BITS Pilani Gets $1 Million Donation From US-Based Alumni Couple

India's premier engineering and science institute BITS Pilani has announced that it received a $1 million pledge, the highest individual donation ever received by the institution from a US-based alumni couple for its campus programme, reports Financial Express.

The couple, Prashanth and Anuradha Palakurthi, made the donation announcement on Friday (16 November), during the ruby anniversary celebrations of Prashanth’s 1978-83 batch.

'Momentous and a game-changing gesture', Prof Souvik Bhattacharyya, Vice-Chancellor, BITS Pilani, said.

“ BITS Pilani would launch a campaign to set up a Rs 100 crore Research Endowment Fund. The fund would help provide additional thrust to research by way of attracting research-driven faculty, post-doctoral fellows and research scholars,” he said.

The donation would also help set up advanced research labs to pursue an institutional research agenda and provide seed fund support to new faculty, Prof Bhattacharyya added.

Prashanth Palakurthi is the Founder and CEO of US-based Reflexis Systems, while his wife Anuradha, the founder of Juju Productions, is a professional singer as well as a radio personality in the United States.

In July this year, BITS Pilani was conferred the ‘Institute of Eminence (IoE)’ status by the Union government along with IISc Bangalore, IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay.

BITS Pilani has four campuses at Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad and Dubai and features among the prestigious rankings such as QS Asia ranking.

Recently, it featured in the World top 500 when it was ranked 401 in the Times Higher Education 2019 Subject Ranking for Life Sciences.