CII, Asia Foundation to gift books

Asia Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, USA that has been donating books through its Books for Asia programme to universities, colleges, schools, libraries and public institutions for the past 52 years, and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) will jointly organise a gift of books to universities in north-eastern India.

Based on discussions in April 2006, CII and The Asia Foundation signed a MoU for the Books for Asia programme for distributing books to nine universities in the north east. The universities are Nagaland University, Tripura University, Manipur University, Dibrugarh University, North Eastern Hill University, Tezpur University, Guwahati University, Rajiv Gandhi University, Itanagar and  Mizoram University.

Gavin Tritt, director, Books for Asia, The Asia Foundation, was in Kolkata last week to co-ordinate the donation and distribution, and review long-term areas of co-operation between The Asia Foundation and CII.

The foundation provided more than $53 million in support and distributed 9,20,000 books and educational material valued at $30 million throughout Asia in 2006.