FM Nirmala Sitharaman inaugurates BITS Pilani campus in Mumbai's Kalyan

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman | Illustration: Moneycontrol

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 24 inaugurated a new campus of the Birla group-run engineering institute BITS Pilani in Kalyan, Mumbai.

The Rs 1,600-crore campus spread across 60 acres will accommodate 5,000 students on full capacity, said Kumar Mangalam Birla, the group chairman and the chancellor of the institute.

The new campus moves away from its core focus of engineering to law, management and design. The design school was started just last week while law and management schools were functional from last year from the temporary campus in Powai.

Sitharaman, during her address at the campus' launch, said 6,400 alumni are founders and co founders of several startups and 13 unicorns have emerged from them and 2 decacorns.

"170 startups have been incubated in BITS campuses," Sitharaman said.

The finance minister added that over the years, the institute has produced as many as 7,300 Fortune 500 CEOs, 300 academics of global repute and 600 civil servants. It has also produced 6,200 startups while its incubation centre has spawned 170 startups of which 30 have become unicorns.

Began in 1964 in Pilani, the native village of the Birlas in the Marward region of Rajasthan, the institute, which was one of the six private institutes elevated as an institute of eminence and houses 80,000 students across its five campuses in Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad, Dubai and Kalyan.

With PTI inputs