Bharti Airtel Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Bharti Enterprises, on Tuesday launched a merit-cum-means scholarship programme that will fully fund students in technology-based engineering undergraduate and integrated courses in top 50 National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) colleges, including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
The programme, launched to mark 25 years of the Bharti Airtel Foundation, will begin with 250 students a year, and will reach up to 4,000 students in a phased manner. The scholarship programme is expected to have an annual outlay of ₹100 crore to support students on a rolling basis.
Rakesh Bharti Mittal, vice chairman of Bharti Enterprises that operates telecom firm Airtel, and co-chairman of Bharti Airtel Foundation, told Mint that the programme has a special focus on the girl child even as the key goal of the scholarship is to remove hurdles for underprivileged students in need of financial aid.
The programme aims to support deserving students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and will be applicable to students eligible for admissions in August 2024. The scholarship will be provided to students whose family income doesn’t exceed ₹850,000 a year.
“For the 2024 cohort, we will be picking up 250 students coming from the tech sector. The applications will be reviewed for meeting the criteria by Buddy4Study,” Mittal said. The corpus for the new programme will come from the corporate social responsibility spends that the group has committed as per compliance norms.
“From my perspective, if I see how many lives we can shape or change. It isn’t just directly the number of students who are getting support, when they become employable, the whole family benefits,” he added.
The scholarships will focus on undergraduate and integrated courses in the field of electronics and communication, telecom, information technology, computer sciences, data sciences, and emerging technologies such as AI, IoT, AR/VR, machine learning and robotics.
Recipients of this scholarship will be known as‘Bharti Scholars’. They will receive 100% of their college fees throughout the duration of their course and will also be given a laptop. Additionally, hostel and mess fees shall be given to all eligible students who apply for it. Recipients will be encouraged to voluntarily support at least one student continuously once they graduate and are gainfully employed.
The scholarship programme is the latest for the Bharti Airtel Foundation which started with Satya Bharti Schools for the underprivileged in 2006 that now has 164 schools in four states with 36,000 children. Girls account for half of the students enrolled in these schools. The foundation’s quality support programme, which transfers the best practices from Satya Bharti Schools to government schools, now covers 880 such schools and 370,000 students, across 12 states. It also supports higher education programmes.
Mittal noted that about 100 of the alumni from the senior programme had been absorbed into Bharti Airtel at various positions, while another 100 were under review. Some of the graduates have come back to the schools as volunteers and teachers, he added.
Mittal, who is also the chairman of the Indian School of Business’ advisory board at Mohali, pitched for a stronger industry-academia partnership for making course curriculum more relevant to the present and future needs of the industry.
“… the world has moved to future of jobs. So when we talk of AI, machine learning, virtual reality, Internet of Things, robotics, you need to have the right faculty. You need to have the right curriculum. You need to have the right pedagogical skills right from school into the university and a very, very strong industry academia partnership,” he emphasized.
The collaborative approach was also needed in enhancing funding for research and innovation, where private investment had to match that of the government. He also pitched for joint faculty appointments where the private sector could fund salaries for high-quality faculty, which can, in turn, benefit research.