New Delhi, India
The Indian businessman Anil Agarwal’s pledge last week of $1-billion to set up Vedanta University, in the South Indian state of Orissa, is a gimmick to divert attention from his purportedly corrupt mining deal with the state’s government and may even be a land grab, opponents of the project say.
“He wants to deflect criticism of his deal with the government to mine bauxite ore on terms that are much below market value,” said Srikant Jena, a senior member of the Congress Party, the main opposition party in Orissa. “He is trying to gain recognition as a do-gooder so that the scam can be covered up. But he’s no Mr. Stanford,” Mr. Jena said on Monday, referring to Mr. Agarwal’s stated ambition to model Vedanta University after Stanford University.
The $1-billion pledge, which if realized would be the largest gift ever made to a higher-education institution, is intended to create a multidisciplinary elite university for 100,000 students that would open in 2008. The source of the pledge is Mr. Agarwal’s family foundation (The Chronicle, July 20).
Mr. Agarwal is chairman of Vedanta Resources, a metals and mining company. In October 2004, Vedanta Aluminium, a subsidiary of Vedanta Resources, signed a mining-lease agreement with the Orissa Mining Corporation, which is owned by the state government, to develop its bauxite mines.
Mr. Jena said Vedanta Aluminium had been awarded the project without competitive bidding and at prices far below what bauxite ore fetches on the global market. He said he found it “unbelievable that the state-owned company had “handed over” the deposits of bauxite, an important aluminum ore, at what he characterized as 3 percent of their real value. Vedanta Aluminum’s project has also run afoul of India’s Supreme Court, environmental activists, and humanitarian groups, which say the region’s indigenous peoples and its flora and fauna will be adversely affected by the project.
Mr. Jena added that the land identified by the state government for the proposed university is on the coastline, making it an impractical location for a university campus. “The area is too exposed to the sea, and it is dangerous,” said Mr. Jena, adding that he doubted a university would ever be set up there. “In the name of a university,” he said, Mr. Agarwal “is grabbing land so he can build resorts on the coastline even though similar projects have in the past been rejected for environmental reasons.”
A spokesman for Vedanta University declined to comment on the Congress Party’s business-related accusations. “The endowment made by Mr. Agarwal is in his personal capacity and has been made by him and his family members,” said the spokesman, who refused to allow his name to be published. “As such we should not link the corporate social-responsibility activities that are routinely undertaken by various operating companies and the endowment made by Mr. Agarwal in his personal capacity. The two are completely distinct and need to be viewed in that light.”
Background article from The Chronicle: