Ratan Tata gives $50 million to Harvard

Ratan Tata, Drew Faust, Nitin Nohria (c/o HBS)

We’re proud to see our alma mater Harvard being blessed by gifts from South Asian donors of late (see my earlier post on Anand Mahindra’s gift for a new humanities center).  Well, the famous Ratan Tata just gave $50 million to Harvard Business School for executive education:

[T]he Tata Companies, the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, and the Tata Education and Development Trust, which are philanthropic arms of the Tata Group, India’s largest company, are donating $50 million to the School.

The gift, the largest from an international donor in the School’s history, will fund a new HBS facility to support the School’s broad range of executive education programs.

We’ve written about Ratan Tata before – here on corporate citizenship, and here on his large gift to Cornell.  It’s great to see South Asians involved in philanthropy in such high-profile ways, especially at an institution like Harvard.  I found it interesting that Ratan Tata took an executive course at HBS himself, and was obviously so impacted by it that he then decided to support the school in such a major way.  This highlights the point we often discuss here about how people – not just South Asians – often choose our philanthropy based on our own experiences…