urban science came up in the last two three years which get inputs from us both in teaching and projects says parthasarathy there are collaborations also on courses such as computational linguistics and cognitive science similarly suneet tuli dean research and development at delhi iit says inputs from the humanities department are used for several projects especially those on linguistics and lowcost tribal welfare projects psychology and political science are also popular with students working toward an mba but the humanities department isnt as flush with funds as the rest of iit while there are some sources like the university grants commission and indian council of social science research humanities projects rarely attract funding from private ones it is extremely difficult but we are trying to get funding from the csr corporate social responsibility part says tuli but money isnt a problem at a new iit like gandhinagar established in 2008 it still has capital funds while older iits receive only the operational cost it admitted the first batch of 15 students in ma of arts in society and culture this year here 2025 of the courses btechs take are in the liberal arts and the type of content is different there are courses in urdu poetry 75 students took that and in classical indian music says achal mehra from the department of humanities the safety centre particularly the behaviourial safety section and archeological sciences centre too use inputs from the humanities departments as for the newlylaunched programmes their success can be gauged from the response of students whove opted to join iits instead of mainstream universities yashasvini rajeshwar in her fourthyear of development studies at madras says other options available to most of us include delhi university christ university as well as a hold of local colleges in each of our hometowns collaborations are both in the form of group presentations project work or research assignments in courses we do together as well as coorganizing shaastra our technical festival and saarang our cultural festival explains rajeshwar our ways of thinking are moulded differently and out problem solving approaches probably vary but at the root of it when we are handing out we cease to be the arts major and the engineers and become friends just like any other group of 20something yearolds