How the Cold War in Germany played a small yet significant part in establishing IIT Madras

A recently-published research paper unearths an oft-forgotten chapter in the establishment of IIT-Madras and its connection with the Cold War in Germany, which resulted in the formation of the now-revered institution

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, Germany was on the cusp of facing another bout of unrest. Over the next decade-and-a-half, political, social and economic factors resulted in the formation of the Berlin Wall which divided the country into the German Democratic Republic (GDR, also known as East Germany) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FDR, also known as West Germany). During the Cold War (between 1947-1991), it was common for the two rival countries to offer development support to then developing and under-developed countries, in their larger goal to muscle their influences and to benefit from the bilateral relations they shared. One of the “largest and most successful educational projects” that emerged out of Indo-German relations during the Cold War, was the establishment of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) in 1959, which, when seen from the perspective of FDR, was largely driven by the Cold War foreign policy it shared with India. While the Sarkar Committee in 1946 recommended that India set-up “at least four technical institutions on the lines of the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, in the eastern, western, northern and southern regions of the country”, the IITs came into existence only post-Independence.