Azim Premji

Azim Premji, the businessman who built Wipro from a vegetable oil company into a global information technology firm, is India's largest private philanthropist and has directed almost all of his giving to a single problem: the quality of teaching in government schools.

Born in Bombay in 1945, Premji was studying electrical engineering at Stanford when his father died in 1966; he returned at twenty-one to run the family business. He founded the Azim Premji Foundation in 2001, choosing to work inside the public school system in the poorest districts of India rather than build private schools, on the argument that the state system educates the overwhelming majority of Indian children and that improving it requires long-term work with teachers and education officials. Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, of which he is chancellor, followed.

His giving has been made through transfers of Wipro shares rather than annual donations. In December 2010 he pledged shares worth about two billion US dollars, equal to 8.7 per cent of the company; a further 12 per cent followed in February 2013 and 18 per cent in July 2015. In March 2019 he committed another 34 per cent of his holding, bringing the total endowment to roughly 21 billion dollars and making him by some distance the largest Indian donor. In 2013 he became the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge started by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, writing that those who hold wealth ought to use a large part of it for people who are far less privileged. During the pandemic the Foundation and the Wipro companies committed 1,125 crore rupees to COVID-19 relief in April 2020 and a further 1,000 crore in June 2021 towards vaccination.

He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2005 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2011, and was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour in 2018. In 2019 Forbes listed him among the world's most generous philanthropists outside the United States.[2]