Respected senior members of the association, President, Vice President and other Governing Body members

I fondly remember the days when the seeds for this association were being sown some 9-10 years back. My dear friend Arvind Gupta (1992 Batch) had come back from a 5 year stint in the US and we wanted to get our Delhi Alumni together, for reminiscing our past, for being able to relive some good old times, to bask in the warmth of this relationship called ITBHU Alumni.

For the first few years, we took it on us to organise a contributory dinner every December. Despite several hurdles – like having no seed money and having no clue about the number of participants – we managed to do this. What prevailed was the spirit of being an IT-BHU’ite. People came and appreciated the effort and some even made good the shortfalls by contributing generously so that we did not land in financial trouble.

The body finally took formal shape in 2002 under the able leadership of Mr. A. K. Srivastava and our present Vice- President and past Secretary Mr. Debashish Bhattacharyya. The years since then have seen our membership swell to 400+ today.

I must say I have enjoyed every bit of this journey. I received all the affection and love from all our seniors and juniors that I got in touch with. There have been very senior members like our past President Mr. Pahwa,our present President Prof. Dhar, our Patrons, our special invitees our governing Board members and others who have supported the association with whatever was required time, money, resources, ideas ….etc.

During the current year, we started our program with a talk by noted writer and Trainer, Pawan Chaudhary on “When you are sinking become a submarine – winning through wisdom and creativity” at India International centre,on 10th Nov 2006.Around 35 members attended .

The Annual Dinner was held on 23.12.2006. The dinner was held at 1A Sunehri Bagh, which is our Patron VP Goyal’s residence. About 100 alumni attended with their families. Mr. Pramod Joshi was the master of ceremonies, and he engaged the attendees with various activities.This time we had a lot of cultural events performed by children of alumni and.Also our Sanjeev Sharma ( 1982 )enthralled the audience by rendering Kishore Kumar hits.

The Annual Picnic was held at Nehru Park on 04.02.2007, which was attended by about 50 members with their families.

We then invited senior consultants from PwC to talk about “Tax Planning in the wake of the the Budget 2007” at India International Centre on 8th March 2007. This was also attended by around 30 members.

This year we also took more courage from our past record and started the process of life memberships. We also instituted an award for significant contributors from amongst our distinguished alumni. An eminent jury under the chairmanship of of Mr. S S Kohli (ex-chairman PNB) and consisting of such stalwarts like Mr. MK Modi (CMD Modipon), Mr. Deepak Pahwa (CMD Bry- Air ), Mr. A. K. Sah (ex-CMD NTPC), Dr. Pritam Singh, Mr. Kashi Memani (Ex- chairman Ernst & Young) and Mr. Vinod Chandiok (Chairman, Grant Thorton) was constituted. All took out time from their busy schedules to do this important task of selecting the significant contributors from amongst established entrepreneurs, prolific CMDs of some of India’s largest corporate houses, scientists and academicians of international repute, Politician and Members of Parliament and some on the path to become one

The Honourable members may find the Souvenir 2007 to have more of articles and write ups; we have attempted this year to try and make the Souvenir a compendium of the the literary capabilities of our members and their families, in addition to it carrying the directory of members and messages. The souvenir carries a phenomenal 18 write ups (articles / poems etc.) from our members and family members; it also carries two articles by IIT Alumni. I would like to thank all of you who have contributed, and the editorial and printing team that has edited and compiled all these, and in a tight time frame, got the souvenir printed.

In addition to these activities, your association has also been lobbying with the Ministry of HRD, together with the Institute officials, to try and push for an upgradation to IIT. We are also taking up projects for building / upgrading infrastructure of the Institute, and in this, we are working closely with the nominated officials of the Institute, and the Director. Currently, we are have finished a project of making the IT Hostels WiFi enabled.

While we had planned to add our current portfolio of activities, we have been held back for want of organisers and volunteers. Honourable members will appreicate that unless the association is broad based, and we have additional volunteers for taking up these activities, it is not possible for a small group of governing body members only to try and expand the scope of our activities. I again request you to please come out and help us in making the association more vibrant.

To come back to another important item: the member database. Despite our best efforts, we have found that every time a mailing campaign – whether electronic or otherwise – is carried out, about 40% of the e-mails, and a similar number of couriered letters come back to us, which other than the wasted money, also inhibits our capability to reach out to you, and get complaints from honourable members as to how they were not informed about some event or the other. I would like to repeat that this can be enabled if and only if you keep us updated about your changes – in address, telephone numbers, offices, e-mail addresses. On behalf of the association, I request you again to please drop a mail, giving details of your changes, so that the database can be updated. We are also trying to have a software created, which will make it easier for us to maintain the database – if some member can help, it would be appreciated.

Please also participate by sharing your ideas on how the reach of the association can be inproved, and how its bandwidth can be increased. Slowly and slowly, we would like the association to become an important part of our lives, and would like to see the association moving beyond networking within the alumni group to Institution building and, maybe, to nation building.

With best regards

Rajeev Gupta
Secretary