Chairman's Message
Founder and Chairman Emeritus
Ghiasuddin Babukhan
The message below was written by our founder for the students of the Hyderabad Institute of Excellence. We have kept it exactly as he wrote it, because it still describes the institution he asked us to be.
I take pleasure in welcoming you to The Hyderabad Institute of Excellence. The students who join here would have displayed tremendous potential by already having a good Academic record. At HIE, they will not only get an opportunity to develop their abilities further but also to expand their horizons.
"Having already demonstrated their potential to stand out in their communities, at HIE they shall aim to further excel. The students will be groomed to be future leaders and role models in their communities."
To many of our students, good education will be a privilege that was not available to their parents. HIE will enable our students to prepare them for the opportunities of tomorrow.
Our teaching staff and administrators are more than just 'teachers'. They will be friends, mentors, guides and fellow participants in the wonderful and joyful process of teaching and learning.
Welcome to Hyderabad Institute of Excellence.
"Having already demonstrated their potential to stand out in their communities, at HIE they shall aim to further excel. The students will be groomed to be future leaders and role models in their communities."
To many of our students, good education will be a privilege that was not available to their parents. HIE will enable our students to prepare them for the opportunities of tomorrow.
Our teaching staff and administrators are more than just 'teachers'. They will be friends, mentors, guides and fellow participants in the wonderful and joyful process of teaching and learning.
Welcome to Hyderabad Institute of Excellence.
Ghiasuddin Babukhan
Chairman Emeritus
THE CONVICTION THAT BUILT HIE
Mr. Jannat Hussain at Cornerstone Ceremony of HIE
By the time the Hyderabad Institute of Excellence opened its doors in 2013, Ghiasuddin Babukhan had already spent two decades putting children from poor families through school. He had seen what happened next. A boy would finish Class 10 with excellent marks, and then the road would narrow. The coaching was in the city. The hostel was expensive. The family could not carry it. The talent was real and the opportunity simply was not there.
HIE was his answer to that specific problem.
He set aside land at Vikarabad and built a residential campus where a scholarship student would live and study alongside a fee paying student, in the same classroom, the same hostel and the same coaching batch, with no distinction made between them. Students are selected through an entrance examination on merit and on need. The scholarship student pays nothing for tuition.
The principle he set for the institution was simple enough to state in one sentence: one paying student should pay for one scholarship student. He wanted the mission to eventually fund itself, so that a good education for a poor child would not depend on charity but on the strength of the institution.
That is the standard he left us. It is the one we measure ourselves against.
From Building a City to Building Lives
Ghiasuddin Babukhan was born into a family that had already given Hyderabad a great deal. His father, Khan Bahadur Abdul Karim Babukhan, belonged to a lineage associated with institutions the city still uses, from the Arts College at Osmania University to the Nizam Sugar Factory. He was educated at Aaliya School and at Nizam College.
He entered the family business and did well in it. As a director of Babukhan Properties and Industries, and through Moghul Builders and Planners, he had a hand in landmarks that changed the shape of the city, among them Deccan Towers and Babukhan Estate.
In the early 1990s he turned decisively toward a different kind of construction. He had come to a view that he repeated for the rest of his life: that knowledge is the greatest leveller available to a society, and that giving a poor child an education is a more durable act than almost anything else a person can do with money.
He gave the next three decades to that idea.
He was as attentive to those the city overlooked as he was to students. He supported widows and orphans, and the remarriage programme he backed became a model that later shaped public policy in the state.
He passed away in Hyderabad on 25 August 2025, at the age of 83. He is survived by his wife, three sons and a daughter.
THE TRUSTS HE FOUNDED
He did not give informally. He built institutions to give through, because he wanted the work to outlast him.
Hyderabad Zakat and Charitable Trust (HZCT). Founded in the early 1990s with a small first collection, HZCT turned zakat from scattered individual giving into an organised and transparent system. Over three decades it has supported many thousands of students, a large number of them in the smaller towns and remote districts of Telangana where no other support was available.
Foundation for Economic and Educational Development (FEED). Founded in 1996, FEED grew out of a conviction he held for the rest of his life: that education is the surest route out of poverty, and that knowledge is what makes a person free. At the primary level it has supported schools in remote villages of Telangana and the Rayalaseema region, in places where the alternative for a child was no school at all
