A survey conducted on the IIT-Bombay campus for freshmen found 95% students had never had sex, but about 30% of them were in a relationship. Inspired by the Harvard Crimson freshmen survey, IIT-B's student newspaper — Insight — conducted a survey to appreciate the diversity of a freshman batch welcomed to the campus. The Powai campus for the first time looked at the beliefs and lifestyles of its incoming batch to find that most students were moderately liberal when it came to their political views and 75% of them were comfortable with the idea of homosexuality and/or homosexual marriages.

The survey looked at diverse topics such as students' background before joining IIT, their political and religious beliefs and post-grad plans. In all, 254 of the 875 freshmen who entered through JEE participated in the survey.

"The survey aimed to understand the institute's demographic better. It's important so we can see how we're growing as an institute and what demographic we are catering to," said Shreeyesh Menon, Insight chief editor. The quintessential IITian has changed over the years. A good 60% don't believe in religious practices and another 30% "somewhat" follow them.

But when it comes to the idea of God, 18% are atheist, 35% are agnostic and 47% believe in God. Cellphone, largely a smartphone, is a necessity and spending at least 1.5 hours on a social networking site is on their must-do list.

"Halfway into the first semester, every respondent was spending 1.6 hours on Facebook every day. The percentage of people not using Facebook at all decreased from 37.7% to 6%," the study noted.

Kicked off in September, the long exercise included the planning and designing of questions, mailing them, collating information received and analysing it. The results were released on Tuesday. Insight would typically survey seniors. The survey of freshers was conducted for the first time by the new editorial board, so there is no historical data to compare.