Why your next IIT, IIM reunion will feel like a sales pitch

Rachel Varghese (0:00)

I don't think anyone ever forgets their college hostel or dorm room.

ACs that dripped, or fans with missing regulators, a door with a lock that never fully shut, the way you decorated your wall, the kind of posters you had up, or the designated messy corner that you refused to look at. Now, imagine if you could have your name on that room. Turns out, at IIT, or the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, you can. For a price.

SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

8 lakhs at IIT Bombay gets you a hostel room that's named after you for as long as the building stands.

Rachel Varghese (0:38)

You just heard my colleague, Santam Joseph, a reporter at The Ken. He told me that the name of the person who donated goes on a colored marker outside the room door. In fact, there was even a room at IIT Bombay with a marker that said Room 701, Jaydev Kulkarni.

And if you can't pay the full amount upfront, there are installment options as well. And at IIT Delhi, a similar named hostel room costs a little more, just 10 lakh rupees. But rooms aren't the only thing on the list.

SPEAKER_2 (1:12)

You can also get less glamorous parts of the campus named after you like a cycle stand. So at IIT Delhi, this is around 1.5 crore.

Rachel Varghese (1:22)

So rooms and cycle stands are just a part of a much bigger shift at some of India's top public institutes. You see, the IITs and IIMs, or the Indian Institutes of Management, are being encouraged to depend less on funds from the central government. And so, they are turning to their alumni.

But even though this shift has been going on for about a decade, the latest playbook for the institutes is the Silver Jubilee Reunion, when a batch comes together 25 years after their graduation. Here, the university can go several steps beyond an individual donation. They can now turn an entire graduating batch into a fundraising pool. Santhom and our colleague Mutasim worked on this story together. Both are alumni of the institutes they covered. Santhom went to IIT Madras and Mutasim went to IIT Kanpur. And they're joining us today on Daybreak to get into how the reunion became a fundraising machine and how not everyone is on board with this new wave.

Over the last five years or so, alumni funding has grown into a serious revenue stream for the top IITs. So, I asked Santham, why that was the case now?

SPEAKER_2 (3:02)

The fundamental thing that's happening here is that these universities are trying to diversify away from central funding. So, central funding comes with a lot of strings attached, and it's dwindling anyway. So, what these universities are doing is that they're trying to sort of recreate the Western model of endowments. So, if you look at MIT or Harvard, they have these huge endowments, like massive endowments, and the interest that you get on these endowments is enough for you to like start new projects in the campus. So, this is basically what our institutes are also trying to do.

And so, they're creating sort of like the institutional infrastructure that's required to ask for money, like development foundations and stuff. And alumni are also sort of more willing to donate, because the culture is sort of getting recreated in the country and institutes are asking and alumni are giving.

Rachel Varghese (3:57)

Mutasim and Santham went through the accounts of the oldest IITs, Madras, Bombay and Kanpur. They picked these institutes because their recent fundraising data was publicly available. Data for IIT Kharagpur was dated and most of the newer IITs were not old enough to have reached the silver jubilee milestone yet. IIMs, on the other hand, do not publicly disclose the 25 year reunion fundraising figures. So, a like for like comparison would have been difficult. And they found that while government funding is still the institute's largest source, philanthropy makes up around a fourth of what they get from the government. In fact, the ratio has actually doubled in four years. From 9 to 14% in FY21 to 27 to 31% just last year.

IIT Kanpur, for example, brought in 256 crore rupees in philanthropic funding last year.

Here's Mutasim's explanation for what that number includes.

SPEAKER_3 (4:58)

Even though we are tracking the change from 2021 to 2024-25, it's the 2024-25 numbers that are big with all these IITs. So for example, with the IIT Kanpur, when you see a 265 crore number, out of that 100 crores came from a single batch, which was batch of 2000, for example. So it is these single batches that are contributing to a large part of this philanthropic funding.