Shiv Nadar

Shiv Nadar, born 1945, founded the computer company HCL in 1976 and has since the mid-1990s directed most of his attention and a large part of his fortune to Indian education. He has committed more than a billion US dollars to philanthropy and was named in 2011 among Forbes's Heroes of Philanthropy in the Asia-Pacific.

He established the Shiv Nadar Foundation in 1994 as a body concerned specifically with creating equitable access to education and to leadership. Its first institution was SSN College of Engineering, opened in Chennai in 1996 and named after his father, Sivasubramaniya Nadar; Nadar involved himself in its running and endowed it with HCL shares. Post-graduate teaching followed in 2003 and a research centre in 2007. In 2009 the foundation launched the VidyaGyan Leadership Academy for meritorious rural children in Uttar Pradesh, providing free schooling to students drawn from across the state's districts. Shiv Nadar University opened at Greater Noida in 2011, Shiv Nadar Schools in Noida and Gurgaon in 2012 and Faridabad in 2015, and Shiv Nadar University Chennai, created by an act of the Tamil Nadu legislature, in 2020. The Shiksha Initiative, begun in 2012, took technology-based literacy teaching into villages in Uttar Pradesh.

The foundation's remit has extended beyond schooling. In 2010 it established the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, named after his wife, as India's first privately funded philanthropic art museum. Nadar has also given directly to public institutions — he donated computers and equipment worth about eight million rupees to his old school in Kumbakonam in 2011 — and served in public educational roles, joining the executive board of the Indian School of Business in 2005 and chairing the board of governors of IIT Kharagpur until 2014. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2008.[2][3]