I donot know why its dead right now, but it sure worked. Do a google search http://www.google.com/search?source...F-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:en&q=bit+mesra and see cached pages for now.
Technically it's for any education institution in the world, but usually they are only given to US institutions because usually countries have their own edu suffix (for example school.edu.au). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu
So say I have a .ac.in link would it count as good as .edu link. .ac.in for indian educational institutions.