Lifting students who haven’t had the access — yet.
FAER — the Foundation for Advancement of Education and Research — is a Bengaluru education trust, established in 2004, that backs rural and semi-urban student innovation.
Why FAER exists
Talent is everywhere. Access is the work.
FAER — the Foundation for Advancement of Education and Research — was founded in 2004 by academics and industrialists who saw the same thing again and again: brilliant students in rural and semi-urban India with real ideas and no way to build them. No guide. No money for the parts. No way to be seen. The talent was never the problem — the access was.
For twenty years FAER has worked to close that gap, through the Scholar Awards and its outreach programmes. FAER 2.0 goes further: a year-round platform that carries a student all the way from "I have never met a technologist" to "I built something real, and my name is on it."
One ladder, five rungs
How the mission becomes a method.
Everything FAER does maps to one climb — so a student is supported at every step, not just judged at the end.
Reach → Apply
Colleges and faculty put the Scholar Awards in front of their students, and every student applies online through the FAER portal.
Build
A faculty guide at the student’s own college, and project support of up to ₹6,000 for the parts the build needs.
Twenty years, in numbers
A track record you can check.
2004
established
A Bengaluru education trust
20+
years of programs
Scholar Awards since 2005
5
trustees
Academics and technologists
1
mission
Access to technology careers
Mission and engine
Built with OpenTurf.
OpenTurf builds and runs the platform
Applications, review, mentoring and reporting — the software behind the programmes.
FAER holds the authority
The mission, the programme design, and the final academic and selection authority sit with the trust.
Governance
The people behind FAER.
FAER is led by a board of academics and technologists who have spent their careers building things and teaching others to. The board holds final academic and selection authority at all times.
DS
Prof. D.K. Subramanian
President & Trustee
Dean and Professor (Retd.) at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Four decades in computer science and more than 200 publications, with wide-ranging advisory work across academia and industry.
MK
Mr. Mahesh Kumar Jain
Trustee
Chairman and Managing Director of Integra Micro Systems. A software-industry pioneer who helped bring UNIX to Indian hardware, with more than 27 years building technology businesses.
Board of Management
Office bearers.
The day-to-day stewards of the trust.
KS
Mr. K. Sridhar
Secretary
Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Integra Micro Software Services.
TS
Mr. T. Shankar
Treasurer
Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.
