Wipro

Azim Hashim Premji, born 24 July 1945 in Bombay, is the Indian billionaire businessman and philanthropist who led Wipro for decades as chairman before stepping into a non-executive board role as founding chairman. As of late 2023 Forbes put his net worth at roughly eleven point six billion dollars, with his reputation equally split between building Wipro and giving away most of it.

TIME's 2025 Philanthropy list noted that over five decades Premji transformed his parents' small vegetable-oil business into a global IT leader, then became better known as one of India's most generous philanthropists, directing wealth to systematically improve India's public education system. The two identities — operator and giver — are presented as a single arc rather than separate chapters.

As the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge in 2013, Premji has endowed the foundation he launched nearly twenty-five years earlier with over twenty-nine billion dollars in Wipro shares, per TIME's 2025 accounting — an updated cumulative figure that reflects subsequent top-ups beyond the 2019 twenty-one-billion transfer.

Premji was born into a Gujarati Ismaili Khoja Muslim family. His father Muhammed Hashem Premji was a noted businessman called the Rice King of Burma, and famously turned down Muhammad Ali Jinnah's invitation to move to Pakistan after Partition, choosing to remain in India — a family decision that anchors Premji's Indian nationalist identity.

His father had incorporated Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd in 1945 at Amalner, in Maharashtra's Jalgaon district, manufacturing Sunflower Vanaspati cooking oil and a laundry soap called 787 that was a byproduct of the oil trade. That single-product, small-town family company would, over five decades, become the global IT services firm Wipro.

In 2023-2024 the foundation disbursed traditional grants of about one hundred and nine million dollars to 940 organisations focused on education, health and related areas. Alongside grants, it runs 59 field offices and 263 teacher-learning centres across India, working directly with teachers and rural child-care workers — the operating-organisation model Premji committed to in his pledge letter.

TIME reported that the foundation's educational programs have so far helped over eight million children, and that it also plays an advocacy role on education policy — including helping to shape national curriculum. That dual operating-plus-advocacy posture makes it an institutional actor, not just a charity.

In 1966, at age twenty-one, Premji dropped out of Stanford on news of his father's sudden death and returned home to take charge of the family business. He would finally complete his Stanford electrical engineering degree only in 2000 — a thirty-four-year detour that underscored how completely the family business consumed his early adulthood.

In the 1980s, after IBM was expelled from India, Premji changed the company name to Wipro and entered high technology by manufacturing minicomputers through a technology tie-up with the American Sentinel Computer Corporation. From there he made a deliberate pivot from soaps to software, eventually turning Wipro into one of India's flagship IT services exporters.

Among recent initiatives cited by TIME: a third campus for Azim Premji University with programs aligned to the foundation's mission (public health, education, sustainability), a scholarship programme for college-bound girls, and over 480 child-care centres for children aged six months to three years — extending the foundation's reach from school age down to early childhood.

In August 2025 the foundation committed around one hundred and seventy-five million dollars to expand school-meal coverage for more than five million children, taking its nutrition work to population scale. Premji's philosophy, as TIME framed it, draws on Mahatma Gandhi's notion of holding wealth in trusteeship for the betterment of society.

Under Premji, the original hydrogenated cooking-oil business was progressively diversified into bakery fats, ethnic ingredient-based toiletries, hair-care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products and hydraulic cylinders — a portfolio reshaping exercise that anticipated and funded the eventual IT pivot rather than replacing it overnight.

Premji is the chancellor of Azim Premji University in Bangalore, an institution founded in 2010 that offers programs in education and related human-development domains. The university is the academic-institutional arm of his education thesis, training the practitioners his foundation deploys in the field.

Premji set up PremjiInvest as his family office in 2006, formalising the investment vehicle through which the family deploys capital beyond Wipro. The office has since become one of India's most active family-office investors in venture and public markets, anchoring Premji's reputation as a serious allocator, not just an operator.

TIME highlighted Premji's Gandhian framing of wealth: he holds it in trusteeship rather than as owner, and the foundation's scale, field presence and policy advocacy all flow from that framing. The conviction explains why he has chosen to give during his lifetime rather than via a bequest — control and accountability matter.

He founded the Azim Premji Foundation in 2001 to improve India's public school system in disadvantaged regions. The foundation is now the operational vehicle for nearly all his giving, deliberately structured as an operating organisation rather than a grant-making trust so it can deploy people on the ground in tandem with government.

The giving pace escalated over a decade: in December 2010 Premji transferred 8.7% of Wipro (about two billion dollars then) to the foundation; in February 2013 an additional 12%; in July 2015 another 18%, taking his total contribution to 39%; and in March 2019 an additional 34%, taking the cumulative endowment to about twenty-one billion dollars and making him India's top philanthropist.

During COVID-19, the Azim Premji Foundation, Wipro and Wipro Enterprises together committed Rs 1,125 crore (about one hundred and forty million dollars) in April 2020 to relief, and a further Rs 1,000 crore in June 2021 to support universal vaccination — among the largest single philanthropic commitments by any Indian business family during the pandemic.

In 2013 Premji became the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge, the Buffett-Gates-led campaign encouraging the wealthy to give most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. He was only the third non-American after Richard Branson and David Sainsbury to join, signalling that Indian business wealth was beginning to plug into a global philanthropic infrastructure.

Premji has been honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2005 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2011, France's Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2018, EY's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018, and an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan University in 2009 — a recognition arc that mirrors the rise of Wipro itself from a single-product family firm to a global IT services powerhouse.

From 2020 onwards Premji faced a series of lawsuits filed through the NGO India Awake for Transparency alleging illegal asset transfers; the Karnataka High Court dismissed them as frivolous and jailed two complainants for contempt, and the Supreme Court closed the remaining matters in March 2022 after the principal complainant apologised. The episode tested but ultimately vindicated his governance record.

Premji wrote that newly independent India buzzed with idealism and a genuine sense of nation-building, and that this influenced him deeply. He explicitly invoked Gandhi's notion of holding wealth in trusteeship, to be used for the betterment of society rather than as if one owned it — the philosophical anchor for everything that followed.

He recounted how in 1966 he had to drop out of Stanford on his father's untimely death (completing his engineering degree only in 2000) and returned to India at age twenty-one to run the small family business. Over the next three decades he focused on building Wipro into a successful, professionally run organisation — a period he described as the precondition for everything he could later give away.

Premji told the Giving Pledge community that his experience in India had taught him that establishing effective operational and execution structures is much harder than committing or collecting money. That conviction drove his decision in 2001 to set up the Azim Premji Foundation as an operating organisation, working in collaboration with government to improve public schooling rather than merely writing cheques.

In 2009, the foundation reviewed its strategy and decided to scale up by creating institutions — district and state-level bodies working on teacher capacity development, plus a university focused on education and related human development domains. To enable this, Premji donated about 8.7% of Wipro (then worth roughly two billion dollars) in December 2010 to create the foundation's endowment.

At the time of the letter, the foundation had about 800 people spread across India, most working in disadvantaged regions, with plans to scale to 4,000–5,000 over the next five years. The headcount signalled Premji's bet that field presence at scale, not grant disbursement, was the binding constraint on education reform in India.

Premji committed to transferring more of his wealth to scale up the foundation's endowment, framing the act as a moral obligation: those privileged to have wealth, he wrote, should contribute significantly to create a better world for the millions far less privileged. He pledged to continue acting on that belief — a commitment he would later exceed by transferring the majority of his Wipro stake.

In February 2013 Premji transferred an additional 295.53 million Wipro shares, representing 12% of the company. Cumulatively he had by then donated over 521 million shares — 20.2% of Wipro's total shareholding — with a January 2015 valuation of about five billion dollars. The Giving Pledge signing and the share transfer together formalised the largest philanthropic commitment by any Indian up to that point.

Premji framed his broader conviction in the letter as the belief that markets, public systems and philanthropic initiatives all had a significant role to play in inclusive development, and that India needed to work purposefully toward a more humane, equitable and ethical society. The stance explicitly rejected a markets-only or state-only ideology in favour of a three-legged model.

Speaking at Stanford GSB's View From The Top series on 27 October 2006, Premji told students that failure is essential to innovation: you cannot generate a few good ideas without a lot of bad ones, and failures should be forgiven and forgotten quickly. The framing made risk-tolerance a structural requirement, not just a corporate slogan.

Premji was introduced as the leader who transformed Wipro from a family-run vegetable oil business (Western India Vegetable Products Ltd) into one of the world's largest outsourcing companies over a roughly forty-year arc. The shorthand used in the West — from Crisco to computers — captured the sheer scale of the diversification in a single phrase.

In his argument, every market at every juncture has significant scale advantages that make incumbents look invincible, yet upstart technologies repeatedly disrupt them and rewrite the rules. He cited Skype, which became the first to offer voice-over-Internet phone services at broad scale, long after established telecom companies had begun talking about the technology — a reminder that incumbents often describe change before they execute it.

He positioned Wipro's gradual evolution as a sequence of pivots rather than one grand one. The 1970s exit of IBM from India opened room for local computer manufacturing; Wipro began assembling its own machines, then moved into computer and IT services for global firms operating in India, and as computers commoditised, shifted toward servers and R&D labs for hire to Western tech and consumer firms.

By the time of his Stanford talk, Wipro was the world's largest independent R&D services provider — a positioning that put it a step beyond pure coding into contracted research for Western high-tech and consumer-product companies, leveraging Indian engineering talent at a lower cost than their in-house labs.

Premji distinguished creativity from innovation in his Stanford talk: creativity is about making new things, while innovation is about doing new things. The distinction mattered to him because it placed execution, not invention, at the centre of business value — a stance that explains Wipro's services-first DNA.

Defending offshore outsourcing against Western political criticism, Premji argued it was inevitable not so much because of cost arbitrage as talent arbitrage: Western cultures were not pushing enough students into engineering, and those who entered often did not choose computer science. India, by contrast, had the engineering supply to plug that gap structurally.

He offered a striking statistic on brain-drain reversal: Wipro's annual attrition had long run at 13 to 14 percent, but just four years earlier almost all departing employees had left for US jobs; by 2006 only 1 percent of those leaving Wipro went to US companies. The flow had inverted, with Indian engineers returning home rather than chasing American salaries.

He emphasised that companies must deliberately design a culture of innovation: actively seek customer feedback, celebrate diversity in the workforce, and create an environment in which workers feel safe taking risks even when they fail. Innovation, in his view, is engineered through culture rather than left to chance.

Premji told the Stanford audience that real progress comes as much from changing behaviour as from inventing new products. The line reflected a management philosophy that prizes adoption and execution over invention and IP — an appropriate stance for a services-led firm whose customers' needs set the agenda.