The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are autonomous public institutes of higher education, located in India. They are governed by the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 which has declared them as institutions of national importance alongside National Institutes of Technology and lays down their powers, duties, and framework for governance etc. The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 lists twenty-three institutes located at Bhilai, Chennai, Delhi, Dhanbad, Dharwad, Goa, Guwahati, Jammu, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Mumbai, Roorkee, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Indore, Jodhpur, Mandi, Palghat, Patna, Ropar, Tirupati and Varanasi. Each 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-officio Chairperson of IIT Council.[6] As of 2017, the total number of seats in all IITs is 11,032.

The IITs had a common admission process for undergraduate admissions, called IIT-JEE, which was replaced by Joint Entrance Examination Advanced in 2013. The post-graduate level program that awards M.Tech., MS degrees in engineering is administered by the older IITs (Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, Delhi, Dhanbad, Roorkee, Varanasi, Guwahati). M.Tech and MS admissions are done on the basis of Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE). In addition to B.Tech, M.Tech and MS programs, IITs also award other graduate degrees such as M.Sc in Maths, Physics and Chemistry, MBA, PhD etc. Admission to these programs of IITs is done through Common Admission Test (CAT), Joint Admission Test for Masters (JAM) and Common Entrance Examination for Design (CEED). IIT Guwahati and IIT Bombay offer undergraduate design programmes as well. Joint Seat Allocation Authority 2015 (JoSAA 2015) conducted the joint admission process for a total of 19 IITs.