Clustering of real life data for analysis has gained popularity and imprecise methods or their hybrid approaches has attracted many researchers of late. Recently, rough intuitionistic fuzzy c-means algorithm was introduced and studied by Tripathy et al [3] and it was found to be superior to all other algorithms in this family. Kernel based counter part of these algorithms have been found to behave better than their corresponding Euclidean distance based algorithms. Very recently kernel based rough fuzzy algorithm was put forth by Bhargav et al [4]. A comparative analysis over standard datasets and images has established the superiority of this algorithm over its corresponding standard algorithm. In this paper we introduce the kernel based rough intuitionistic fuzzy c-means algorithm and show that it is superior to all the algorithms in the sequel; i.e. both normal and the kernel based algorithms. We establish it through experimental analysis by taking different type of inputs and using standard accuracy measures. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.