Azim Premji on Governance

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In his 2013 Giving Pledge letter, Premji credited his mother as the most significant influence on his early life. A medical doctor who never practised, she spent close to fifty years building and running a charitable hospital for polio and cerebral-palsy children in Bombay — giving Premji a hands-on model of how difficult, but necessary, sustained institutional philanthropy actually is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.