Shiv Nadar to invest 2500 cr in Education over next 5 years

The fresh round of funding will be utilized to ramp up existing institutions of the foundation, which has already put in close to Rs. 2,000 crore to set up several educational institutes across the country.

Nadar did not divulge specific details about investment, and said the funds would go into expansion activities in the form of more schools and an infrastructure upgrade. Nadar has committed 10% of his personal wealth for philanthropic causes such as education. The new investments are a part of this commitment.

“Over the next four-five years we plan to invest around Rs. 2,500 crore to expand our educational initiatives in the country,” Nadar told HT. He said his aspiration is to turn students into leaders and instill a cross-disciplinary learning process.

Education is not an entirely new endeavour for Nadar. The Shiv Nadar Foundation successfully runs two Vidya Gyan Schools in rural UP, runs management and engineering colleges and in April 2011 set up a research-led multi-disciplinary university spread across 286 acres campus at Greater Noida near Delhi.

In 2011, the Foundation also announced two Shiv Nadar Schools at Gurgaon and Noida respectively. The plan is to open around 25 more Shiv Nadar schools across the country over the next 10 years.

Nadar, who is the chairman of HCL Corporation – the holding company for HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems – scripted India’s software services success story along with Infosys’ Narayana Murthy and Wirpo’s Azim Premji in the eighties and the nineties. Infosys, Wipro and HCL employ around three lakh computer professionals across the globe.