I don't know the actual venue in Bombay. so I have put IIT-Bombay as a default. Check correct venue on Pan-IIT website

From HindustanTimes.com: The alumni from all IITs are grouping together under a single banner. The first meet, 'Pan-IIT 2006', with about 5,000 members, hopes to chalk out a comprehensive action plan to help India Inc. grow by initiating dialogue with the government and maintain its edge in key technology areas.

"While IITians have served the world's best in most of the global MNCs, it is time to give something back to the country. With our experience, we can enable the government, academia and Indian businesses to come together and build a more equitable society," said IIT alumnus Rajat Gupta, a senior partner of McKinsey and Company.

"We are looking to address issues that involve bureaucrats, politicians, academia and industry executives so that India can brace up to the next level of challenges," says Ashank Desai, another IIT grad who is chairman of Mastek, one of India's biggest IT exporters.

Other plans include working with schools and colleges all over India to help them fine-tune curriculums based on the industry requirements.

"To nurture entrepreneurial spirit, we will offer a platform where startups in any domain can approach our alumni and get help," said Gupta. For this, IIT has an arrangement with The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a consortium that mentors and funds start-ups

By IBNlive.com
Friday August 4, 10:07 PM

New Delhi: Chairman of Mastek, Ashank Desai understands the need for IITians to give back to the country, so he and 500 other IITians have grouped together to form, Pan IIT, a movement which looks at building brand India and brand IIT.

"We would like to find technology solutions to India’s unique problems," Desai said.

IIT is now 50 plus and there are around three lakh alumni spread across the globe.

Most of them have made some monetary contribution to their alma mater in the past but now the focus has changed.

"The easiest thing to do is to sign a cheque and clear your conscious. But this is not it. One has to devote one’s brain power and experience to make things work," Chairman, BT India, Arun Seth said.

A brief overview of the event:

It is the first of it's kind in Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, where some 5,000 IIT alumni would be collectively looking at the opportunities available to actually get closely involved with building the Indian economy.

Highlights of this conference that makes it unique

The agenda for this event has come directly from a survey that has taken the views of hundreds of IIT alumni. The findings have been distilled into a pragmatic platform that engages the IITs, alumni and the leading lights of the Indian economy in a first-of-a-kind event.

This conference has a unique focus on the nitty-gritty of strategy and action needed to create and sustain an agenda for national development in a practical way that every IIT alumnus can engage in immediately. It is a clear initiative for inspired actions in the next few years.

The core of the event is in the six specific segments that deliver on the vision of inspire, involve and transform:

1 How to make India a knowledge economy

2 How to lift 260 million people out of poverty in one generation

3 Sustainable development through decentralised services

4 You can you get the Governance you want

5 Use of technology for nation building

6 What you can learn from successful entrepreneurs

Expected concrete initiatives that may result from this conference

With interactivity between alumni, speakers and panellists, as well as focus discussions geared to action, I expect that we will be able to come up with specific, time-bound action plans for each of the segments. The conference will also brief the Prime Minister on the key areas requiring attention and support at a national level.

What would Alumni from the US and other countries gain from attending this event?

Alumni from abroad would be able to find specific areas of engagement with the urgent development goals of the Indian economy, locate exciting projects that they can be involved in, and, of course, get a golden opportunity to network with thousands of IIT alumni whom they never would otherwise have met.

Details at : www.paniit2006.org

Interview with Ashank Desai on Rediff.com

This an informative chat that covers the upcoming IIT Alumni 2006 Global Conference at Mumbai

http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/oct/19iit.htm

It is also at Rediff India Abroad

http://ia.rediff.com/money/2006/oct/19iit.htm?q=bp&file=.htm

With best wishes for the season of lights!

Cheers!
Tabby

Action Group

• Event Chairman
  Ashank Desai
  
  
• Participation Committee
  Anil Chandiramani
  
  
• Programme Committee
  Raj Nair
  
  
• Sponsorship Committee
  Nabankur Gupta
  
  
• Exhibition Committee
  M. Balachandran
  
  
• OrganisingCommittee
  Shailesh Gandhi
  
  
• Marketing & Media + IT Infrastructure
  Prakash Khemani
  
  
• Public Relations Committee
  Ashank Desai
  
  
• Finance Committee
  Pradeep Kapse

President A P J Abdul Kalam urged pan-IITians to ensure that the spirit of IIT touched every technical university in the country, which would create a large number of quality students and faculty.

This was at IIT-Powai

Arun Sarin, CEO of UK-based Vodaphone, alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, who had presented $2,50,000 for the development of the Arun Sarin Electronics materials research laboratory as extension of the metallurgical and material engineering, has now promised another donation of an equal amount to the institute.

MUMBAI: A group of IITians have unveiled an initiative to promote excellence by adopting engineering colleges and raising them to the standards of the Indian Institutes of Technology.

As the three-day Pan IIT-2006 meet concluded on Monday, nation-building still the overriding theme, alumni spelt out firm plans for campaigns touching onreforms in education and widening the ambit of the Right to Information facility.

At the end of the three-day meet, groups of IITians have now decided to work towards setting up a national centre for best practices in engineering education as well as preparing a database of models adopted by various technical institutions to create healthy engineering education. "Similarly, many of them have pledged to assist engineering colleges to commercialise their technologies," said Raj Nair, who presented the initiatives that the IITians would take up.

M S Banga, Unilever president (food services), in his speech, asked IITians to come forward and assist at least 100 engineering colleges across India to raise their standards. He said 30 years ago, there were merely five IITs and nothing much had happened after that, barring the setting up of two more IITs.

Likening the crisis in sections of Indian society to the Sudoku puzzle, he said the key to most problems lay in education. "It is the key to poverty alleviation, some sort of employment will come if you're educated. It is also the key to hygienic living," Banga said.

As mentioned during the deliberations on Sunday, IITians have also decided to work at dismantling the license raj in education and setting up a private credit rating agency to rank engineering and other higher education institutes, while working towards a broader aim of increasing faculty salaries significantly, added Nair. Some alumni were of the opinion that change had to take place from the primary education level. The PanIIT group has therefore recommended to the seven IITs that their students be given credits for training school teachers during their summer holidays.

To scale up the Right To Information campaign, IITians will also lobby for including civilians in an auditing process on RTI. Impressed by a move to install a special phone line in Bihar that allows citizens to register RTI requests for Rs 11, IITians will also work towards scaling it up in other states. Some other IITians have also pledged to adopt villages, and work in the areas of renewable energy and water supply.

Sanjay Ubale, secretary (special projects) assured the IITians that he would work as a nodal point for all the assistance IITians required from the Maharashtra government.

26 Dec, 2006 0343hrs IST TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the US as one from MIT or Caltech. The next step is for IITians in India and IITians abroad to strengthen their bonds at events such as this month's conference in Mumbai to help combine their intellectual talents, resources and skills to help each other expand into each other's markets.

One can imagine IIT alumni abroad enhancing opportunities for their businesses by partnering with Indian companies led by IITians here, and vice-versa.

Such "IIT alumni to IIT alumni trade" could apply to many industries and even to higher education, where IIT alumni professors from Indian institutions and those attending from abroad can plan to exchange students and faculty and collaborate across borders on research.

IITians should take advantage of events like this one in Mumbai and other IIT events which are now being held globally with increasing frequency (such as the meetings planned for California in the summer and in Tokyo next fall) to pursue such collaboration.

India's extraordinary emergence in new-age industries — software, Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing — is the indirect result of Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in scientific education.

Nehru left India with the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel outside the developed West.

His legacy is not one we can afford to be complacent about. After all, the roots of Indian science and technology go far deeper than Nehru.

The Rig Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together 24 centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head.

The Vedic civilisation subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth at a time when everyone else, even the Greeks, assumed the earth was flat.

And yet, we lost the global lead in science and technology for over a millennium. This New Year's, it is time to resolve that we will never allow ourselves to slip behind again.

That will require resources — serious money for research, world-class lab facilities. But above all it will require one commodity India is not short of — brains (and the determination to use them).

"Brand IIT" has shown the way. In 2007, we must start to scale this up to the point where one day "Brand India" becomes synonymous not with cheap products or services but with the highest standards of scientific and technological excellence.

by Mr. Shashi Tharoor