Shiv Nadar gifts HCL Tech shares to Chennai Trust

Our Bureau

CHENNAI, July 24

IN a novel method to attract and retain faculty, the Shri Sivasubramaniya Nadar Educational and Charitable Trust, of which Mr Shiv Nadar, Chairman, President and CEO of HCL Technologies, is the Managing Trustee, plans to grant shares of HCL Technologies to them.

Mr Nadar told a select gathering of journalists on Tuesday that he had donated one million of his shares of HCL Technologies to the trust.

The trust runs the SSN College of Engineering, near Chennai. It has tied up with the Institute for Software Research, International of Carnegie Mellon University to offer advanced software engineering education in the country.

Mr Nadar would not describe the scheme as a stock option, but said that the faculty would be granted the shares.

This would be for all the permanent faculty and the shares would be granted for a consideration, not necessarily linked to the market rate.

To a question, he said that his holding in HCL Technologies would not come down significantly because of the one million shares that he had donated to the trust. He holds about 75 per cent of the equity of the company, which works out to about 200 million shares.

Mr Nadar said that those in academia did not get compensation packages on par with the industry. Moreover, after two years of teaching, some of them were picked up by leading companies.

Apart from providing the ambience for teaching and research, granting shares was a novel method to keep them loyal to the institution.

To a question, he said that he had bequeathed the shares to the shares for ``zero consideration''.

On Monday, the trust announced its collaboration with the Institute of Software Research. The SSN School of Advanced Software Engineering will award a master's degree that will require a six-month stay in CMU.

``We will ensure that students who earn their seats on merit will not lose out for want of finance. We are willing to give scholarships provided the students satisfy our condition of working in India for three years after graduation,'' Mr Nadar said. The master's degree would cover IT domains such as e-commerce, networking and security.