The Golden Decade Begins

In 2014, IIT Madras raised about fifteen crore rupees in a year. A decade later it raised five hundred and thirteen crore. Its charter did not change in between. Its alumni did not become wealthy overnight. What changed was that the institute learned to ask properly, and learned to receive properly. That sentence carries most of what I want to argue here. India has never had a giving problem. India has had an asking problem. The asking has now begun, and it has begun at the top of the system.

The evidence is no longer anecdotal

IIT Madras raised roughly Rs 100 crore in FY21. Three years later it crossed Rs 513 crore, of which alumni alone gave Rs 368 crore. Pledges worth a further Rs 717 crore followed behind them. Sunil Wadhwani endowed Rs 110 crore there for a school of data science. These are not reunion collections dressed up for a press release. These are gifts with architecture behind them.

IIT Bombay has travelled the same road from a different direction. Nandan Nilekani gave Rs 315 crore in 2023, taking his lifetime support to Rs 400 crore. It remains the largest private gift ever made to an Indian academic institution. He gave it largely untied and said so publicly, leaving the institute to decide its use. IIT Bombay then announced a target of five hundred million dollars by 2030. Two founders of BrowserStack added Rs 100 crore for hostels in 2025. The Class of 1971 had given Rs 41 crore at its golden jubilee. The Class of 1998 gave Rs 57 crore at its silver. At IIT Delhi, the Class of 2000 has now pledged more than Rs 70 crore. Each cohort is quietly outbidding the one before it, and that is exactly what a maturing culture of giving looks like.

The management schools are moving on the same current, though they set out from further back. IIM Ahmedabad launched its endowment in 2020 with Rs 100 crore from ten founding alumni and set itself a thousand crore ambition. Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon later endowed Rs 100 crore for a school of artificial intelligence. A decade ago none of this had a name, a team, or a governance structure. Today it has all three, and that is the real change.

IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta are instructive for a different reason. Mathew Cyriac of the 1994 batch gave IIM Bangalore Rs 17.5 crore to build the country’s first private equity centre inside an academic institution. The gift funds a chair professorship, scholarships and four named classrooms. It is also, tellingly, the largest single alumni gift the institute has ever received. At IIM Calcutta, the Class of 1992 gave Rs 3.24 crore, which renovated classrooms and endowed a chair. Both schools have run reunion giving for years and run it well. IIM Bangalore’s alumni once raised Rs 2 crore simply to name a classroom after a professor they loved, and left the money untied.

Now hold that beside the technology institutes. A single IIT batch today pledges fifty to seventy crore at its silver jubilee. A leading business school announces its largest ever alumni gift at seventeen and a half. The difference is not wealth, and it is certainly not affection. IIM alumni sit in private equity, banking and consulting, which is exactly where personal liquidity is most concentrated in this country. The difference is that the technology institutes learned to ask in crores while the business schools were still asking in lakhs. IIM Calcutta still sets its reunion batch minimum at twenty five lakh. That is a ceiling wearing the costume of a floor.

Now stand these numbers beside the West

Harvard’s endowment stood at 56.9 billion dollars on 30 June 2025, after a return of 11.9 percent, and paid out roughly 2.5 billion dollars in a single year. MIT held 27.4 billion dollars and took in about 680 million dollars of philanthropy in twelve months. Penn held 24.8 billion dollars across more than 8,900 separate endowments, and drew 1.12 billion dollars from that corpus to run the university for one year. Oxford holds 4.2 billion pounds centrally, with a further 5.06 billion in its colleges. Oxford received 227 million pounds in donations in 2023-24 and Cambridge received 150 million, which between them was nearly half of everything given to British universities that year. American higher education as a whole raised more than 78 billion dollars in FY2025.

Set against this, our best year looks small. MIT collects in twelve months roughly what our finest institutions have collected in a decade. It is tempting to read that as failure, and much Indian commentary does. It is not failure. It is arithmetic. Harvard began compounding in 1638 and Oxford has been accepting gifts for eight hundred years. IIT Madras opened a professional advancement office in 2015. We are not behind these institutions. We are earlier on the same curve.

The gap between us and Harvard is not a gap in generosity. It is a gap in time, and time is the one variable that closes on its own.

Read the slope, not the height

Harvard and Penn now grow their annual giving in low single digits. IIT Madras has multiplied its annual fundraising more than thirty times in ten years. No Western institution can produce that number again, because nobody can compound from a small base twice. Ours can, and several will. Maturity buys stability and surrenders velocity. We hold the opposite trade at present, and velocity is the more useful asset when a corpus is being built rather than defended.

There is a second point that Indian commentary has largely missed. The Western model is under strain for the first time in living memory. Harvard posted a 113 million dollar operating deficit in FY2025 despite a record endowment, after federal research funding was suspended mid year. A new excise tax on endowment income now applies across the sector, and Penn expects a four percent levy from July 2026. Mature philanthropy is meeting political risk. Ours is meeting open ground. Capital that wants to build something rather than defend something will notice the difference.

Why the wealth is finally within reach

India now counts 358 dollar billionaires, and listed wealth grew at close to two thousand crore a day. The composition matters more than the total. Almost all of this wealth is first generation. Inherited money gives slowly, through committees and family offices. Founders give through conviction, and they give while they are alive to see it spent. The men and women who can transform an Indian campus are still in the room, still working, and still reachable.

The decisive change, though, has come from the institution’s side rather than the donor’s. By March 2025, HEFA had sanctioned Rs 43,438 crore across 109 institutions, with the IITs and AIIMS taking nearly two thirds of it. Under that arrangement, grants effectively became loans, and the principal must be repaid from internal accruals. A review by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy found heads of premier institutions under genuine financial strain. The ministry’s guidance was to raise fees and cut costs. Philanthropy is therefore no longer an ornament on the annual report. It has become a line item in solvency, and that changes who gets hired, who gets heard, and who sits in the room when strategy is set.

IIM Calcutta has lived inside this reality longer than anyone. It has received no government support since 2003 and has funded itself from internal accruals ever since. What HEFA has recently imposed on the technology institutes, the older business schools absorbed quietly two decades ago. That experience should make them our most sophisticated fundraisers. It has not, and the reason is worth sitting with. Necessity produces thrift far more reliably than it produces ambition.

The profession has arrived alongside the need. IIT Madras built an Office of Institutional Advancement in 2015. IIT Bombay built a development and relations foundation. IIM Ahmedabad built an endowment company with its own board. India also holds two instruments that no Western university possesses. Corporate giving here is statutory, and our leading institutes now draw tens of crores a year from CSR alone. Harvard has no equivalent pool to reach into, and never will. The second instrument is the diaspora. IIT Bombay runs a registered charitable foundation in the United States, and IIT Madras runs another with a hundred million dollar endowment goal. Through these, an American donor can support an Indian campus and claim an American deduction. No British or European university can convert its overseas alumni on those terms. Our graduates left in large numbers and prospered abroad, and the tax code of their adopted country now works quietly in our favour.

What the West does that we still do not

The distance between us is not a distance in generosity. It is a distance in method, and method can be learned faster than wealth can be created. Five habits separate them from us. The first is that they endow while we spend. Penn holds more than 8,900 individual endowments, each designed to outlive the donor who created it. Most Indian gifts are consumed within the year they arrive, which turns philanthropy into an income stream rather than a capital base. The second is that they measure participation and not merely totals. Alumni participation rate is a governance metric at Harvard and Oxford, and very few Indian institutes publish it at all. Yet the capability plainly exists here. In FY23, roughly 55 percent of IIT Gandhinagar’s alumni gave something to their institute. The sum was modest at about Rs 70 lakh. The participation rate would flatter many American colleges. One young Indian campus has already proved that the habit can be built on our own soil, which means the rest is a matter of choosing to build it.

The third is that they build the annual fund before they chase the transformational gift. The Penn Fund alone raised over seventy million dollars from undergraduate alumni in a single year, in small and repeated amounts. That habit of modest annual giving is what makes the eventual large gift possible, and we have almost none of it. The fourth is that they ask for unrestricted money and are given it. Nilekani’s untied gift was remarkable here precisely because it would have been unremarkable there. The fifth is that their campaigns outlive their leaders. A Western campaign runs for ten years while an Indian director typically serves five, which means our strategy must be built to survive the person who signed it. To these five I would add a sixth that we have barely begun. They practise planned giving, and bequests form a serious share of Western totals. In India, legacy giving scarcely exists.

The three questions that decide the decade

A record year is not a pipeline, and momentum is not yet a machine. Three questions will determine whether this becomes a decade or merely a moment. Will the corpus be protected, or quietly consumed to plug operating gaps when a budget tightens? Will participation be measured honestly, or will only headline totals be announced at press conferences? Will the advancement office survive a change of director, or begin again from zero every five years? None of these is a fundraising question. All three are governance questions, and that is precisely where the risk sits.

The verge is real

India’s premier institutions are not laggards in global philanthropy. They are early entrants, arriving at the exact moment when their alumni are wealthiest, their donors are youngest, and their old funding model has run out of room. Harvard took three hundred and eighty eight years to build its endowment. Our best institutions have taken barely a decade to build the offices that might build one. The wealth is here, the alumni are ready, and the financial pressure is real. What remains is discipline.

The next ten years will settle one question only. Whether this was a surge, or a system.

Sources: financial reports, giving pages and press releases of IIT Madras, IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Gandhinagar, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta; the IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation and IIT Madras Foundation; Harvard, MIT and Penn FY2025 financial reports; University of Oxford endowment disclosures; Times Higher Education analysis of UK university donations 2023-24; CASE Insights on Voluntary Support of Education 2025; M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025; EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List 2025; HEFA sanction data to March 2025 and the NIPFP review of HEFA.