Scholars’ welcome: Shriman Sai Raman, Siddharth Arora, Mr Nasser Munjee, Sir Ratan Tata, Maan Barua, Shahana Munazir, Garima Singh, and Narendra Killada
Sir Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, and Nasser Munjee, Chairman of Development Credit Bank and a member of the boards of Jaguar Land Rover and several Tata companies, visited Somerville College and the University of Oxford on 24 June in order to learn more about the work of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and its Somerville scholars.
Over the course of his visit, Sir Ratan and Mr Munjee met with Dr Alice Prochaska, Principal of Somerville College and The Rt Hon the Lord Patten of Barnes, Chancellor of the University of Oxford. They also met with Dr Alfred Gathorne-Hardy, Research Director at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, and visited key university departments associated with the Oxford India Centre: the departments of Plant Sciences, Engineering and Mathematics.
Sir Ratan and Mr Munjee also attended a senior academic discussion at Somerville followed by a lunch with scholars from the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development. (To learn more about the current scholars, see their profiles.)
The Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development was founded at Somerville College, Oxford in 2013 to help shape the next century of India’s growth and to support high-quality research in fields related to Sustainable Development at Oxford, by providing opportunities for exceptional young students from India to conduct cross-disciplinary research at the University of Oxford. The centre aims to develop their talent, support pioneering research, and foster new partnerships between leading academics, practitioners and policymakers from Oxford, India and beyond. The centre’s work began following a generous grant of £3 million from the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development, which Somerville College and the University of Oxford matched, in order to provide permanently-endowed scholarships for outstanding postgraduate students from India.
Somerville has a long history of welcoming exceptional students from India to study at the College and is planning to establish a new building to house the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD). To find out more about the OICSD, please go to www.some.ox.ac.uk/OICSD