The Bharti Airtel Foundation, the charitable division of Bharti Enterprises, has introduced a merit-cum-means scholarship program designed to fully fund students pursuing technology-based engineering undergraduate and integrated courses at the top 50 National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) colleges, including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Launched in celebration of the Bharti Airtel Foundation's 25th anniversary, the program will initially support 250 students per year, with plans to expand to up to 4,000 students. The scholarship program will have an annual budget of ₹100 crore to provide ongoing support to students.
Rakesh Bharti Mittal, vice chairman of Bharti Enterprises, which operates the telecom company Airtel, and co-chairman of the Bharti Airtel Foundation, informed Mint that the program particularly emphasizes supporting girls. The primary objective of the scholarship is to eliminate financial barriers for underprivileged students. This initiative aims to assist deserving students from various socio-economic backgrounds and will be available to those eligible for admission in August 2024. The scholarship will be awarded to students whose family income does not exceed ₹850,000 per 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. The scholarships will target undergraduate and integrated programs in fields such as electronics and communication, telecom, information technology, computer sciences, data sciences, and emerging technologies like AI, IoT, AR/VR, machine learning, and robotics.
The scholarship program is the latest initiative from the Bharti Airtel Foundation, which began with the Satya Bharti Schools for underprivileged children in 2006. These schools now number 164 across four states, serving 36,000 children, with girls making up half of the enrollment. The foundation's quality support program, which shares best practices from Satya Bharti Schools with government schools, now reaches 880 schools and 370,000 students in 12 states. Additionally, the foundation supports higher education programs.
Mittal highlighted that approximately 100 alumni from senior secondary schools have been employed in various roles at Bharti Airtel, with an additional 100 graduates currently under consideration. He also mentioned that some graduates have returned to the schools as volunteers and teachers. As the chairman of the Indian School of Business' advisory board at Mohali, Mittal advocated for a stronger industry-academia partnership to make course curricula more relevant to the current 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. A collaborative approach is also essential for boosting funding for research and innovation, requiring private investment to match government contributions. He also proposed joint faculty appointments, where the private sector could finance salaries for high-quality faculty members, thereby enhancing research efforts.
