NEW DELHI: Congress Vice President
Rahul Gandhi on Sunday thanked External Affairs Minister
Sushma Swaraj for "recognising" his party's "great vision and legacy."
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Rahul tweeted: "Sushma ji, thank you for finally recognising Congress governments' great vision and legacy of setting up IITs and IIMs"
He was referring to Swaraj's speech at the
United Nations General Assembly
on Saturday, wherein she cited the Indian Institutes of Technology (
IIT) and the Indian Institutes of Management (
IIM
) as examples of the country's "scientific and technical institutions which are the pride of the world."
The minister contrasted this with Pakistan, which, she said, had "produced terrorists."
"We established scientific and technical institutions like IITs and IIMs, which are the pride of the world. But what has Pakistan offered to the world and indeed to its own people apart from terrorism? We produced scholars, doctors, engineers. What have you produced? You have produced terrorists. Doctors save people from death; terrorists send them to death," Swaraj charged.
Rahul's tweet was referring to the origins of these institutes, during various Congress governments at the Centre and in the states.
While the idea of the IIT system goes back to 1946, the first
Indian Institute of Technology
was set up in 1950 in Kharagpur.
In his first convocation address in 1956, then-Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru called IIT-Kharagpur a "fine monument of India, representing India's urges, India's future in the making."
In September the same year, Parliament declared it an 'Institute of National Importance.'
PM Nehru's government established the first IIM at Calcutta in November 1961, in collaboration with MIT, the West Bengal government, the Ford Foundation and Indian industry. It was set up "as the first national institute for Post-Graduate studies and Research in Management."
Today, India boasts 23 IITs and 20 IIMs.