Mumbai: Devesh Bhaiya, All India Rank 8 this year in the fiercely contested JEE Advanced, has decided to turn his back on India’s elite engineering institutions and head for MIT instead.He won’t be alone. Ved Lahoti, last year’s Rank 1 and the candidate who has scored the highest in the entrance exam (352/360) in recent history, is also wrapping up his Powai chapter in exchange for a fully funded scholarship at MIT.There’s a murmur of a trend here. In 2020, it was Chirag Falor who chose MIT over IIT. Before that, it was Chitraang Murdia, who spent a year at IIT Bombay before transferring to MIT. He now holds a PhD from Berkeley.“It seems like MIT trusts the rigour of JEE Advanced and the promise of our Olympiad stars,” said Prof Vijay Singh, once at IIT Kanpur, who later superannuated from the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education.Jalgaon’s Devesh has a record that goes far beyond the JEE rank: three gold medals, two from International Junior Science Olympiads in 2021 and 2022, and one from the International Chemistry Olympiad in 2024. In 2020, he was awarded the Bal Shakti Puraskar. At 12, when most children were still tracing constellations in the sky, Devesh was mapping their vanishing — authoring a paper on light pollution.He received admission to MIT in March but sat for JEE Advanced anyway — a “back-up,” he calls it. Devesh is not alone. But the others chose to stay for a year, to feel the pulse on Indian campuses, before going overseas.They too were accepted by American universities, whose doors — as Professor Vijay Singh notes — open wide for those with Olympiad medals and high JEE scores.The students’ reasons for the switch are apparent. “I’m fully satisfied with IIT Bombay. But it lags in research. Globally, it’s not even in the top 100. So, I applied to MIT — and when it came through, I took it. A lot of students have taken transfer to MIT and when I asked them, they said the transfer was truly worth it,” said Lahoti.Nishank Abhangi, who spent 2019–2020 immersed in IIT Bombay’s rigour before packing for MIT, and Mahit Gadhewala, All India Rank 9 in 2022, who also left after a year at IITB, are the other examples. Prof Singh said the first such student to do so was Raghu Mahajan, who spent a year at IIT Delhi, then took off to MIT, completed his PhD at Stanford, and is currently spending a year at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru.“He was very committed to coming back to India,” recalled Prof Singh. Lahoti too shares the same feelings. “I have no plans to settle in the USA.”
