Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra has pledged INR 500 crore to the upcoming Mahindra University in Hyderabad. This amount is 10 times the INR 48 crore ($10 million in 2010 valuation) that he pledged to Harvard University nearly 14 years ago.
Speaking to TOI, he said, “My family and I are announcing a INR 500-crore pledge to Mahindra University, which will be spread over five years starting this year.” This, he clarified, will be in addition to the INR 50-crore he has pledged for the Indira Mahindra School of Education endowed in his mother’s name, at the Mahindra University. “This year there will be a disbursal of INR 100 crore plus INR 50 crore and in the ensuing four years, it will be INR 100 crore per year,” he said.
Spread over a 130-acre campus — which used to house the erstwhile Satyam R&D centre — MU has set up a school of law, a school of management and a school of education and there are plans for a School of Hospitality, as well as School of Liberal Arts. MU is headed by Anand Mahindra as chancellor and Dr Yajulu Medury as vice-chancellor. Apart from the five schools, the university also has four centres of excellence for entrepreneurship and innovation, for executive education, for life sciences and for sustainability.
Established in May 2020 as the brainchild of former vice-chairman of Tech Mahindra Vineet Nayar, Mahindra University’s aim is to educate “future citizens for and of a better world”, driven by the need for multi-skilling, interdisciplinary academic education, and inculcation of entrepreneurial mindsets.As for the Harvard grant, it was, he said, a way of giving back to the institution which had offered him a full scholarship to study liberal arts because “at that time foreign exchange was not given for undergraduate liberal arts education”, he said. Today, the feedback he gets from other scholarship students is that it is a “matter of pride as they are now treated as people who can also give back later so they walk around the campus with their head held high”, he said.
