The Hindu Business Line : PM to inaugurate PanIIT 2008 meet

The meet will have six tracks – Rural Transformation, Innovation, Education, Research and Technology, Entrepreneurship and Infrastructure Development.

Our Bureau

Chennai, Nov. 24 Four out every 10 IIT-ians who graduated prior to 2001 are in top-leadership roles in corporates, educational institutions, research labs, NGOs, government agencies and politics or entrepreneurs themselves.

Seven out of 10 are currently based in India, two of them being returnees who have come back after careers in other countries.

These are some of the key findings of the IIT Alumni Impact Study – 2008. The “first-of-its-kind” study was commissioned by PanIIT, an umbrella organisation of all seven IITs, in partnership with the Indian Brand Equity Fund. The Bangalore-based Zinnov Management Consulting has assisted PanIIT with designing and conducting the study.

Announcing the preliminary findings of the study here at a press conference, Mr B. Santhanam, Managing Director of Saint-Gobain Glass India, said the complete results with statistics from the study would be made public at the annual IIT alumni global meet – PanIIT 2008, under the theme ‘Inspire, Innovate and Transform’ – to be held in Chennai at the IIT Madras campus between December 19 and 21.

According to Mr Santhanam, who himself is an IIT alumnus, the three-day conference will address questions as to what and how can IIT alumni contribute to nation building. The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, is scheduled to inaugurate the summit.

It will have six tracks – Rural Transformation, Innovation, Education, Research and Technology, Entrepreneurship and Infrastructure Development. A team of personalities including Nobel Laureate Dr Amartya Sen; Mr Orkut Buyukkokten, Founder of Orkut and Google; Mr Bob McDonald, COO, Procter & Gamble; Prof. C.K. Prahalad; the Union Finance Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram; and Mr Stephen Cohen, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institutions, will be part of the conference.

Some of the other key findings of the study are:

IIT alumni have been associated with over $450 billion of incremental economic value creation across geographies, business sectors. They have also been involved in the creation of over 20 million new jobs.

Overall, IIT alumni in senior positions in industry and government sectors across the world today have budgetary responsibility of over $885 billion.

Fifty four per cent of the top 500 Indian companies have at least one IIT alumnus on their boards, and these companies have a cumulative revenue that is 10 times greater than that of the other companies on the list.

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