The Bharti family has pledged 10% of its wealth, or around £700 million, to philanthropy and announced its plan to set up a new university to offer free education to underprivileged. The commitment includes 3% stake it holds in Bharti Airtel, group chairman Sunil Mittal said. Mittal said talks have been initiated for a partnership of Bharti Foundation with global leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, among others, for tieups, although the details are yet to be worked out.
While £100 million will be used to build the university campus, a sizeable chunk will be allocated to meet the annual requirement for around 10,000 students. A part of the funds will be allocated for scaling up the existing Satya Bharti School Programme, said Rakesh Mittal, vice-chairman of Bharti Enterprises and co-chairman of Bharti Foundation. With funds earmarked for Bharti Foundation, the group is working out the details, involving some restructuring.
Mittals’ announcement came days after Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and his wife Rohini Nilekani committed half their wealth to philanthropy by joining the ‘The Giving Pledge’, a movement spearheaded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Sunil Mittal said he had discussed the issue with Gates and decided to focus on education as the core area.
Initial feedback shows that the proposed Satya Bharti University for Science and Technology may not be able to get its full quota of students from the underprivileged and meritorious category and will prompt the university to look at candidates beyond the focus group, who will pay the prevailing fee in government colleges. “We are not in this for business... In Satya Bharti School programme there is zero fee, we do not charge anything, and even here, the idea is to bring meritorious underprivileged students to give them education,” he said.
He said the proposed university will come up on a 100-acre land and “active discussions” are on with various states, including Punjab and Haryana, and indicated that the facility will come up near Delhi or Chandigarh to attract top-notch professors, including some from overseas.
