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Most of the IITs have benefited tremendously from international exposure because they were established with the help of partner countries. IIT Bombay (IITB), located in plush surroundings by the side of the Powai lake, is no exception. The institute had its Russian connection in the initial days with teachers going to Moscow for training and campus computers giving error warnings prefaced with ‘Achtung’.

There is also a story of how IITB’s first mainframe computer—a Russian-built Minsk II—which it got in 1968, "filled the entire floor of a building" and how Indian students wrote their own operating system to turn the behemoth into a primitive multimedia computer.

However, even if IITB had an undertone of socialist Soviet influence in its initial days, its ideological volte-face in becoming a strong votary of market economics has been remarkable. Today the institute, which boasts of business leaders like Nandan Nilekani, Gururaj Deshpande, Kanwal Rekhi and Bharat Desai (CEO Syntel) as its alumni, is the undisputed leader amongst all IITs in fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship. It even has a Center for Research in Entrepreneurship (CARE) that has played a stellar role in incubating ventures from IITians. The list includes names like iPortia that attracted VC funding from Rakesh Mathur of Junglee.com fame as well as MyZus that got commitment of $150 million from another high-profile investor, which has not happened so far. While IITs in general have confined themselves to shaping brilliant technical minds, IITB was the first not to shy away from grooming them to be billionaires. "Our ambition is to have a TCS, Wipro, Infosys from our campus one day," says Dr. D B Phatak, who heads the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology.

While IITB has thus earned a reputation of being an entrepreneurial hub, it has also been branded, many believe wrongly, as an institute with the trappings of a five-star hotel.

This has got the institute under the stentorian scanner of the former HRD minister Murli Manohar Joshi who threatened cuts in government aids.

However, even if there is a five-star culture in IITB, no one can accuse the institute of lacking social conscience. Nothing illustrates this better than the way the entire IITB rallied behind demanding an investigation into the murder of Satyendra Dubey, an alumnus, in the Golden Quadrilateral scam.

In fact, the extremely pro-active IITB alumni has been responsible for a number of centers within the institute—other than CARE, this would include the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology and the Shailesh Mehta School ofManagement.

Other than this, IITB also boasts of first-rate specialization centers like the School of Bio-Sciences and Bio-Engineering, Industrial Design Center (IDC) Center for Aerospace Systems Design and Engineering  (CASDE), Center for Formal Design and Verification of Software (CFDVS), Regional Sophisticated Instrumentation Center (RSIC) and Advance Center for Research in Electronics (ACRE) among others.

Says IDC Prof. GV Shreekumar, "This is a one of its kind center in India teaching among others esoteric concepts like human-computer interface; very few institutes in the world can be compared to us." No wonder, Dr. Phatak calls IITB better than "MIT, Princeton and Harvard put together."

Not only entrepreneurship, IITB also scores in R&D. However, it ensures that all research activities are strongly grounded with industry realities—this is done by forming tie-ups with several leading companies/bodies like TCS, Compaq, Tata Infotech, TIFR, NTPC and Lucent Technologies among others.

With nearly 40% of IITB alumni now settled in the US, a large portion of them can be found in the world’s leading labs like MIT, Stanford, Intel Research Lab or IBM. Still, there is a lingering concern especially amongst the old-timers—the lure of entrepreneurship is gradually driving away the students from research, as shown by the drop in the number of PhDs.

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