Azim Premji on Scale Economics

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.