You are the Director of a Government Engineering College. The State Higher Education Department has allocated ₹5 crore for a new Centre of Excellence on Artificial Intelligence. Your governing council, by majority vote, has approved a partnership with a private cloud-services firm whose founder is a non-resident alumnus of the college and donates ₹1 crore annually. You discover that two council members hold non-disclosed advisory positions in the same firm. The Centre’s budget will lock the college into a 5-year cloud contract. The faculty union has objected. What course of action would you take? Justify with the values involved.

Dilemma: A Government Engineering College's governing council has approved a Rs 5 crore AI Centre of Excellence partnership with a private cloud-services firm whose founder is a Rs 1 crore annual donor-alumnus, while two council members hold undisclosed advisory positions in the same firm. The dilemma is between capitalising on donor generosity and preserving institutional autonomy, competitive procurement and faculty trust.

Stakeholders: Students whose curriculum will lock into the chosen cloud stack for five years; faculty (union has objected); the donor-alumnus and his firm; the conflicted council members; alternative cloud vendors denied a level playing field; the Higher Education Department and AICTE; State Audit and CAG; future donors watching whether disclosure costs are too high.

Options analysed: (a) sign as approved — five-year lock-in tainted by undisclosed COI, breaching DoPT Conflict of Interest Guidelines 2014 and UGC's Promotion of Academic Integrity Regulations 2018, exposing the college to AICTE strictures; (b) reject the partnership outright — loses the donation and alumnus relationship without the AI centre necessarily being built; (c) require written disclosure under the College Statutes' COI provision, ask conflicted members to recuse, re-table the decision after a structured RFP under GFR 2017 Rule 173, separate the donation from procurement through arms-length MoUs, ensure faculty representation on the selection committee, brief the Higher Education Department — the hard right.

Decision and reasoning: Option (c). The Director writes to the conflicted council members requiring disclosure and recusal, places the cloud-services decision on hold pending a structured RFP, accepts the annual donation through a separate MoU with a written non-quid-pro-quo clause, and constitutes a selection committee with faculty-union representation and at least one external academic from AICTE-empanelled institutions. Three named values anchor it: Nolan principles of selflessness and integrity; DoPT 2014 COI doctrine operationalised through disclosure and recusal; and the Civil Services Code's impartiality, supported by the donor-recipient arms-length doctrine adopted in IIM-Ahmedabad endowment partnerships and BITS-Pilani industry-research governance.

Safeguard / institutional fix: Section 4 RTI publication of the RFP, selection criteria and bid evaluations; State Audit and CAG visibility; donation MoU vetted by the Law Department; standing COI disclosure register at every council meeting; mandatory annual conflict declarations; faculty-union representation on all industry-partnership selection committees; an institutional rule that no donor's nominee firm may bid in the same financial year as the donation except through open RFP with full disclosure.