Alliance University is a private research intensive university that was established in 2010 in Bangalore, India.
Foundation
Alliance University grew out of the "Academy Business School", which was founded around 2005 and in turn grew out of the "Alliance Group of Institutions", which had been founded in the mid-1990s. Madhukar G. Angur, then on the faculty of University of Michigan, was an honorary dean of the AcademyBusiness School and his brother, Sudhir Angur, was the president. Alliance Business School was unrelated to the "Alliance Business of Academy" that was affiliated with Bangalore University. Alliance University was the first private universities in the state of Karnataka and in South India, and was established under state legislation. The sponsoring body of the university is Alliance Business School Pvt. Ltd, run by the Angur family, and until 2016 the university's chancellor was Madhukar Angur. As of 2016 it had around 6,500 students.
As early as 2014 disputes within the Angur family began interrupting the management of the university; in 2015 Madhukar Angur removed his brother, sister, and other family members from the board and filed police charges that they had stolen money and mismanaged the university. In February 2016 Madhukar Angur was arrested on charges of raping his niece, then released, and further rape allegations were made the next month. Around April 2016 Madhukar Angur was fired as chancellor and replaced by his brother, Sudhir Angur, and by June the power struggle within the family for control led to the university being closed for two weeks and semester-end exams were indefinitely postponed. The university went on holidays two more times in 2016; in September Madhukar Angur forcibly took back the chancellorship, and the next month his brother forcibly took it back.
Government intervention
In November 2016 a government-appointed investigation by M.I. Savadatti reported that it found that between 2010 and 2016 Madhukar Angur had been "deeply involved in committing huge financial irregularities causing wrongful loss to Alliance University a total amount of Rs 96 crore". Students and their families began to request refunds, and appealed to the government of Karnataka to intervene. The government had no legal right to intervene in a private university, and in November worked to change the law so that it could. In December 2017 the government appointed an administrator with unspecified tenure and said that the Angurs could no longer be involved in managing the operations of the university. As of March 2018 litigation between family members over control of the university was pending in the High Court.
