Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology was founded at Patiala in 1956 by the industrialist Karam Chand Thapar and is one of the older private engineering institutions in India.
IISER Mohali, established in 2007, and the Indian School of Business campus at Mohali, opened in 2012, are the newer national-level institutions in the region. Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College at Ludhiana dates from 1956.
Punjab has no Indian Institute of Technology. It has an IIM at Amritsar, established in 2015, and an IISER at Mohali.
The state's engineering graduates in large numbers go abroad, and a substantial part of the private engineering college sector built in the 2000s has since closed for want of students.
Punjab's education economy now runs substantially on preparing people to leave, which is a fair description of the IELTS centres and a harsher one of some of the colleges.
Thapar was funded by an industrial family and built as a private institution before that was common in India, and it went from a college to a deemed university in 1985.
Punjab Engineering College at Chandigarh is the older institution, founded at Lahore in 1921 and moved after 1947.
The absence of a central technical institution of the first rank in Punjab is a long standing complaint and has been raised at every reorganisation of the higher education map.