This week, the BITSAA Leadership had yet another opportunity to celebrate the success of some of BITSAA International’s flagship programs.

Prof Rajiv Singh teaches Embedded Systems Design and other CS/EEE courses and is a doctoral candidate at BITS. He had recently been invited to George Washington University to attend the Intelligent Transport Systems Conference held by IEEE in Washington, D.C. The prestigious conference promised great visibility not just for Prof Singh’s work, but also BITS, Pilani, which is resetting its focus on research.

Prof Singh was confident of availing UGC funding through the Institute, a grant of Rs 48,000. But the conference registration fees of $650 and estimated air fare of Rs 70,000 was steep. Prof Singh was also waiting to hear back from other organizations, such as Microsoft Research India Tarvel Grant, DST, CSIR and INSA for additional funding.

Mayank Mathur (’06, E&I), who has been in touch with Prof Singh, found out that the high costs of travel was threatening Prof Singh attendance at the conference. Mayank, himself a BITSAA Leader, swiftly rallied others to evaluate how Mr Singh could be helped. BITSAA runs several programs to help improve alumni student and faculty access to resources. Two of them – BITSAA Miles and BITSAA Credit Card – seemed apt applications in this case.

The BITSAA Miles program pools unused United Airlines miles from alumni to fund selected applicants’ travel to prestigious conferences. The BITSAA Credit Card was launched last year in association with CapitalOne, where BITSAA gets a donation every time a card is swiped. One leg of the air fare was bought using BITSAA Miles and a part of the registration cost ($500) was covered using BITSAA’s General Fund that is fed by income from the BITSAA Credit Card.

Brij Bhushan

Champa Bhushan

BITSians revel in being part of an ‘old boy network,’ a network that sticks together in the highest moments of glory and heaviest instances of need. Generous donors help their brethren in need who have eventually turned around to help others. Brij Bhushan (’65, EE), Senior Old Boy, and his wife Champa, Senior Lady,* have opened their home up for several BITSians who’ve visited the DC area to present papers and participate in contests. Not surprisingly, Brij offered to host Prof Singh for the duration of the conference (Oct 5-7). Brij also drove him to Virginia Tech, where he was invited to give a talk.

In BITSAA CEO’s own words, we note:

• The BITSAA network works! The Board alone is so geographically diverse that we did not have to look elsewhere. Having generous and passionate alumni like Brij who did not think twice about welcoming someone from his alma mater, and having a network of Chapters, helped to spread the word.
• Ok, we knew (1) already. What have we learnt? BITS has limited funding. A UGC Fund which BITS taps into can provide a maximum of Rs 48,000 (for Travel) whereas a typical Conference Registration fee costs Rs 32500 = $650 and Air Travel = Rs 70,000. This is over and above ancillary visits that the Professor would like to do (to other Universities), stay etc. BITSAA needs to do more to encourage research and scholarship in the BITS Campuses
• 100% of our support came in “virtually”. Air miles which would otherwise have been lost/forfeited were pooled together and put to use. Credit Card sign-ups by BITSians raised “real money”. Both show the intelligence and success of these programs.
• Passionate BITSAA Leaders like Mayank Mathur, Vijay Sharma, Kaushik Subramaniam, Dileep Adityan and others made this happen.

*Brij and Champa are both BITS alumni. ‘Old boy network’ has its origin in male-only schools, but we shall use the term Lady to describe alumnae of BITS. Read about how they met and their sabbatical in Pilani in our Sandpaper 2006 edition.