A Man of Indian Origin Managed $57 Billion for Harvard. Why Can't Our Universities Do the Same?

A few months ago, I was presenting the five-year fundraising strategy to the board of a private university in Delhi NCR. The room had board members, senior faculty leadership, and most importantly, several prominent donors who had agreed to fund the implementation of the plan itself. By most measures, it was an encouraging room to be in.

Then one of the UHNI who also happened to be the founder donor, a very well-known businessman from Mumbai, the kind of person whose name appears in the business pages more often than he'd probably like, raised his hand.

He didn't seem interested in the section of the strategy, which focussed on the Endowment gifts. He didn't want an endowment. He wanted to fund what the university needed now. Buildings. Faculty positions. Scholarships. Real, tangible, urgent things. The endowment felt too abstract to him, the money parked away for some future he couldn't picture, while the present need was was pressing.

I've heard versions of this in almost every institution of higher learning that I've worked with in 28 years. It is not a bad instinct. It is an impatient one.

My answer to him was this: "We need both. And the endowment helps you do both."

He looked unconvinced while started to move ahead.

I read this morning that Nirmal Narvekar, a man of Indian origin, known simply as "Narv" in Ivy League circles, is stepping down after nearly a decade managing Harvard to $57 billion endowment. Fifty-seven billion dollars. Managed by one person. Of Indian origin.

Harvard's endowment is 3.5 times larger than India's entire central education budget.

Yale's stands at $44 billion. Stanford's at $41 billion. Princeton's at $36 billion. These are not governments. They are universities. They do not depend on a budget cycle or an annual allocation. They generate income from permanent capital, year after year, to fund the very things my Mumbai donor cared about: scholarships, buildings, faculty, research.

An endowment is not money parked away from the present. It is the machinery that makes the present sustainable.

When Narvekar arrived at Harvard in 2016, the investment arm was notorious for dysfunction and weak returns. He restructured it entirely, outsourcing roughly 90% of assets to elite hedge funds and private equity firms, shifting from conventional securities to alternative investments. Over the next decade, Harvard generated annualised returns of 8.1%, outperforming its peers. The strategy worked not because it was clever, but because it was patient. It was built for the long horizon. It was built for the future, it was crafted for sustainability and growth.

That is exactly what most Indian institutions of higher learning refuse to think in.

I do not say this to be unkind. I say it because I have seen it up close for nearly three decades.

Our public universities, IITs, IIMs depend overwhelmingly on government funding. Our private universities subsist on tuition fees and the goodwill of founding trusts. Development offices, where they exist at all, are often staffed by one overworked person with a donor list in a spreadsheet, no gift acceptance policy, and no fundraising strategy worth the name. I know there are exceptions to this like Ashoka University , Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay , Indian Institute of Management Bangalore , Plaksha University but they are few and far in between.

And yet, and this is the part that keeps me going; India does not lack donors.

The Mumbai businessman in that boardroom was not unwilling. He was uninspired by abstraction. He needed to see how an endowment would fund the scholarship wing he cared about, permanently, in perpetuity, without the university having to ask again.

So I showcaed him. A ₹10 crore endowment gift, conservatively invested, generates ₹60–70 lakhs annually in perpetuity. Enough to fund ten full scholarships every year, forever, with his name on the fund and the flexibility to direct a portion to current operational needs during the build-up phase.

Once the abstraction became concrete, he was interested. He didn't stop caring about the present. He started caring about both.

This is not a funding crisis. It is a fundraising imagination and donor stewardship crisis.

The most generous donors are always those who lend flexibility to these institutions of higher learning to utilize their donation, wherever its required the most. And trust me as a fundraiser, such donations deliver maximum impact and donor's delight can be seen in action.

Nalanda was funded by merchant guilds and royal patrons who understood that knowledge is the highest investment a civilisation can make. The concept of Daan in our tradition is not charity, it is the considered, intentional transfer of resources to a purpose that transcends the self. Sankalp, giving with deliberate, committed intent is a fundraising instrument of extraordinary sophistication, sitting undisturbed in our own texts.

We do not need to import the Yale model wholesale. We need to rediscover and recognise our own.

@IIT Kanpur, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras , Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and a handful of such institutions have begun building alumni-driven endowments. They are early movers in a field that should have been crowded by now.

What separates them from the rest is not prestige or resources. It's the decision.

Some forward thinking Director decided that the institution deserved to be funded permanently, not just annually. Some Vice Chancellor and the Founders decided that asking alumni and donors for endowment gifts was not a presumption, it was an invitation to belonging. It was the process of setting up the relationship in motion.

That decision has to come from the top. A Vice Chancellor who treats fundraising as a delegation will always be underfunded. A Director who walks into a donor's meeting alongside his development team sends an entirely different signal.

The professional infrastructure matters too, a well thought and designed endowment policy, a gift acceptance framework, legal literacy on FCRA provisions and 80G or 35AC benefits that most development offices cannot explain to a donor if pressed. These are learnable things. None of it is as complicated as it appears from the outside.

Back to the boardroom in Delhi NCR.

The Mumbai donor came around. Not because I convinced him with a framework, Fundraising is never ever about convincing the donor. It's always about undersatnding the donor's need and his desires around the outcome., but because the numbers showed him something he hadn't seen before. That an endowment gift and a current-use gift are not in competition. One funds the year. The other funds the century.

That is the conversation Indian institutions of higher learning need to learn. Not with a asking bowl. Not with a guilt pitch. With the quiet confidence of an institution that knows its own worth, whats its building and knows how to help a donor see theirs.Part of the problem is cultural.

Most Indian alumni still see education as a transaction they completed, not a lifelong institutional relationship they belong to. Universities reinforce this mistake by contacting alumni mostly only when they need money and seldom when they want participation, mentorship, or stewardship. The benchmark is did the donor feel happy and satisfied while making their gift. Were they thrilled?

The alumni, the donor, must experince "The joy of Giving", and not only when making the donation but all though their life.

Narvekar managed $57 billion for Harvard. The question is not whether an Indian can do this. We clearly can. The question is whether Indian institutions are ready to deserve it.

In Fundraising, there is a saying, "You didn't get it because you didn't ask the right way; the way donor wanted to understand".

I believe we are working on it. Institutions of higher learning must work for Donor's delight. That's the Endowment.