When KV Ramani, a co-founder of Nasscom and a software entrepreneur, exited his businesses — Future Software and Hughes Software — in 2004, he did something unusual. Ramani kept just 12 percent for his family and placed more than 85 percent in the Sri Sai Trust, which he had set up. The corpus was worth around Rs 325-350 crore back then. The trust, till date, does not accept donations — it gives thousands of scholarships to first-generation graduates, supports 4,000 people with emergency medical care needs and provides 5,000 meals a day to people all over India. It has also funded nearly 450 Sai temples all over the country.
The 70-year-old entrepreneur and philanthropist is now gearing up for his next mission—to build, in his words, the Stanford of India. Ramani is the founder-chancellor of Sai University, an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary university that started functioning in August 2021. Located on Old Mahabalipuram Road in Chennai, it will start with three undergraduate programmes in the liberal arts, science and technology, apart from one postgraduate course in law.
“We are doing education as a service and not education as a business. When you are doing education as a service, you don’t want to take a single rupee out of it; you want to put in more to make sure it succeeds,” says Ramani. He spoke to Moneycontrol on his vision for the university, why India is lacking in this sphere, and how spirituality anchors him. Edited excerpts:
After several years, Sai University has finally come to fruition. How did it start?
The key purpose and vision to start Sai University is that India needs major reforms in the higher-education sector. In the past 75 years, since independence, we have not had one Indian University in the top 50 of the world. I think the first one comes in the top 150.
Where is all the investment that India is making in education? Are we investing in the wrong direction, people and infrastructure? Our vision for Sai University came out of the hunger to create a higher education institution of global eminence in India.
India has the world’s second-largest population and we want to offer better higher education and opportunities for our youngsters in more emerging technologies, services and industries.
This year, 55,000 Indian students were granted student visas to the US, the highest ever. We should be ashamed that the top talent is going abroad and we cannot provide them with opportunities here. There is also an economic disadvantage. A student going abroad for higher education will spend about Rs 25 to 30 lakh a year, which translates to Rs 13,000 crore in forex outflow per year. There is no point in complaining about the brain drain and all when we are not catering to the requirements of our own youngsters. That’s a fundamental fault. We are trying to pick that ball by creating Sai University.
Read More at https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/meet-kv-ramani-who-donated-80-of-his-wealth-to-shirdi-sai-baba-and-is-now-building-sai-university-7670061.html
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