The Rubber Technology Laboratory was established under the Colombo Plan (UK Government) and Technical Collaboration Mission (USA Government) with the aid of the Ministry of Education, Government of India. Initially, a part of Applied Chemistry, it became an independent Centre in 1981 and acquired advanced Processing and Testing equipment from Indo-British collaborative programmes and also from a large number of research projects by CSIR, DST, ICAR, BARC, ISRO and many private Indian and International Companies at the beginning of its journey. The thrust area in research and development currently undertaken at the Centre includes: Polymer Blends and Alloys, Nanocomposites, Rubber Modification, Waste Rubber Recycling, TPEs and TPVs, Radiation Processing of Elastomers, Development of Conductive Rubber Composites, Adhesion, Rubber Compounding etc. The Centre offers M.Tech and Ph.D. in Rubber Technology and assists several other departments in IIT by offering various courses. It also conducts national and international short term courses on different aspects on Rubber Science and Technology on regular basis to train different industry and academic people. In 25 years of independent existence, the Centre has been equipped with almost all sophisticated analytical instruments used in rubber research and development. About 50 research papers of high quality are published in international journals from the centre every year. Currently the centre handles 30 sponsored research projects from several national and international funding agencies amounting to Rupees 5 crores.