The global phenomenon, ‘Pokemania’ has gripped India’s premier engineering institutes, Indian Institutes of Technology. Students who might appear to be wandering aimlessly around the IITs, are actually exploring their campuses, desperately looking for Pokemon. Usually gathering around Poke Stops, they reload on supplies of Poke balls, an essential tool for catching Pokemon.

While the game is yet to be launched in India, it has already become a major hit in college campuses in India. Students of IIT Roorkee have started a unique way of helping their classmates by publishing details of spots frequented by Pokemon. They have gathered this information on a map of their institute.

Harsh Bajaj, a student of IIT Kharagpur, said, “We usually roam in the campus at night after our classes are over. It is an exciting game and it is even more interesting to play this game on such a big campus. With good internet connectivity provided to us, we now find ourselves in unexplored places of the campus. I have also found a couple of Pokemon in the classroom as well.”  With over 2,100 acres of campus land, IIT Kharagpur has one of the biggest campus areas in India.

While there are reports from some colleges in the USA , that academic sessions have been disrupted due to the game, no such case have been reported from colleges in India. “Even if the game has gained momentum amongst the students, it has not disrupted our academic sessions in any way. I personally have not noticed any of my student playing the game in the class,” said Prof Bhattacharjee, Student Affairs Dean, IIT Kharagpur

Not all students who play the game burn calories, there are techies who have found a way to play the game without moving a muscle. “We have a big campus but there not many Poke stops in it. So we found a different way of playing the game. We simply tricked the GPS in our device and virtually visited other places and played the game,” said Rohan Pandey, a student of IIT Gandhinagar.

So far in India, there has not been any mishap reported, unlike in other countries where people have lost their lives while playing the game.