Shiv Nadar on Family-Business Stewardship

Nadar attributes his commercial success to the education and scholarships he received in his early years, and founded the Shiv Nadar Foundation in 1994 explicitly to widen that access — explicitly treating education as the highest-leverage form of capital allocation, not merely a charitable side-venture.

The Foundation frames its mission as nurturing leaders in 'symbiotic growth' — a phrase that deliberately mirrors the partnership-and-alliance logic Nadar applied at HCL, suggesting a unified theory of institution-building that spans both his commercial and philanthropic vehicles.

Padma Bhushan recipient in 2008, Nadar is profiled by his Foundation as both a business pioneer and a philanthropist with global recognition — a dual framing that positions the philanthropy as the natural continuation of the commercial career rather than a separate end-of-career pivot.

Forbes records that Nadar has donated about US$1.1 billion to the Shiv Nadar Foundation, which backs education-related causes — placing him among the most generous philanthropists in Indian business history in absolute terms, not just as a percentage of wealth.

In August 2020 Nadar handed the chairmanship of HCL Technologies to his daughter Roshni Nadar Malhotra, making her the first woman to chair a listed Indian IT company; in July 2021 he stepped down as managing director, succeeded by chief executive C. Vijayakumar for a five-year term.

Through the Shiv Nadar Foundation, established in 1994, Nadar has channelled more than a billion dollars into education-related philanthropy, founding SSN College of Engineering in Chennai, the Shiv Nadar University, and the VidyaGyan schools for rural students in Uttar Pradesh — a transfer of capital from the for-profit engine to institution-building that he has framed as his most durable legacy.

The Forbes relational summary lists HCLTech as the primary company stake Nadar holds, with his daughter Roshni now holding the controlling stake transferred in 2025 — a clean holding-company diagram of the family's listed and unlisted interests.

In 1996 Nadar founded SSN College of Engineering in Chennai in his father's name and gifted roughly INR 1 million of HCL shares to the institution, an early instance of transferring promoter equity into a philanthropic trust — a model he would later scale dramatically.

A 2011 Forbes feature on Nadar's VidyaGyan schools framed his education philanthropy as a multi-generational leadership pipeline — taking the brightest children from India's poorest villages and placing them in boarding schools — rather than a short-cycle charity programme.

The proposed 2025 merger of SSN College of Engineering with Shiv Nadar University consolidated Nadar's education philanthropy under a single institutional roof, mirroring the holding-company logic that had organised his commercial interests at HCL Enterprise.