Kharagpur: The alumni foundation of IIT Kharagpur met in Mumbai on April 21 to discuss ways to build up the brand image of the country's oldest Indian Institute of Technology.

To many it could be surprising that the IIT that has produced a Google boss - Sundar Pichai - has to crow about its achievements, but those closer to the ground feel that is the need of the hour.

Only three of the top 200 students who had cracked the JEE Advanced had opted for the Kharagpur institute last year. Worse, former students point out, nine seats had remained vacant at the institute at the end of last year's admission season - the third highest among the 23 IITs.

"We have to overcome the challenges (for IIT Kharagpur) by flashing stories about the additional advantages of studying at the institute," said Commander V.K. Jetley, president of the IIT Kharagpur Alumni Foundation India, who attended the Mumbai meeting.

"We must tell all that the IIT has set up a centre on artificial intelligence, a state-of-the-art field, how our alumni are funding the summer internship programme abroad. Brand Building is the tool for the job."

Kabindra Daga, a former president of the IIT Kharagpur Alumni Association, Calcutta, said successful former students such as Pichai and Ajit Jain, who heads the US-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc's insurance group, have built the institutional brand in their own ways.

"Now, the challenge is to leverage the brand in a way that IIT Kharagpur can compete with IIT Bombay, IIT Madras in attracting the best students," Daga said.

He feels better branding has made the IITs in Chennai and Mumbai a more preferred destination than the one in Kharagpur.

But an institute's profile does not entirely depend on getting top-notch students, said an IIT official.

"Pichai was a student of metallurgy, a stream that the top 500 students on the merit list do not opt for. But then see where he is now. So, it also depends on how an institute grooms you to make you the best."

Many cite the institute's location - in a town 130km from Calcutta - as a key factor that puts it at a disadvantage.

In the institute's 67 years of existence, neither Calcutta nor Kharagpur has grown in a way that the two could come closer.

"There is a perception that aamra ekta gram-ey porey achhi (we are tucked away in a village)," IIT director Partha Pratim Chakrabarti had told Metro after the 2017 convocation.

Delivering the convocation address last year, former chairman of the standing committee of the IIT council, chemical scientist Man Mohan Sharma, had said the oldest IIT needed proper branding to gain the prominence "it richly deserves".

Several former students said a brand-building exercise would help the institute buck the trend of slowly losing ground to the IITs located in Mumbai, Madras and Delhi, which have the advantage of being in burgeoning metros.

In 1979, Jetley had come all the way from Delhi to study electronics and communication engineering at the Kharagpur institute because he said it was the most sought after of all IITs.

There were five IITs then - in Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Bombay and Madras.

He wondered how many students would make that journey now.

"The times have changed. In our times, the IITs in Delhi and Bombay were located on the outskirts of the cities. Now, over the years, the cities have grown and they have become part of the metropolis. But IIT Kharagpur continues to be far from Calcutta.

"Students these days want to study on a campus that is close to a shopping mall and a multiplex," he said.

Kharagpur is 144km from the nearest airport, in Calcutta. The Delhi and Chennai IITs are about 16km away. In Mumbai, the distance is 9km.

Vinod Gupta, whose $2 million endowment helped the institute set up a school of management, had refused to believe while talking to this newspaper last year that IIT Kharagpur had not been sold hard enough to the world and that it needed to brand itself.

"IIT Kharagpur is already one of the most respected brands... Top companies are being run by IIT Kharagpur alumni," he had said.

Many academics and former students think so.

Subrata Chattopadhyay, dean, alumni affairs, IIT Kharagpur, said: "We hope through the foundation and its regional chapters in India we will be able to network with large number of alumni to engage them towards institutional brand building, funding for infrastructure developments."