Women™s education champion

A SUCCESSFUL industrialist and educationist, Chennai-based S. Abhaya Kumar wears many hats. He is founder and managing director of the Rs.1,000 crore Shasun Pharmaceuticals Ltd (SPL, estb.1976), founder and vice chairman of Life Cell International Pvt. Ltd (LCIPL), and director of Visionary RCM Infotech Pvt. Ltd and General Optics Pvt. Ltd.  Yet despite a busy daily agenda, in 2004 Kumar ventured into education with the promotion of the Shri Shankarlal Sundarbai Shasun Jain College for Women under the aegis of the Shri S.S. Jain Educational Society which currently administers five schools and two colleges in Chennai. Newspeg. Last October, the society launched the Shasun School of Liberal Education (SSLE), an all-women™s college affiliated with Madras University. SSLE is readying to admit its first batch of 120 students instructed by five full-time and 15 visiting faculty, come August. It will offer students four-year liberal education undergrad programmes in business administration (BBA), psychology (B.Sc) and visual communications (B.Sc). In the first two years, students are required to study four core subjects (ethics, logic, public speaking, rhetorical and critical thinking) and 26 elective courses. In the next two years they focus on their majors. Uniquely, there™s no age bar for women wishing to study at SSLE (tuition fee: Rs.3.90 lakh per annum). Eligibility requirements are successful completion of Plus Two and clearing an entrance test. A new academic wing with a built-up area of 80,000 sq. ft (project cost: Rs.45 crore) is under construction on the 2.5-acre campus of the Shri Shankarlal Sundarbai Shasun Jain College for Women to house SSLE students. Determined to give SSLE a flying start, Kumar has also roped in Dr. Indira Parikh, founder-president of the Foundation for Liberal and Management Education (FLAME), Pune, and former dean of IIM-Ahmedabad, to serve as chief mentor of SSLE. Direct talk. œSSLE will be the first college in India to offer a specially designed four-year liberal arts education programme for women. Our objective is to provide high-quality education programmes to empower and prepare women to assume leadership roles in society and facilitate their holistic personality development, says Kumar. History. A chemical engineering graduate of Madras University, Kumar promoted Shasun Pharmaceuticals in 1976. After taking the company public in 1994, he subsequently promoted LCIPL in 2004. A strong desire to provide quality higher education opportunities for women prompted him to promote the Shri Shankarlal Sundarbai Shasun Jain College for Women in 2004 which currently has 3,500 students on its muster roll. Future plans. Confident that SSLE™s innovatively designed liberal education programme will attract foreign and Indian students,Kumar has made ambitious expansion plans. œWe plan to start a branch of SSLE in Pondicherry which will be a co-educational institution, he says. Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai) MEC gets going Dr. Sanjay Dhande is founder-director of the newly launched Mahindra Ecole Centrale (MEC), Hyderabad, a fully-fledged engineering college promoted by Tech Mahindra, a constituent company of the Mahindra & Mahindra Group ” one of India™s heavyweight industrial houses. The first higher education venture of the group, MEC…