Caring for the alma mater

At the library of the Kalpana Chawla Space Technology Centre.-ARUNANGSU ROY CHOWDHURY

Alumni of IIT Kharagpur show their gratitude by contributing to and collaborating with their alma mater.

At the library

ALUMNI of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur have done their institution proud by carving a name for themselves in various fields all over the world. Each in his or her own way has also extended help and support to the alma mater to help it maintain its position of pre-eminence in the country.

An academic institute is judged by its alumni and their achievements. By that analysis, IIT Kharagpur is a premier institute. Its students have made their mark in diverse fields across the world.

Sushantha Kumar Bhattacharyya was awarded the Commander of the British Empire, a knighthood, and the Padma Bhushan; and V.C. Kulandaiswamy the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan. Mani Lal Bhaumik invented the excimer laser, Srikumar Banerjee became the director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, and the list goes on.In the corporate world, too, IIT Kharagpur can boast former students such as Suhas Patil, who founded Cirrus Logic; Arjun Malhotra, the co-founder of HCL Technologies; Vinod Gupta, founder, CEO and chairman of infoUSA, Inc; Ajit Jain, the president of Berkshire Hathaways Reinsurance Group; and Arun Sarin, the CEO of Vodafone.

Most IIT Kharagpur alumni are strongly attached to the institute, and many of them try to pay back a little bit of what they got during their stay at IIT Kharagpur.

The G.S. Sanyal School of Telecommunications at IIT Kharagpur was set up in 1996 and named after a faculty member and former director of the institute. Arjun Malhotra and his wife Kiran made an endowment for setting up this school as a centre of excellence, which will collaborate with industry, academia and professional bodies.

Vinod Gupta, a 1967 graduate, helped set up the Vinod Gupta School of Management and the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law.

Vinod Guptas infoUSA, Inc, headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, is a publicly held company with 2,000 employees and an annual revenue of more than $300 million.

Gupta went to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln for an M.S. in agricultural engineering and a masters in business administration. As a marketing research analyst with a company manufacturing mobile homes, he had to evaluate the performance of rival companies.

It was then that he found how difficult it was to get information and how the information that one got turned obsolete very soon. That led him to the idea of starting the American Business Information Inc, now known as infoUSA, Inc, which made a modest profit of $22,000 in its first year.

The lists prepared by the company soon became cost-saving marketing tools for small businesses in the United States, and thus the company took off. Gupta subsequently became an American citizen but is conscious of his Indian roots and contributes generously to his alma mater. He gave $2 million to establish the Vinod Gupta School of Management, to be modelled after the School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also established a state-of-the-art science block at the school he went to in Rampur, which was inaugurated by former U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2003.

Gupta donated $1 million to set up a womens polytechnic in Rampur and is establishing a multimedia training institute for women in Rampur, named after Hillary Clinton. He has also donated $2 million to establish a curriculum for small business management at the University of Nebraska.

Vinod Gupta has been quoted saying that it was at IIT Kharagpur that he discovered a different India, and is ever grateful for this awakening and for the solid foundation on which he built his career.

IIT Kharagpur is internationally recognised in the area of microelectronics and VLSI (very-large-scale integration) design. Financial inputs from alumni helped set up the Advanced VLSI Design Laboratory.

Contributions from distinguished alumni, such as Arjun Malhotra, Suhas Patil, Purnendu Chatterjee and Suni Munshani, made the project a reality. Many companies, including the National Semiconductor Corporation, Synopsys Inc., Cadence Design Systems, Sun Microsystems and Agilent Technologies, helped in developing this laboratory.

U.S.-based alumni have started a project called Vision 2020. It is part of a fundraising effort, the objective of which is to raise a $200-million-endowment fund by 2020 to enable IIT Kharagpur to maintain and enhance its position of global leadership and excellence in technical education, research and innovation. The institute, in turn, honours two batches of alumni every year and invites them to spend a weekend with their alma mater. This gives them a chance to see how the institute has evolved since they graduated.