Инженерный вестник: In India, a Top Private University Supports a School for Tribal People

Bhubaneswar, India

By Shailaja Neelakantan

As the founder of KIIT University, a top private institution here, Achuyta Samanta has built an institution that occupies dozens of buildings across 350 acres of plush land. Yet he has no office.

He prefers to do his work at a desk under a fragrant Kadamba tree, in a garden outside a university building where he meets foreign diplomats, Indian movie stars, journalists, and other visitors. Many treat him with reverence; some even touch his feet as if he were a modern-day Buddha.

Mr. Samanta politely waves away such adulation, but to many local people and higher-education officials, what he has created is nothing short of remarkable.

With little more than $100 and 12 students, Mr. Samanta in 1993 established a technical-training institute, the Kalinga Insitute of Industrial Technology, that eventually earned approval to provide undergraduate courses in engineering—the Holy Grail for a private Indian college. Later the government granted it university status in record time.

The courses at KIIT University have expanded to include management, biosciences, and law,. To build his teaching staff, Mr. Samanta attracted high-quality professors from across India, as well as a few from the United States and Canada, by offering two to three times the salaries they would earn at other top Indian institutions.

Today the university has 16,000 students and consistently ranks in the top 30 to 40 Indian private higher-education institutions.

KIIT University "is definitely the top university in Orissa, and we rank them among the top private universities in India," says Premchand Palety, chief executive of the Centre for Forecasting and Research, which ranks universities in India.

But Mr. Samanta says he did not start KIIT University to make money or earn personal prestige. He started it as a means to support the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, a charitable effort to aid the desperately poor, indigenous tribal people of this southeastern state by offering them free education. (There are 62 tribes in Orissa and about 700 in all of India.)

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