With two million-dollar pledge to the centre from Prabhakant Sinha — who graduated from the institute in 1970 and is at present the Co Chairman of ZS Associate — the IIT-Kharagpur alumni have so far donated 10 million dollars to their alma mater.

And thanks to their largesse, the institute now boasts of at least five new centres of teaching and research, and more and more proposals are pouring in everyday.

“We are more than happy with what support we have received from the alumni in terms of contributions and setting up of the centres. With the support of alumni, the university has ventured into the areas of management and law — not the conventional areas of engineering — and helped to strengthen research in various other disciplines,” said A K Majumdar, Deputy Director, IIT-Khargapur. It all began with setting up of the Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSOM), the first management school in an IIT, with an investment of $ 2 million in 1993 by one alumnus Vinod Gupta.

This was followed by setting up of G S Sanyal School of Telecommunications in 1996 with the support of Arjun Melholtra, an alumnus who made a contribution of Rs 3 crore and dedicated the institute to his teacher and former director of the institute G S Sanyal.

In 2006, the IIT got a law school, the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, that specializes in intellectual property rights. For this school also Vinod Gupta donated $ 1 million. Two years later, Ranbir and Chitra Gupta School of Infrastructure Design and Management was set up. Ranbir Singh Gupta, an alumnus of 1970 batch BArch, contributed $ 1 million for setting up the institute.

“We are coming up with a unique course on entrepreneurship and plan to set up centre of innovation. We will be collaborating with Lord Kumar Bhattacharjee, head of Warwick Manufacturing Group of UK and one of our alumni,” said Damodar Acharya, Director, IIT-KgP.