By Aditya Raj
Every year, a certain kind of student in India runs out of road. Not the one who fails, but the one who scores well and then cannot pay for what comes next. The seat is earned. The fee is not affordable. And somewhere between the two, a promising academic life quietly ends.
The Enso Foundation has decided to spend its money on exactly that problem.
The intent was on display this year at Jai Hind College in Mumbai, where the Class of 2025 gathered for its convocation. Vaibhav Maloo, Managing Director of the Enso Group and President of the Enso Foundation, was there as Guest of Honour. There was a personal note to the moment. Maloo studied at Jai Hind himself before heading to Carnegie Mellon, and later to Oxford and Cambridge. In a way, he was speaking to a younger version of himself.
He did not spend that time talking about markets. He talked about values, about integrity, and about the friendships that outlast a degree. These are not the themes convocation audiences usually expect from a businessman, and that was rather the point. His argument, put simply, was that character and relationships end up mattering more than any line on a marksheet, and that graduates would do well to remember it once the applause faded.
Then he said the thing that carried the most weight. “We look forward to continued association with Jai Hind College and hope no one is denied education at this world-class institute due to lack of funding.” It is a plain sentence, and a deliberate one. Read closely, it commits a wealthy family’s foundation to a specific idea: that a strong institution should not have to choose between staying excellent and staying open to those who cannot pay.
The programme behind that promise is the Enso Scholarships, run by the Enso Foundation for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The two-part design is worth noticing. Undergraduate help arrives when students are most exposed, at the stage where one unpaid semester can end everything. Postgraduate help does something Indian philanthropy attempts less often. It keeps capable students in the system long enough to turn potential into real, specialised skill, at the very moment many are pulled away by the need to start earning. Funding both ends suggests a foundation thinking about journeys rather than one-off gestures.
Why an energy and mining house is paying college fees makes more sense once you look at the Foundation itself. The Enso Foundation was set up in 2013 as the philanthropic arm of the Enso Group, the diversified business that Vinay Maloo founded in 2005. Its work is organised around the idea of an “Enlightened Life” and spreads across education, healthcare, conservation and animal welfare. The framing is not accidental. This is philanthropy treated as the reason the money exists, rather than a box ticked at the end of a financial year.
Maloo has been fairly open about that outlook. He has named Bill Gates as an influence and has described the point of building wealth, in blunt terms, as doing good with it. He speaks about karma without embarrassment and about ethics as a way to compete rather than a cost of doing business. Coming from someone in a sector not known for soft edges, the consistency stands out.
There is a bigger question sitting underneath all of this, about how Indian money now chooses to present itself. The older philanthropic families, the Tatas and the Birlas among them, built institutions that outlived their founders. A newer set of promoters is now deciding whether its giving will be a photogenic cheque or something that actually holds up over time. Scholarships are an unshowy answer to that question. They put nobody’s name on a building. They attach an opportunity to a single person and then step back. If the return comes, it shows up years later as a career that would not otherwise have existed.
None of this puts the model beyond scrutiny. Scholarships only work when they are steady, transparent and large enough to change outcomes, and one convocation appearance is a start rather than a result. The real test for the Enso Foundation is whether that “continued association” turns into a commitment measured in years, and whether each batch it reaches is a little wider than the last.
For now the direction is clear. In a system that too often lets money do the sorting, the Enso Foundation has taken a straightforward position. No student at a good institution should be turned away because of a bank balance. It is a simple idea. Simple ideas, worked at patiently, are usually how the lasting things get built.
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