IIT Kharagpur's KRITI Launch

IIT Kharagpur has started something much bigger than a summer internship. It has grouped school outreach, undergraduate research, and educator-facing programs under one umbrella called Knowledge, Research and Innovation for Transformative Impact, or KRITI. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) The idea is to catch students before they drift away from science. KRITI is described as a pipeline that starts with school students, continues through college, and extends to early-career researchers and educators. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) At the school end, IIT Kharagpur is using programs named i-KITES and RISE. Those are the first touchpoints in the system, meant to bring younger students into structured academic exposure before they even reach university. (news.kollegeapply.com) In the middle of that pipeline sits GRISHMA, which stands for Undergraduate Summer Research Program. It gives undergraduate students from institutions other than IIT Kharagpur a chance to join faculty-led research groups across science, engineering, technology, medicine, and the humanities. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) The 2026 GRISHMA cycle opened applications on April 5 and closes them on April 18. The program is scheduled to run for 8 weeks from May 16, and selected fellows can receive support of up to 22,000 rupees per month for housing, meals, travel, and contingencies. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) That matters because research careers usually begin late and unevenly. GRISHMA is built to let students practice the basic moves of research early: framing a question, working on a real problem, and presenting findings inside a faculty lab instead of only reading textbook answers. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) KRITI does not stop at students. The same umbrella also includes programs named THESES, CRAFT, KERNEL, and CREATE, with CREATE positioned for educators and the others described as part of IIT Kharagpur’s higher-level scholarly development stack. (news.kollegeapply.com) That makes KRITI look less like a single launch and more like a campus-wide operating system for talent. One institution is trying to connect school curiosity, college research, and teacher development so the same learner can keep reappearing at different stages instead of dropping out of the pipeline. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com; news.kollegeapply.com) IIT Kharagpur is a natural place to try that kind of long game. It was founded in 1951 as the first Indian Institute of Technology, and it now spans engineering, science, medicine, law, architecture, management, and humanities on one campus. (wikipedia.org) If KRITI works the way IIT Kharagpur is framing it, the payoff comes years later. A school student meets the institute through i-KITES or RISE, returns for GRISHMA as an undergraduate, and may later reconnect through research, teaching, or alumni ties instead of treating the campus as a one-time stop. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com; news.kollegeapply.com)