Teri working to establish Rs 100-cr research & development corpus

The Energy and Research Institute (Teri) is working to establish a corpus of up to Rs 100 crore as it seeks to pursue research activities beyond project-based works. “The corpus will be utilised to pursue, within the mandate of Teri, larger issues of scientific and technical interest,” Teri Chairman Ashok Chawla said. A major chunk of the institute’s financial resources come from specific projects that are funded by various clients, including government and international organisations. “The idea is to separately, not linked to the projects, go out and request big corporates which are focused on matters concerning sustainable development, environment and new technologies, among others, to give some funding to built up our corpus,” said Chawla. In existence for more than four decades, Teri is focused on energy, environment and sustainable development. When asked how much could be the quantum of the corpus, he said, “We should be in a position to get, in the reasonable future, Rs 50 to 100 crore towards that objective.”  Most of the resources that Teri gets flow from specific projects funded by clients. “There is very little surplus of cushion which arrives from these projects,” Chawla said, adding there is no big corpus considering Teri has been around for many years.

The institute’s annual budget is of the order of Rs 200 crore. “There are many things which we ideally should be looking at which may or may not have commercial viability straight away,” Chawla, who became the Chairman in February, said. A major part of Teri’s income is in the form of funds and research grants from multilateral and bilateral organisations, national and global banks, FIs, central and state governments, grant-making bodies, corporate sector, and international academic institutions.