The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad’s (IIM-A) efforts to replenish its dwindling corpus seems to finally reaping benefits. Even as IIM-A sets a target of raising Rs 250 crore by December 2011, the premier B-school has received a contribution committment of Rs 2.3 crore from its 1989 batch, making it arguably the largest single gift by any batch to any management institution.
Interestingly, in all these years since its inception, the institute has received financial contribution of close to Rs 2 crore only. "We realised that the deficit that we were running at had to be replenished. If we look at other global B-schools including Harvard, these institutes have a corpus worth billions of dollars. If IIM-A has to create its standard globally then it should not only be in terms of academic quality but also self sufficiency in terms of a huge corpus.
Considering this, we have embarked on raising Rs 250 crore through alumni contributions alone by December 2011," said Arvind Sahay, chairperson, alumni relations and resource generation at IIM-A. It was a result of these efforts that the institute, recently, received a committment from three alumni batches including 1984, 1989 and 1998. Of these, while 1989 batch pledged the highest contribution of Rs 2.3 crore, 1984 batch gave a committment of a gift worth Rs one crore while 1998 batch for Rs 65 lakhs.
Of the several prominent names in the 1989 batch include Rasesh Shah, chairman of Edelweiss, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder of Naukri.com, Nirmal Jain, chief executive officer of India Infoline, Rahul Bhasin, managing partner for Bearing Private Equity, among others.
Apart from alumni, the institute also intends to tap corporates to fund activities like management fairs, reunions, etc., Sahay added. "We have also scheduled 25 year, 30 year and 40 year reunions for several of the batches in the coming years to enhance the institute-alumni interaction," said Sahay.
