Gautam Adani announces Rs 100 cr contribution to Indology mission

NEW DELHI: At the inaugural Adani Global Indology Conclave, Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani announced a landmark commitment to building the Bharat Knowledge Graph— a first-of-its-kind digital framework designed to preserve, structure and future-proof India’s civilisational knowledge in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

The Adani Group, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education’s Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), is hosting the three-day Global Indology Conclave to revive Indology — the global academic study of India’s civilisation, languages, philosophies, sciences and cultural heritage.

Delivering the keynote address at the event, Gautam Adani said, “As a beginning, I am humbled to announce a founding contribution of Rs 100 crore towards building the Bharat Knowledge Graph and supporting the scholars and technologists who will contribute to this Indology mission. This is the repayment of a civilizational debt.”

The guest of honour at the conclave was Swami Avimukteshwaranand Saraswati, Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math — the 46th in an unbroken lineage of revered acharyas who trace their spiritual authority to Adi Shankaracharya himself.

Addressing the conclave, the Shankaracharya said, “When I assumed the position of Shankaracharya, I had said that my role would become meaningful only when India becomes the Vishwaguru (global teacher). And today, Gautam Adani ji’s initiative is a major support to that very dream of mine”.

The Global Indology Conclave is being held at the Adani Corporate House (ACH) in Ahmedabad from November 20 to 22, 2025. At a time when Indology departments worldwide are shrinking, this effort seeks to reassert India’s ownership of its knowledge systems and present them to the world through an authentic, research-driven Indian lens, a release said.

“If a civilisation does not actively defend its cultural and emotional frameworks, human behaviour will bend, not towards culture or tradition, but towards the cold logic of the machine’s algorithms. This shift will be silent, gradual and will reshape how we feel, learn and analyse our own country,” added Gautam Adani.

The partnership brings together the Adani Group’s long-term commitment to nation-building with IKS’ mandate to integrate India’s traditional knowledge frameworks into contemporary education. Launched under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, IKS works to mainstream ancient Indian wisdom across disciplines, encouraging interdisciplinary research, preservation of texts and practices and practical application in modern contexts such as engineering, environmental science, linguistics, public policy and healthcare.

Indology has historically shaped the global understanding of India, influencing sectors as varied as linguistics, astronomy, mathematics, governance, literature and health sciences. But decades of declining institutional support have diluted its academic depth. To address this challenge, the Adani Group and IKS are also leading a five-year program to support 14 PhD scholars across leading institutions. Their research will span Paninian grammar and computational linguistics, ancient astronomical systems, indigenous healthcare frameworks, sustainability principles in traditional engineering, political thought, heritage studies and classical literature.

The scholars were selected through a rigorous national consultation involving IITs, IIMs, IKS-focused universities and eminent scholars. By integrating classical knowledge with advanced tools such as data science, systems thinking and multimodal archiving, the programme seeks to make Indology relevant to contemporary academic discourse and global scholarship.

Rooted in the spirit of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the ancient Indian ethos of “the world as one family” the initiative reflects the Adani Group’s commitment to strengthening India’s soft power and civilisational leadership, the release said. (ANI)