IIT Madras raises ₹700 crore as endowment fund – Mint

An endowment fund is a new phenomenon in the Indian higher education space unlike the US education sector. It gives elbow room to an institution to further research and development, student aid, and academic expansion.

IIT Madras aims to garner around ₹800 crore more for deep impact research in areas ranging from ocean science to port technology to defence-related research.

“We don’t talk about endowment fund. Let me tell you we have already raised an endowment corpus of almost ₹700 crore,” IIT Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthy said.

The institution is readying a strategic plan for the next 5-10 years and will set its next target for the endowment corpus, which could be substantially higher. “In the next five years, our endowment fund will be substantially higher. When we started, we had around ₹200 crore, and in five years or so we have reached ₹700 crore (by the end of 2020),” Ramamurthy said in an interview.

The director said he will soon give a number for the next target for the endowment fund, which his institute will be able to meet.

The ₹700 crore corpus is one of the biggest for an Indian institution and underlines the capacity of IIT Madras to raise funds from external sources to complement the grants it gets from the Union government. IIT Delhi has also started an endowment fund with an initial corpus of around ₹250 crore in October 2019 and plans to raise $1 billion by 2025-26.

Endowment funds are a big source of income for top global universities, which use a portion of it for development work and scholarships. Harvard University has an endowment corpus of more than $39 billion, while Stanford has an endowment corpus of $27.7 billion.

The Union government is encouraging top educational institutions to raise funds. In a recent meeting of the IIT Council it was decided to set up a committee on innovative funding mechanisms.

Ramamurthy said nearly 50% of the money IIT Madras gets is from the ministry of education and the rest from other sources, including industry consultancy and sponsored research. Government funding is crucial for paying faculty members, staff, scholarships to doctoral students, and infrastructure development, he said. “No donor will pay me money for paying the staff or for pension payment,” he explained. Donors give money for high-impact projects, he said.

IIT Madras is building a 163-acre campus for deep research work. Increasingly some research needs specialized built-to-purpose facilities, which will be created in the new campus, which Ramamurthy calls a discovery campus.

In the next five to seven years, the IIT expects 10-15 such high impact research centres in the new campus with the funding for each of these centres varying between ₹50 crore and ₹70 crore.