The Establishment of IIT Madras. German Cold War Development Assistance and Engineering Education in India — Das IIT Madras. Deutsche Entwicklungshilfe und indische Ingenieurausbildung im Kalten Krieg

Abstract

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras was established between 1959 and 1974 with assistance of the Federal Republic of Germany, which was the largest West German enterprise in the field of technical education abroad. The support consisted of German experts for teaching and in setting up laboratories and workshops. In this article, I argue that the engagement of the Federal Republic at IIT Madras must be understood primarily as a political project. The Federal Republic saw itself in direct competition with the Soviet Union, but also with the USA and the UK, which in turn supported the establishment of the IITs in Bombay, Kanpur and Delhi. While West Germany’s engagement had initially been motivated by influencing India’s position on divided post-war Germany, this changed towards the end of the 1960s to the vested interest of German policymakers in long-term scientific and technical cooperation. The German assistance was reoriented, from workshop-based engineering education to setting up a technological research university. Planning and policy were guided by political premises, to which the educational and scientific aspects were subordinate, and German staff was controlled and restricted in its scientific freedom. The German faculty saw themselves confronted with implementing a project which had been politically predefined as a successful Indo-German collaboration, by establishing meaningful research and engineering training. As a case study, the article contributes to the important history of aid in technical educational as part of Westas well as East German development aid during the Cold War, which so far has received little if any attention among historians.