NEW HORIZONS
Adani Cement Bets On Campus Engagement At Scale
Priti Saldanha
FutureX initiative now spans 1,000+ institutions and has delivered 1,500+ plant experiences and 100+ internships, as Adani Cement's top brass draws on the legacies of Ambuja and ACC to make the case to students.
At a time when India's employers are increasingly vocal about the gap between what graduates learn in classrooms and what industry actually needs, Adani Cement is betting on early, sustained engagement with students to close it and the numbers behind its FutureX programme suggest the bet is paying off.
The initiative, which pairs academia with the shop floor, has now partnered with over 1,000 educational institutions and reached close to 20 lakh students nationwide, offering more than 1,500 plant and laboratory experiences, over 250 lab visits, 50-plus expert-led sessions, and over 100 internships alongside campus recruitment drives.
The latest installment, held at Adani University, saw Vinod Bahety, CEO of Adani's Cement Business, sit down with students for a session titled "Strength & Trust: A Roadmap to Succeed in Professional and Personal Life", part pep talk, part masterclass drawn from his own career and the histories of Ambuja Cements and ACC, the two heritage brands under the group's cement arm.
Mr Bahety used the two companies almost as case studies in contrasting virtues: Ambuja, he said, embodies resilience and scale, while ACC has built its name on reliability and consistency over decades. His pitch to students distilled the two into a simple formula: "Strength earns respect. Trust earns opportunity. Together, they create credibility, resilience and lasting impact."
He also invoked what he described as the Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani's own framing of legacy that a company should be remembered not for the size of its balance sheet, but for the strength of its backbone and pressed the point that strength is built through discipline, while trust has to be earned through transparency and keeping commitments.
Vinod Bahety, CEO of Adani's Cement Business, addressing students during a session titled "Strength & Trust: A Roadmap to Succeed in Professional and Personal Life".
Beyond the rhetoric, the pitch to students is a practical one: exposure to real manufacturing and laboratory environments, direct contact with industry leaders and a foot in the door for internships and jobs. For a company operating in an unglamorous, capital-heavy sector like cement, it's also a recruitment and reputation play, building familiarity with the brand among students years before they enter the job market.
Adani frames the broader ambition in the language of national policy, tying FutureX to the government's twin goals of a "Yogya Bharat" (a capable India) and "Viksit Bharat" (a developed India) — positioning workforce readiness as industry's contribution to that agenda, rather than a corporate social responsibility side-project.