Indian Institute of Technology Madras - Student activities

Shaastra

Shaastra is the annual technical festival of IIT Madras. It is typically held in the first week of October and is the first ISO 9001:2000 certified student festival in Chennai. It is known for its exceptional organization, stunning range of activities, and a growing legacy for honing the engineering talent in India. Forums include workshops, video conferences, lectures, demonstrations, and technical exhibitions. Competitive activities cover design events, programming, simulations, quizzes, applied engineering, robotics, junkyard wars and contraptions.

[edit] Department festivals

Several departments organize department festivals. ExeBit, Wavez, Mechanica, CEA, Chemclave, Amalgam and Forays are some of the festivals organized by the Computer Science and Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Metallurgical and Materials Engineering and Maths departments respectively.

Fest Name	Department
Exebit	Computer Science and Engineering
Amalgam	Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
CEA	Civil Engineering
Chemclave	Chemical Engineering
Forays	Mathematics
Mechanica	Mechanical Engineering
Wavez	Ocean Engineering

[edit] Hostels

Most students at IIT Madras reside in the hostels, where a large number of extracurricular activities complement the hectic academic routine. The campus has 17 hostels, of which two, Sharavati and Sarayu, are exclusively for women. In earlier times, each hostel had attached dining facilities, that have since been closed down. Sharavati and the four seven-storeyed men's hostels do not have mess halls. Dining facilities are now provided in two large centralized halls dubbed 'Vindhya' and 'Himalaya'. The hostels may accommodate undergraduate and graduate students, though they tend to keep the two apart. Students are assigned to hostels at the time of admission, where they usually spend their entire stay at the Institute.

The hostels are named after the principal rivers of India and the campus buses used to be named after mountains, resulting in an epigram about IIT Madras that it is the only place where the mountains move and the rivers remain still.

The hostels of IITM currently are:

1. Saraswati (Saras)
2. Krishna
3. Cauvery
4. Brahmaputra (Brahms)
5. Tapti
6. Godavari (Godav)
7. Alaknanda (Alak)
8. Jamuna (Jam)
9. Ganga
10. Narmada (Narmad)
11. Mandakini (Mandak)
12. Sharavati (Sharav)
13. Sarayu
14. Sindhu
15. Pampa
16. Tamraparani (Tambi)
17. Mahanadi (MAHAN)

Sindhu, Pampa, Mahanadi and Tamraparani are seven-storeyed whereas all the other (older classic) hostels are three- or four-storeyed (the older hostels were all three-storeyed till the early 2000s when extra rooms in the form of an extra floor and rooms above the common room were added). These four hostels can accommodate more than 1,500 students.

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