Soon, the first Indo-German agreement was signed in Bonn, West Germany in 1959 for the establishment of the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (now Chennai).

[14] Although official support from the German government has ended, several research efforts involving the DAAD programme and Humboldt Fellowships still exist.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras started functioning with the first batch of 120 students being admitted in July 1959 to the first year of the Engineering Course.

[19] The main entrance of IIT Madras is on Sardar Patel Road, flanked by the residential districts of Adyar and Velachery.

[20][21] In July 2023, education officials of India and Tanzania said that an IIT Madras satellite campus in the Tanzanian autonomous territory of Zanzibar would begin offering classes in October 2023 and this has started functioning as announced.

The self-contained campus includes two schools (Vanavani and Kendriya Vidyalaya), three temples (Jalakanteshwara, Durga Peliamman and Ganapathi), three bank branches (SBI, ICICI, Canara Bank), a hospital, shopping centres, food shops, a gym, sleeping room and cricket, football, hockey and badminton stadiums.

Admission criteria to the five-year integrated Master of Arts (MA) programme is changed as the Humanities and Social Sciences Entrance Examination (HSEE), an IIT Madras-specific exam has not been conducted since 2023.

[34] Admissions to the 4-year BS degree programme for in Data Science and Applications are done through 2 channels: JEE and their own entrance test called the Qualifier exam.

IIT Madras BS in Data Science won Silver in the Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) - QS Reimagine Education Awards.

To improve the quality of higher education in India, IIT Madras came up with an initiative called NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning)[58] in the year 2003.

[61] The Research Park functions to promote innovation in established companies and provide a nurturing ecosystem to startups through incubation efforts and technical infrastructure.

It provides hands-on programmes, and hybrid courses like Out of the Box Thinking in Maths, Winter School on Advanced Quantum Computing, Wireless Networks, Blockchains and others.

On 20 October 2023, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology stated that the Bharat Semiconductor Research Centre (BSRC) would be established starting in 2024, working with professionals from the industry and academic institutions.

The centre will be established initially as an institution co-located with Semi-Conductor Laboratory, with the potential to split off into a stand-alone semiconductor research organization in the future.

The programme has won Silver in the Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) - QS Reimagine Education Awards[74] IITM launched the 4-yr BS undergrad degree in Electronic Systems (ES) in March 2023 to meet the significant and growing demand for skilled graduates in the electronics and embedded systems sector in India.

In the last 5 years, it has grown to be the pre-eminent interdisciplinary research centre for Data Science and AI in India and is one of the country's largest groups in network analytics and deep reinforcement learning.

[82] The Center of Excellence in Fluid and Thermal Sciences was established at IIT Madras with the help of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which provided seed money of ₹1.84 crore.

The centre's advanced research initiatives will focus on cryo-tank thermodynamics, combustion instability in hybrid rockets, and spacecraft thermal management.

[citation needed] It consists of various engineering, science and technology competitions, summits, lectures, video conferences, exhibitions, demonstrations and workshops.

It is a five-day-long event held in early January every year and attracts a crowd of 70,000 students and young people from across the country, making it the largest student-run fest in India.

Indiresan, the main aim of the Extra Mural Lectures series is to expose the IIT Madras community to the ideas and experiences of eminent personalities from diverse backgrounds.

Mr. Kenji Hiramatsu, then defence secretary of India Mr. Ajay Kumar and ISRO chairman S. Somanath have been hosted at IIT Madras for Extra Mural Lectures, to motivate the students and broaden their perspectives.

S-Net was envisioned to work towards developing and deploying solutions for making a self-sustaining campus (focusing on energy/electricity, water, and waste management), which could eventually be replicated across the country through tie-ups with other educational institutions.

[90] The Fifth Estate[91] is the official media body of IIT Madras and gives an insight into the happenings inside the campus and important news related to the institute.

NSS in IIT Madras has been noted for taking up socially relevant initiatives, taken up as individual projects to create an impact on society as well as the students.

By working out projects from Braille magazines to technology interventions, from teaching children in urban slums to educational video content, NSS (IITM) seeks to challenge mediocre thinking and reach out into the darkness, to pull a hand into the light.

[92] A mix of English, Hindi, Telugu (Gult), Malayalam (Mallu) and Tamil (Tam), aspects of the campus slang have been adopted by some other Chennai colleges.

Unlike its sister institutions, IIT Madras has no single Indian language used among its students: Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, English and Hindi are all very commonly used.

The actual idea of a Heritage Centre was mooted in the year 2000 and has become a reality due to the efforts of the Professor-in-charge Dr Ajit Kumar Kolar and his team.

Several members of the Hindu Munnani were arrested in November 2014 for organising a "spitting protest" outside the IIT-Madras after the institute played host to the 'Kiss of Love' campaign.