NEWS
- April 2010
- March 2010
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- December 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- June 2008
- March 2007
- July 2006
MORE NEWS
Largest Donation ever made to a University
Original:Â The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 2006
Indian Foundation Will Give $1-Billion to Create a Huge Research University
By SAMANTHA HENIG
In the largest donation ever made to a single higher-education institution, a foundation created by an Indian tycoon has committed $1-billion to establish a large, multidisciplinary research university in the Indian state of Orissa.
Â
The institution, to be called Vedanta University, is scheduled to begin enrolling students in 2008, and will model itself after campuses like Stanford University. Its goal is to create an “economic hub” in India comparable to what Stanford has produced in Silicon Valley, according to a release issued on Wednesday by the Anil Agarwal Foundation.
Anil Agarwal, the chairman of Vedanta Resources, a metals and mining company in India, had said in February that he planned to finance an elite institution that would cater to more than 100,000 students. On Wednesday, he formally announced the $1-billion donation, to be given in phases. During a brief ceremony at the State Secretariat in Orissa, he signed a memorandum of understanding with the Orissa government.
The government has identified 8,000 acres of land for the campus and plans to pass specific legislation to give the university complete administrative autonomy, according to a written statement by Werner Kreuz, managing director of A.T. Kearney, Germany, the consulting firm that is handling the project.
That autonomy will set Vedanta University apart from India’s most respected higher-education institutions, such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Management, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the University of Delhi, and the University of Mumbai, all of which are state-run.
Although the country has made public higher education a priority, the existing institutions struggle to accommodate India’s college-bound population, and many within the system criticize universities’ emphasis on rote learning and say they do not adequately prepare graduates for the job market.
Mr. Agarwal has high hopes for Vedanta University’s contribution to higher education in India. “The Vedanta University will make global standards of educational excellence more accessible to future generations of our country, thereby creating tomorrow’s Nobel laureates, Olympic champions, and heads of government and state,” Mr. Agarwal said after Wednesday’s ceremony, according to a news release.
As the university’s enrollment grows past 100,000, it is also likely to absorb a substantial portion of the Indian students who might otherwise have been expected to pursue a higher education abroad. More than 80,000 Indian students came to the United States in 2004-5, representing the largest foreign contingent on American campuses, according to data reported last fall by the Institute of International Education. Substantial numbers of Indian students also study in Australia, Britain, and Canada.
To design the master plan for the university, the Anil Agarwal Foundation has appointed Ayers/Saint/Gross, an architecture firm in Baltimore. The firm has 90 years of experience with higher-education projects, and has designed buildings and facilities at such institutions as Duke University, Georgetown University, and Swarthmore College.
Dhiru Thadani, the project’s lead master planner, said in a written statement that “this is the project that I have been training for all of my life — to apply my 30 years of architecture and planning experience to further develop India as a knowledge economy.”
