Department of Mining Engineering was started at IIT Kharagpur in the year 1956, with a sanctioned annual intake of 25 students in the Bachelors Degree programme, and the first batch of students graduated in 1960. The existence of well developed facilities both within and outside the Department at IIT provided an ideal ground for imparting mining engineering education suitable for the graduates to take up the roles of managers, engineers, and scientists in the industry. The Department pioneered the introduction of postgraduate courses, research programmes, and continuing education programmes in mining engineering. The Department and the infrastructure at IIT has many facilities for research and development activities, and a number of Doctoral degrees have been conferred. The Mining Engineering programme at IIT Kharagpur is the only such programme among all the IITs. The Department justly takes pride in the fact that its alumni are keenly sought after by the mineral industry, educational and research institutions, and software industry. The faculty members of the Department are also well experienced in both scholarly research and in practical applications of Mining engineering technologies.The Department retains the freedom and flexibility to tune the subjects to meet the demands of the present day mining sector, in terms of its research and planning requirements. There is a good emphasis in the M.Tech programme to orient the students towards computer applications in mineral industry. As such the students gain experience in the areas of computer graphics, data structures, and objected oriented programming. There is a considerable thrust in problem solving using operations research, geostatistics, reliability, and several advanced numerical methods.