Azim Premji on Capital Allocation

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.

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.

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.

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 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 chose public education as the foundation's focus on the grounds that education is perhaps the most important social institution to empower individuals and shape a better society, and that the public school system is what best serves the disadvantaged and deprived. The choice privileged reach and equity over prestige causes like universities or hospitals.

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.

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.