The philanthropic spending by Tata Trusts is slated to go up to Rs 2,000 crore in the current fiscal, said the Chief Executive Officer Siddharth Sharma. It was around Rs 1,600 crore last year.The Trust is finalising a collaboration with a reputed educational institution to set up a world class university for undergraduate studies, contributing to setting up a state-of-the art multi-speciality hospital in Central India and funding quality research in agriculture and genomics, he said. “The trust is also funding IIT Mandi for a Centre for Disaster Preparedness and Resilience in the ecologically sensitive Himalayan Region and enabling cutting edge brain research at IIT Madras,” Sharma said in a post on LinkedIn.This scale of spending, on a year-on-year basis, has enabled the Trust to provide quality, yet affordable cancer care, to citizens of Assam, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and UP, he wrote.Tata Trusts, headed by Noel Tata, hold 66% stake in Tata Sons, the principal shareholder of various Tata group companies.“It has enabled us to raise the standards of living of millions of Indians through rural livelihood interventions through the entire central Indian belt, elevate the nutritional status of newborns, adolescents and mothers, strengthen primary and secondary health care across India and build on the educational foundations of our nation by investing in early childhood education and foundational literacy and numeracy and provide employability to our youth through state of the art skilling initiatives,” he said.It has enabled the trust to ameliorate the financial distress of ailing citizens through direct grants to hospitals for medical treatments and provide scholarships for studies in India and abroad to deserving students lacking necessary financial resource, he said.“As the majority shareholders in Tata Sons, we deploy, year after year, the dividends that we receive, into philanthropic causes that uplift those at society’s margins and help build a nation. This predates, by 122 years, the CSR mandate that was introduced in 2014 for Indian business,” Sharma wrote.Story continues below this adPhilanthropy remains core focus; media feeds on TRPsOn the recent developments involving Tata Trusts, Sharma wrote, “I do understand that much of our media today feeds on TRPs and dishes out news that sells, amplifies certain narratives unfortunately, at times, without verification and analysis — that happens. It is both the reality and the tragedy of our times.”“The brilliance, integrity and calibre of reporting exemplified by the likes of Arun Shourie, is possibly now a thing of the past. I therefore thought of putting the record straight about the core activity of the Tata Trusts, for which we exist — philanthropy,” Sharma said.“I was bemused to find a message in my LinkedIn inbox from someone offering to help me address the ‘chaos’ at the Tata Trusts,” the CEO wrote.He said the Tata Trusts, which came into existence in 1892, when the country was still ruled by a colonial power, gave the Tata Group its distinctive philosophy, its DNA and its moral underpinning. “For the Group, the centrality of the community, and the welfare of its stakeholders has been an article of faith. We have always believed that ‘what is good for the nation is good for us’,” he said.Story continues below this ad“The Tata Trusts are continuing to do what they do best — serving those at the margins of society. No hype, no publicity; only solid, hard work. Everything else is normal,” Sharma wrote.