CITATION
M.V. Muthuramalingam (MVM) is the founder-chairman of the low-profile Chennai-based Velammal Group. Born in Ladenenthal village, Madurai district in 1946, at age six MVM took charge of fending for the family after the premature demise of his father in 1952, grazing buffaloes and selling milk to supplement the household income while his mother Velammal worked as a househelper.

Despite these difficult times, MVM persevered to complete class X in the local government school and followed it up with a diploma in civil engineering from Madurai’s Thiagarajar College of Engineering, and began his working life as a civil contractor. Following his marriage with Kunjaravalli in 1969 and the birth of his first son, in 1972 the family moved to Chennai in search of a better life.

In 1986, he sold the family’s sole property in Madurai for Rs.5 lakh to promote the Velammal Matriculation School with 183 students and 13 teachers in Mogappair, Chennai under the aegis of the Velammal Educational Trust. Since then over the past 30 years, the Velammal Group has grown to include three kindergarten, 11 Matriculation, one international, one residential, two IGCSE and 13 CBSE schools, three engineering colleges, one medical college and an allied sciences college offering high-quality education to 90,000 students mentored by 8,500 teachers in several districts of Tamil Nadu. The group™s newest institution, the state-of-the-art Velammal Medical College Hospital & Research Institute inaugurated in 2012, is spread across 136 acres in Madurai, offering a world-class medical college-cum-hospital with 2,100 beds.

MVM’s dedicated focus on offering high-quality values-driven school and tertiary education in contemporary learning environments to children and youth at all price points, has transformed the Velammal Group into one of the largest and fastest growing education chains of south India. Over the past three decades, Velammal institutions have educated, trained and certified 56,584 class X and 57,263 class XII school-leavers, 16,058 engineers and 1,515 other professionals who have contributed significantly to transforming Tamil Nadu into the nation™s industrial manufacturing hub.

For his extraordinary contributions to the development of Indian education and growth of the economy, the Board of Directors and Editors of EW are proud to present the EW Lifetime Achievement in Education Leadership 2015 Award to MV Muthuramalingam and induct him into the EW Hall of Fame of Indian Education.