July 21, 1998

Hi friends,

This is my first fomal message since taking over from Deepak  Phatak as Dean (Resource Development). Thanks to your  enthusiastic responses and Deepak Phatak's efforts, I believe the  Heritage Fund has made an excellent beginning. Of course, as the bard said 'it is miles to go before we sleep'.

Our first priority, at IIT Bombay, is setting up of a responsive  Alumni Office. We have done all the paper work and advertised  for a dynamic young person who hopefully will help set up a quick  response system through effective interaction with various   Institute functionaries. We hope to have such a person in place  by early October '98.

A second (though not in terms of importance) task is to address  the issue concerning the Institute library. Towards the end of '97 when we finalized the Journal subscriptions, our bill was about Rs. 22 million and the rupee was hovering a little over 35 to the dollar. The position today is that we need to pay nearly Rs. 43 to a dollar, and this could go upto Rs. 45, by the time we finalize subscriptions for 1999. This would entail either a 30% increase in Journal subscription costs, or a corresponding reduction in the number of Journals.

I am pursuing this matter with contacts in Indian Industry to see  how they can help, but right now the Indian Industry is in bad shape. We are pursuing vigorously the matter of networking amongst Institutions in Bombay as well as other IITs - but the impact will necessarily be slow and modest. The third option would be to request you all to look into this. Depending on the size of the Corpus you have created under the Heritage Fund, you may consider using regular proceeds from an endowment created for the specific purpose, towards subscription to elected rather expensive journals [ for example - Chemical Abstracts ($19565), Tetrahedron ($9862), IEEE Transaction ($18855), Journal of Applied Polymer Science ($9305), Physical Review ($10,500) ].

We contribute to around 330 journals, in the subscription ranges
as indicated below. Even individual Alumni could consider making annual journal subscriptions, depending on their capacity to contribute. These steps will insulate us from the ownward slide of the rupee against the currencies of relevance.

A third task is to set up a professionalized resource generation system.  The points made by Ram Kelkar in one of his edits in Y- Point are very valid and we will pursue the suggestions further.  We propose to develop a structured system to raise resources from Industry, and we have located useful databases in this context.

I guess I should stop here for the time being and revert to you later. Let me take this opportunity to thank you for your concern for your Alma mater and your enthusiastic responses. We have already retained the services of an investment consultant vis-a-vis our Corpus Fund.

With best wishes,