Alumni donating to their institutions as a way of giving back is nothing new. These days however former students are tapping into a new method to donate to these institutions — stocks.
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi's Endowment Foundation, which is a registered charity in the United States, has received a donation from Mohit Aron, a 1995 IIT-D graduate in Computer Science and Engineering, reported the Indian Express. Aron, who is a co-founder of two start-ups that have now gone unicorn in the US, transferred shares of his cloud-computing firm Nutanix, amounting to $1 million. In a statement, IIT Delhi said that his donations will be used to bolster research activities of the faculty and to enable students to attend workshops and conferences abroad and in India.
IIT Delhi's Dean Alumni Affairs, Prof Naveen Garg, was quoted by the Indian Express saying that the amount is encashed. He also added that the transfer of stocks to a registered charitable organisation in the US, exempts students from paying capital gains tax, and it is thus an increasingly lucrative option.
IIT Madras and IIT Bombay have also received donations in the past in the form of stocks. In March last year, the Ministry of Human Resource Development cleared a policy that would allow centrally funded technical institutions to set up endowment funds. IIT Delhi had established its fund back in 2019, and valued it last year at Rupees 186 crore.