The Indian Institutes of Technology are autonomous public institutes of higher education, in India. They are governed by the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 which has declared them as "institutions of national importance", as well as lays down their powers, duties, and framework for governance etc.

The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 lists sixteen institutes situated at
Chennai,
Delhi,
Guwahati,
Kanpur,
Kharagpur,
Mumbai,
Roorkee,
Bhubaneswar,
Gandhinagar,
Hyderabad,
Indore,
Jodhpur,
Mandi,
Patna,
Ropar and
Varanasi.

Every IIT is an autonomous institution, linked to the others through a common IIT Council, which oversees their administration. The Union HRD Minister is the ex-official Chairperson of IIT Council.

The IITs have a common admission examination process for undergraduate admissions, called IIT-JEE, which was replaced by the Joint Entrance Examination Advanced well known as JEE Advance in 2013.

The post-graduate level program that awards M.Tech, MS degrees in engineering is administered by the IITs at
Kharagpur,
Bombay,
Madras,
Kanpur,
Delhi,
Roorkee,
Varanasi and
Guwahati for the M.Tech and MS admissions are done on the basis of Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE).

IITs also award other valuable graduate degrees such as M.Sc in Maths, Physics and Chemistry, MBA, PhD etc.

Admission to these programs offered by IITs is done through Common Admission Test(CAT), Joint Admission Test for Masters (JAM) as well as Common Entrance Examination for Design (CEED).