An Indian entrepreneur in the UK plans to set up a new trust with a starting corpus of around 1 million pound to help fund PhD level research of students from Oxford and Cambridge on positive impacts of the British empire on India.
Kartar Lalvani, founder-chairman of Vitabotics group and a philanthropist and historian, announced the "Indo-British Legacy Trust" as part of the launch of his latest book 'The Making of India: The Untold Story of British Enterprise' in London this week.
All proceeds from the sale of his book will also go into the trust, which will be aimed at students affiliated to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
"Oxford and Cambridge because these are the two leading British universities that have given India many great minds and the best of British talent," Lalvani said.
"The details of the workings of the trust are being finalised and will be launched soon but the central idea is to offer grants to students who wish to conduct in-depth study into the vast contributions the British made to India," he added.
Lalvani's book has 22 chapters, each of which focus on various aspects of British contributions that led to the creation of a unified India.
"It was the great British enterprise and its contributions in the 19th and 20th centuries which helped create a unified India, out of multi-cultural, multi-linguistic and divided regions of the vast Indian-subcontinent," Lalvani argues in the book born out of his urge to tell the other side of the story of British colonialism.
"I always felt we have only got a negative and distorted one-sided narrative of the Raj era and I wanted to highlight that India too benefitted under British rule," he said.
Founded in 1971, Vitabotics became the largest vitamin company in the UK by value sales in July 2013. The company's turnover is about USD 371 million a year and is driven by Lalvani's son Tej.
