1989-batch IAS officer who took a BTech in Electrical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur, assumed charge as CEO of NITI Aayog on 17 August, succeeding BVR Subrahmanyam. He is credited with conceptualising Jan Dhan Yojana and PM Gati Shakti.

Money returning to an alma mater is not automatically good news — a named lab is a branding asset for the donor as much as a research asset for the institute, and "announced plans" is not a building. But the direction is worth marking. For most of the last two decades the IIT alumni story was about who left. This week it was about who came back, to Roorkee, Kharagpur and Bhubaneswar.

Across the 23 IITs this week

Every one of the 23 was checked individually against its own press page, LinkedIn, and regional press. Twenty-two produced something. One did not, and we say which.

IITs with verifiable in-window news by cohort, 17–23 August 2026 All five of the oldest IITs produced news. All twelve second-generation IITs produced news. Five of the six newest IITs produced news; only IIT Bhilai did not. IITs with news we could date and source, 17–23 Aug 2026 Oldest 5 (Bombay–Kharagpur) 5 of 5 Second-gen (12 IITs) 12 of 12 Newest 6 (Bhilai–Tirupati) 5 of 6 The hollow block is IIT Bhilai, the week's one documented quiet campus.

Older IITs (Bombay–Kharagpur cohort)

• IIT Bombay: Signed a Master Research Agreement with Tata Power on 18 August covering smart grids, storage, EV mobility, cybersecurity, AI for power systems and carbon capture, with Tata Power MD Dr Praveer Sinha and Director Prof. Shireesh Kedare present. No figure disclosed. Separately, PTI reported a partnership with Poonawalla Fincorp for the institute's Frontier Research Programme — note this is distinct from Poonawalla's earlier, separate tie-up with IIT Bombay's Technology Innovation Hub on AI credit underwriting. Also published the 72-hour water-splitting catalyst in Small.
• IIT Delhi: A student died on campus on 22 August (see above). Chemists led by Prof. Ravi P. Singh published a visible-light chiral-copper route producing 43 unnatural amino acids and peptides in Organic Letters.
• IIT Madras: The ocean-bacteria study in mSystems; hosted the 16th BRICS Science, Technology and Innovation Senior Officials' Meeting on 19–20 August ahead of the ministerial; hosted an MSME export-readiness seminar on 18 August with DGFT, EXIM Bank and ECGC. Also the GATE 2027 organising institute.
• IIT Kanpur: C3iHub signed a tripartite agreement with Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar University Agra and the Vivekanand Incubation Foundation for a Hindi-language online cybersecurity programme, projected to reach 3 lakh students across 570+ colleges — that is a target, not an enrolment. Also co-authored the dusty-plasma work with IIT Jammu, and a team at the Mehta Family Centre is using CRISPR-Cas9 to build a transgenic mosquito line to study why mosquitoes bite some people more than others. That last one is early-stage lab work with no paper yet.
• IIT Kharagpur: The 75th Foundation Day (see above), the JAM 2027 launch, the mess-hygiene video, and alumnus Anurag Jain taking over NITI Aayog. The busiest week of any IIT.

Second-gen IITs (Roorkee, Guwahati, BHU, Hyderabad, Indore, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Ropar, Jodhpur, Mandi, Patna, Dhanbad)

• IIT Roorkee: The Avathon Physical AI Lab announcement (see above) and the BIS national building standards workshop on 20 August.
• IIT Guwahati: With IASST, developed RK-251, a reactive-oxygen-species-responsive prodrug designed to release its anticancer compound selectively inside cancer cells, co-led by Dr Krishna P. Bhabak. Published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry in July; the announcement cycle ran on 20 August. Treat the "may replace chemotherapy" headline framing as the outlet's, not the researchers'.
• IIT (BHU) Varanasi: Co-developed GenR, a blind face-restoration framework that needs no paired training data, with IIT Gandhinagar. IIT BHU's co-author is Dr Indra Deep Mastan of the CSE department.
• IIT Hyderabad: Signed an MoU with Jindal Steel on 21 August to build a Centre of Excellence for high-strength, value-engineered steel on campus. No investment figure disclosed in any outlet.
• IIT Indore: Quiet institutional week. The Department of Chemical Engineering held its biannual open house with a TotalEnergies senior asset manager as keynote and announced a Malwa Chemical Conclave, though the source dates the event only as "lately".
• IIT Bhubaneswar: The ₹2 crore Tega pledge and the 140-startup figure (see above).
• IIT Gandhinagar: The Nature Communications nitrogen study, GenR with IIT BHU, and an MoU with Port Said University, Egypt on 17 August covering exchange and joint degree programmes — tied by the institute to its new Maritime Engineering programme, Port Said sitting at the entrance of the Suez Canal.
• IIT Ropar: Assigned the Son river bathymetric survey by Bihar's Water Resources Department (see above). Its own news page returns a 404; the homepage carries only research-post advertisements.
• IIT Jodhpur: Its campus drone centre profiled as a national drone hub working on heavy-lift, anti-drone and passenger drones. The institute's own news listing carries no dates at all, so nothing there could be placed in the window.
• IIT Mandi: Dr Garima Agrawal of the School of Chemical Sciences was selected for the SMC Bronze Medal 2026. A team led by Dr Sumit Murab developed a sea-urchin-inspired hydroxyapatite coating for 3D-printed bone implants that damages bacteria mechanically rather than chemically. And Himachal's PWD will have IIT Mandi vet 22 bridge DPRs.
• IIT Patna: The phone-based voting model with DoT (see above). NHRC Special Monitor Prof Kanhaiya Tripathi visited on 22 August and proposed a Human Rights Cell, with Director Prof. T.N. Singh announcing four human-rights awards — single regional source, treat as provisional. The institute also reported growth from 92 students in 2008 to 4,347 now, though the source's own year labels are inconsistent.
• IIT (ISM) Dhanbad: Granted a patent for a temperature-independent 2-D optical tilt sensor, invented by Dr Amitesh Kumar and Randhir Kumar Sah — filed February 2025, granted now. Hosted a centenary speaker session on the global steel industry on 22 August with SAIL Bokaro's Director-in-Charge. Its Andhra Pradesh Centre of Excellence MoU with TEXMiN was also formalised, extending the rare-earths tie-up we covered last week.

Newest IITs (Bhilai, Dharwad, Jammu, Palakkad, Goa, Tirupati)

• IIT Bhilai: Quiet week, and this one is checked rather than skipped. Nothing in-window on the institute's news flash, happenings, media or achievements pages — all of which appear frozen around 2017–2020 — and nothing in Patrika, Naidunia, Hitavada, ETV Bharat Hindi or Bhaskar's Durg-Bhilai edition. The only live activity on its site is recruitment notices. A note for anyone searching: a Dainik Bhaskar story about IIT Bhilai launching two digital platforms is surfacing in aggregators with a 21 August date. The page's own metadata says 6 August, and the body says the launch was Tuesday the 4th.
• IIT Dharwad: The most active official-site week of any newer IIT. Prof. Ramesh Nayaka secured an ANRF-IRG grant on recycling wind turbine blades into alkali-activated prefabricated systems, and Prof. Sai Ram Boggavarapu an ANRF-ECRG grant on hysteresis in magnetic components for power electronics. E-Summit '26 ran 22–23 August. Its 10th Foundation Day falls on 25 August with Padma Shri Prof. (Emeritus) Deepak Phatak. Also running free PM-VIKAS AI training (see Careers Watch).
• IIT Jammu: Announced a two-day national conference with the Indian Council of World Affairs on "Geopolitics, Borderlands, and Soft Power", to be held 25–26 September. Met Jammu-region industry representatives at its Central Workshop on 20 August and shared plans for a centre handling design, prototyping and testing for local MSMEs. Its most recent MoU, dated 14 August, is with Baynuna Nuclear Energy Services, Mumbai — listed on the institute's own MoU table and, as far as we can find, covered by nobody.
• IIT Palakkad: The DGCA drone school (see above), a SPARC workshop on hydrogen technologies on 19 August with University of Groningen and German Aerospace Center speakers, a Journal of Physical Chemistry B cover for Dr A. Padmesh's group on copper nanoclusters and lysozyme, and Dr Shanmugaraju S ranked in the top 5% of the 2025 SciRank registry. Also one of the nodal hosts for Yuva Sangam Phase VII.
• IIT Goa: Quiet on press, and checked — nothing in-window on the institute news page (latest clipping 20 July), nothing in Herald Goa, Navhind Times or The Goan. Its live channel is Facebook, where it recorded observing Anti-Ragging Week from 12 to 18 August, and Director Prof. Dhirendra Katti addressing faculty on 14 August on research, teaching, infrastructure and governance priorities.
• IIT Tirupati: The Shukla convocation and the astronaut lecture (see above). Merch here, since this was its week.

Just missed: stories from the days before this window

• IIT Bombay's shipbuilding MoU with the Directorate General of Maritime Administration got trade-press coverage on 17 August, which is why it is circulating as this week's news. The institute's own page dates the announcement 14 August and says the signing was 12 August. It belongs to the previous window.
• Prof. Thalappil Pradeep of IIT Madras was elected the third Indian ever to full membership of the European Academy of Engineering on 14 August, after C.N.R. Rao and Biman Bagchi. Recognised for nanomaterials-based water purification.
• IIT Guwahati's nickel-anthracene catalyst, reported to use nearly 88% of supplied electrical energy in splitting water, published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A and announced 14 August.
• Discovered Materials, founded by two people who met at IIT Madras, raised a $9M seed led by Lightspeed on 10 August.

Coming next

• 25 August: IIT Dharwad's 10th Foundation Day, with Padma Shri Prof. (Emeritus) Deepak Phatak.
• 27 August: GATE 2027 registration opens on GOAPS. Verify your DigiLocker before this date, not on it.
• 27 August: IIT Delhi Project Scientist applications close.
• 28 August: IIT Mandi Deputy Registrar and Assistant Registrar applications close.
• 31 August: Yuva Sangam Phase VII registration closes, extended from 18 August. Six IITs are nodal hosts.
• 31 August: IIT Guwahati faculty applications close; IIT Dharwad PM-VIKAS AI course applications close.
• 4 September: IIT Bombay's 27 non-teaching posts close — verify against the institute portal.
• 5 September: JAM 2027 registration opens.
• 25–26 September: IIT Jammu's national conference with the Indian Council of World Affairs.
• 27 September: GATE 2027 regular registration closes; late-fee window runs to 5 October.
• Undated: NIRF India Rankings 2026 remain unreleased with no announced date. We checked the official portal on 23 August — the ranking menu still stops at 2025.

FAQ

When does GATE 2027 registration open and close?

Registration opens 27 August 2026 on GOAPS and the regular window closes 27 September 2026. A late-fee window runs 28 September to 5 October, and application rectification is open until 3 November 2026. IIT Madras is the organising institute. A verified DigiLocker account is mandatory for Indian nationals.

Have the NIRF 2026 rankings been released?

No. As of 23 August 2026 the NIRF India Rankings 2026 have not been published and the Ministry of Education has announced no date. We checked the official NIRF portal directly — its ranking menu still stops at 2025. Several sites claim the 2026 rankings are already out with IIT Madras at number one; that is recycled 2025 copy.

When is JAM 2027 and who is conducting it?

IIT Kharagpur is the organising institute. Registration runs 5 September to 12 October 2026, the exam is on 14 February 2027, and results are due 18 March 2027. The institute lists roughly 3,000 postgraduate seats across participating IITs.

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By Arun Raghav S, co-founder, IITian Vibes. This roundup covers 17–23 August 2026, and every claim links to the source it came from. Twenty-one widely-circulating stories were left out for falling outside that window, including one from 2024 with a headline nearly identical to a real story from this week. Where a date could not be established or a source could not be opened, the entry says so.

Published 23 August 2026. Covers 17–23 August 2026.