Last year, Harvard University was the recipient of Rs 270 crore of donations from two Indian business houses. Anand Mahindra, Vice-Chairman and Managing Director of Mahindra and Mahindra, who graduated from Harvard in 1977 and earned an MBA degree in 1981, gifted Rs 45 crore to Harvard’s Humanities Centre, the largest for the centre so far. A few days later, the Tata Group pitched in with Rs 225 crore — the largest international donation in the school’s 102-year history. Ratan Tata was a student of the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard in 1975. Harvard is just one example of how Indian business leaders have opened their purse strings to express gratitude to their alma mater. In fact, many Ivy League colleges and the Indian Institutes of Technology have benefitted from such generosity. Consider the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay which has in the past decade, built a corpus worth Rs 200 crore from donations. Its counterparts, IIT Madras and IIT Delhi, have raised around Rs 100 crore and 75 crore, respectively, over the same period. IIT Bombay’s mantra is to encourage smaller donations from alumni across the world. So even if half its 40,000-strong alumni choose to donate a mere Rs 10,000 each to their alma mater, IIT Bombay would have access to an additional Rs 20 crore at its disposal. This is all very good — after all, alumni donations remain a major source of sustenance for many reputed institutes all over the world.
But what is surprising is that this large-heartedness on the part of businessmen has not reached the campuses of the country’s premier management institutes, even though many of India’s corporate leaders chair the governing boards of various Indian institutes. Even the oldest and most prestigious IIMs — Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata — cannot boast of a corpus of more than Rs 5 to 10 crore through donations from their alumni. IIMs are justifiably unhappy with Indian corporate houses donating internationally and cite this as instances of how there is a deep disconnect between Indian and global corporate leaders, the latter having imbibed the culture of giving back to their alma mater. It is also true that IITs have a historical advantage over IIMs as they have a much larger alumni base. IIMs also argue that IITs have produced many more entrepreneurs who have made fortunes in Silicon Valley. While the former argument is partly true, the latter is not. IIMs too have their share of celebrated CEOs and managers in India and abroad, though many of them have not been generous in giving back.
It’s time IIMs looked within to find an answer to this anomaly. There is no denying that IIMs have not done enough to tap their alumni base, a key source of funds via donations, and many in IIMs privately agree that it is only now that some of them are putting in place a strategy on fund-raising. The IIM Ahmedabad Alumni Association in UK, for example, recently resented the fact that there has been no organised mechanism to enable ‘giving back’. It then took the cue from IIT Bombay and asked its members to pledge three days’ income to the alumni trust. But these are isolated efforts and IIMs must take a leaf out of the books of Ivy League colleges which have tapped their alumni network so well that alumni form a majority of the boards for these institutes. Perhaps Harvard University would be generous enough to provide IIMs a possible case study on the art of fund raising.
