A twenty million dollar gift to a United States university, a one million dollar endowment for student scholarships at BITS Pilani, and hundreds of crores pledged or donated to premier Indian institutes in recent years highlight a growing trend of larger education contributions. However, a more pressing issue persists regarding why permanent university endowments are still not a common feature throughout the broader higher education system in India.
Despite having the world's largest population, a rapidly expanding pool of affluent entrepreneurs and professionals, and millions of graduates globally, massive and long-term endowments remain largely confined to select IITs, IIMs, and elite private institutions. The underlying challenge appears less tied to a shortage of wealth or willingness to give, and more connected to whether institutions possess the necessary systems, relationships, and credibility to handle capital across decades.
Recent contributions illustrate a stark contrast in where funds flow. BITS Pilani recently secured a one million dollar endowment from alumna Revathi Advaithi and her husband Jeevan Mulgund to fund scholarships for disadvantaged women students. Simultaneously, Indian-origin philanthropists Anuradha and Vikas Sinha committed twenty million dollars to the University of North Texas to establish permanent endowments spanning scholarships, academic leadership, research, and entrepreneurship. Major contributions have similarly flowed to IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, and IIM Ahmedabad, reflecting an upward trend in large alumni gifts.
Yet this pattern remains highly uneven. The central dilemma focuses on why the endowment model fails to expand across state universities, central institutions, government colleges, and smaller campuses. Grants and endowments serve entirely different functions within higher education.
A grant typically supports a specific project, activity, or time-framed initiative such as research, infrastructure, or a targeted scholarship program, expiring once the project concludes. In contrast, an endowment is built for longevity, investing its principal while utilizing generated income for purposes designated by the donor.
Abhishek Vaidya, chief financial officer at Woxsen University, emphasizes that permanent endowments require a donor to entrust capital across generations of leadership. This places an obligation on the university to preserve the principal, manage it prudently, and respect the donor's vision over time. Ensuring stability for a long-term or permanent endowment relies on institutional frameworks rather than the personal promises of current leaders, requiring clear objectives, restricted corpus usage, approved investment policies, defined authority, solid accounting, and regular reporting.
A primary friction point involves building donor confidence that an institution can uphold intentions decades into the future. This demands professional fund management, governance, transparency, and institutional continuity rather than a basic fundraising office. Without these structures, institutions struggle to attract major gifts regardless of alumni willingness.
India lacks a single unified law governing university endowments, with regulations spanning multiple legal frameworks alongside Foreign Contribution Regulation Act compliance rules for international gifts. A NITI Aayog report highlighted hurdles including weak fundraising capacity, vague guidelines for deploying funds, limited professional management, and a lack of reinvestment strategies.
Vaidya notes that while regulations add complexity, the central requirement is an institution's ability to demonstrate transparently how money is protected, invested, spent, and reported. Meanwhile, alternative viewpoints caution against relying on philanthropy to replace state support. Abha Dev Habib, associate professor at Miranda House and secretary of the Democratic Teachers' Front, argues that donations are neither continuous nor evenly distributed across educational units, making it problematic to expect alumni contributions to fill public funding gaps.