Founder chancellor of Indian private university donates Rs. 1 crore (US $ 166,666) to PM Relief Fund

Last updated on 8th November 2014

Here is a tweet from PMO India with a pic of SRM university, http://www.srmuniv.ac.in/index.html, chancellor (and others) donating Rs. 1 crore (Rs. 10 million which comes to 166,666 US dollars, at Rs. 60 to 1 US Dollar) to PM National Relief Fund (perhaps meant for Jammu & Kashmir flood relief), https://twitter.com/PMOIndia/status/513257413512675328.

From SRM university's wiki page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRM_University:
The SRM University (Sri Ramaswamy Memorial University), formerly SRM Institute of Science and Technology, is a co-educational private university in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. It was founded in 1985 as SRM Engineering College in Kattankulathur, under University of Madras. It now has four campuses in Tamil Nadu—Kattankulathur, Ramapuram, Vadapalani and Tiruchirapalli—and three in the rest of India such as Modinagar near Delhi, Sonepat in Haryana and Gangtok in Sikkim. The institute gained deemed status during the 2003-2004 academic year and was renamed SRM Institute of Science and Technology. It became SRM University in 2006, when it attained the status of a full-fledged university, under section 3 of the UGC Act 1956.

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I think, whether one likes it or not, private universities in India have truly come of age, are here to stay, and have become a significant power to reckon with in the higher education sector. I think this is the first time I have come across/noted an Indian university top-shot donating a significant amount to the govt. Usually one reads about Indian universities requesting money from the government!

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Update on 8th Nov. 2014

Around a week ago, The Hindu carried this article, VIT varsity gives Rs. 1 crore for Cyclone Hudhud victims, http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Visakhapatnam/vit-varsity-gives-rs-1-crore-for-cyclone-hudhud-victims/article6553111.ece.

The article has a photograph of top management-level persons of VIT, a well known deemed university of Tamil Nadu, a neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh, handing over a demand draft pf Rs. 1 Crore (166,666 US dollars at Rs. 60 to 1 US Dollar) to Andhra Pradesh chief minister, Shri N. Chandrababu Naidu. A small extract from the article and comments on it (Mr. Vishwanathan mentioned below is the founder chancellor of VIT):

"Mr. Vishwanathan said that the VIT was deeply concerned at the loss of lives, property and crops in Vishakhapatnam due to the recent cyclone. “Majority of students at VIT University are from Andhra Pradesh and we wanted to like them to know that we are here for them in their time of loss,” he said."

[Ravi: I very much appreciate this sentiment. To put it in a blunt way, they make money from the Andhra Pradesh (AP) students and so when AP faces big problems they want to give back to AP some of the money they made from their students. That's nice.]

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Ravi: So VIT, which in a sense is a competitor to SRM, the other deemed university mentioned earlier in the post, has matched SRM's contribution to govt. relief funds! Nice to see them match each other in such CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) work.