Biography | Sundar Pichai — Nehru Hall of Residence, Where He Finished Top of the Metallurgy Batch

Nehru Hall of Residence stands in the oldest part of the IIT Kharagpur campus. Sundar Pichai lived here while completing his BTech in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering. He graduated in 1993 as the topper of his batch. The department still lists his name on its roll of toppers. Room B-308 is the specific room recorded in later accounts of his student years. That room remains in active use by students today. The pin is therefore set to the Hall itself, not to any single door. Pichai arrived from Chennai with a strong record but found the first year difficult. He later described his early grades as embarrassing and made up the ground in the remaining years. He met his future wife, Anjali, a chemical-engineering classmate, during this period. The campus was his first sustained experience of living independently and of the scale of Indian technical education. From here he went to Stanford for a master’s in materials science and engineering, then to Wharton for an MBA. The path that led to Google in 2004 began with a metallurgy degree earned in these halls. Photo: Gohanjin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (2016 view of Nehru Hall)