The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : SSN institutions form new management board

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Thursday, Jul 02, 2009
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

SSN institutions form new management board

Special Correspondent

To bring corporate professionalism to their functioning

Trust has corpus mostly from private family donations
“Not looking for profits, but we do need to ensure sustainability”

CHENNAI: The SSN institutions, founded by HCL founder Shiv Nadar, have created a new management board in order to bring corporate professionalism into their functioning and attract outside funding as well.

The Shri Sivasubramaniya Nadar Educational and Charitable Trust, which manages the SSN College of Engineering and three other institutions, currently has a corpus mostly drawn from private family donations. It is a family institution — its trustees are Mr. Nadar himself, his wife Kiran and their daughter Roshni. So far, a three-member managing committee has been overseeing operations. However, it has now been decided to expand and corporatise this layer between the family and institutions by setting up a ten-member management board, which includes eminent members of the community from the spheres of education, law, government and business. “I have studied the functioning of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” said Mr. Nadar.

“It is like a public company with independent directors looking after the interests of public shareholders… So it really belongs to the community at large,” said R. Srinivasan, chairman of the new board and founder CEO of Redington Ltd.

Bringing in transparency and professionalism is vital to the plan of attracting further outside funding for the institutions, as they aim for world-class research university status. “We are not looking for profits, but we do need to ensure sustainability… The costs of running a world-class institution cannot be met through students’ fees alone,” said Saurav Adhikari, corporate vice-president of strategy at HCL. SSN is already in expansion mode, with the recent purchase of a 1,100-acre site in southern Tamil Nadu.

When deemed university status is granted, SSN hopes to focus on research-oriented teaching and original research in the fields of renewable energy, especially solar energy, and the applications of embedded systems in safety and critical systems.

“So far as faculty, students, facilities are concerned, the prerequisites for university status are already there,” said board member R. Natarajan, the former director of IIT-Madras and chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education.

The SSN Trust’s northern counterpart, the Shiv Nadar Foundation, is preparing to launch the first of eight Vidya Gyan schools for underprivileged rural children in Uttar Pradesh in July.

Free education is being provided for smart kids, in association with the State government. The Shiv Nadar University’s foundation stone is due to be laid near Noida later this month, and if regulatory approvals come through, it will start admissions this year to the School of Technology.

The project involves an investment of about Rs.600 crore.

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