The institute was started in December 1959 in a room in the canteen building of the Harcourt Butler Technological Institute at Agricultural Gardens in Kanpur.
In 1963, the institute moved to its present location, on the Grand Trunk Road near the village of Kalyanpur in Kanpur district.
During the first ten years of its existence, IIT Kanpur benefited from the Kanpur Indo-American Programme (KIAP), where a consortium of nine US universities (namely M.I.T, University of California, Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Carnegie Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Ohio State University, Case Institute of Technology and Purdue University) helped set up the research laboratories and academic programmes.
