All the IITs provide on-campus residential facilities to the students, research scholars and faculty. The students live in hostels (sometimes referred to as halls) throughout their stay in the IIT. Students in all IITs must choose between National Cadet Corps (NCC), National Service Scheme (NSS) and National Sports Organisation (NSO) in their first years. All the IITs have sports grounds for cricket, football (soccer), hockey, volleyball, lawn tennis, badminton, and athletics; and swimming pools for aquatic events. Usually the hostels also have their own sports grounds.

Technical and cultural festivals

All IITs organise annual technical festivals, typically lasting three or four days. The technical festivals are Kshitij (IIT Kharagpur), Techfest (IIT Bombay),Cognizance (IIT Roorkee), Shaastra (IIT Madras), Techkriti (IIT Kanpur), Tryst (IIT Delhi), and Techniche (IIT Guwahati). Most of them are organised in the months of January or March. While Techfest is most popular in terms of participants and prize money involved and also conducted at a totally different scale, Shaastra holds the distinction of being the first student-managed event in the world to implement a formal Quality Management System, earning the ISO 9001:2000certification.^[55] Kshitij is the largest in terms of Sponsorship amounts and also branded as a techno-management festival due to its emphasis on both technology and management.

Annual cultural festivals are also organised by the IITs and last three to four days. These include Spring Fest (IIT Kharagpur, also known as SF), Rendezvous (IIT Delhi), Tarang (previously Rave) and Thomso (IIT Roorkee), Elan (IIT Hyderabad), Alma Fiesta (IIT Bhubaneswar, also known as AF), Mood Indigo (IIT Bombay, also known as Mood-I), Saarang (IIT Madras, previously Mardi Gras),  Antaragni (IIT Kanpur), Alcheringa (IIT Guwahati) and Zeitgeist (IIT Ropar) .In addition to these cultural festivals, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Bombay celebrate unique festivals. IIT Kharagpur celebrates the Illumination festival on the eve of Diwali. Large bamboo structures (called chatais) as high as 6 metres (20 ft) are made and earthen lamps (diyas) are placed on them to form outlines of people, monuments, or an event. The competition is held between hostels, it does not receive entries by outside visitors. Coupled with the Illumination festival is the Rangoli festival. In Rangoli, large panels showing an event or a concept, are made on the ground by fine powder, and sometimes even by crushed bangles or other innovative materials

SOURCE : WIKIPEDIA