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Shiv Nadar - Founder of HCL
In India’s elite group of tech titans, Shiv Nadar’s name doesn’t always echo as loudly as his peers.
He’s never sought the limelight, rarely made brash declarations, and is notoriously media-shy.
Yet his legacy, both in business and in philanthropy, is profound.
Mr. Nadar is the founder of HCL Technologies, one of India’s richest individuals and has spent the past two decades quietly reshaping education for India’s rural youth.
And it’s not for profit nor for headlines, but out of a deep conviction that talent exists everywhere, not just in urban cities.
From Tamil Nadu to the Tech Frontier
Born in 1945 in a small village in Tamil Nadu, Mr. Nadar’s rise was anything but predictable.
He graduated with a degree in electrical and electronics engineering from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, a decision that positioned him perfectly to ride the upcoming technology wave.
By the mid-1970s, India’s IT revolution had not yet begun — and yet, he saw it coming.
In 1976, along with a group of ambitious colleagues from Delhi Cloth Mills (DCM), he co-founded Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL) with a borrowed capital of ₹187,000.
The goal?
Build computers in India at a time when importing even a calculator required licenses, permissions, and months of wait time.
HCL started by producing calculators and microprocessors, and later, computers. By the 1980s, HCL was developing indigenous computer systems — a revolutionary step when IBM had exited the Indian market, leaving a gaping hole in the local IT ecosystem.
But Mr. Nadar didn’t stop at hardware. He understood early on that India’s future wasn't just in making machines — it was in providing tech services to the world.
As the global demand for software development and IT services surged in the 1990s, HCL pivoted toward outsourcing and enterprise technology.
Today, HCL Technologies has grown into a $13 billion global IT powerhouse, with more than 2,27,000 employees across 60 countries.
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A Shift in Purpose: From Business to Nation-Building
By the early 2000s, Mr. Nadar had already built an empire.
But for him, success came with responsibility.
He once said, "The future belongs to people who build it, and that includes building opportunities for others."
It was this ethos that led to the founding of the Shiv Nadar Foundation in 1994.
At first, it supported scholarships and educational programs through conventional means. But Mr. Nadar quickly realised that piecemeal charity wouldn’t create lasting change. He needed to do something deeper and systemic - that would endure long after he was gone.
So, he began building institutions.
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The Birth of SSN College
In 1996, the foundation launched its first major project: SSN College of Engineering, named after his father, Sivasubramaniya Nadar.
Located in Chennai, SSN offered state-of-the-art infrastructure and an emphasis on research, distinguishing itself from the learn-by-heart education system in India.
Over time, SSN would go on to become one of the top private engineering colleges in South India, with a focus on merit-based admission and scholarships for underprivileged students. It was Mr. Nadar’s first experiment in combining academic excellence with social inclusion — and it worked.
VidyaGyan: Grooming Rural India’s Future Leaders
But his most radical experiment was still to come.
In 2009, the Shiv Nadar Foundation launched VidyaGyan — a network of leadership academies for gifted students from rural Uttar Pradesh.
The idea was both simple and revolutionary: identify the brightest children from economically disadvantaged families and give them access to the best education possible — free of cost.
The selection process is rigorous. Out of tens of thousands of applicants from rural government schools, only about 200 are chosen each year through a series of academic tests and interviews. They are enrolled in fully residential schools that offer English-medium instruction, mentorship, and holistic development.
Today, VidyaGyan has two campuses in Bulandshahr and Sitapur, each outfitted with digital classrooms, modern labs, libraries, sports facilities, and highly trained faculty.
Mr. Nadar's goal isn’t just to educate these children — it’s to build leaders who return to their communities and create change.
He described VidyaGyan as “a place where dreams take root, and where future leaders of rural India are forged.”
Shiv Nadar University: A Model for Interdisciplinary Learning
Continuing his commitment to education, in 2011, Mr. Nadar established Shiv Nadar University (SNU) in Greater Noida.
The university was designed to break traditional academic silos and promote interdisciplinary learning, research, and innovation.
SNU is still young, but it has quickly gained a reputation for academic rigour and industry collaboration. It is also part of Mr. Nadar's broader mission to cultivate a new generation of thinkers and innovators.
The Numbers Behind the Mission
The Shiv Nadar Foundation has committed over $1.1 billion to philanthropic causes, with education as its central pillar. It manages over 10 institutions across K-12, higher education, and rural leadership programs.
To date, more than 40,000 students have benefitted from the foundation’s initiatives, with many receiving full scholarships.
What sets the foundation apart is its long-term approach: it runs and operates the institutions it funds, ensuring quality and consistency.
This is not Corporate Social Responsibility for branding purposes. It’s nation-building, brick by brick.
A Model for Indian Philanthropy
In a country where private philanthropy is growing but still patchy, Mr. Nadar's approach offers a powerful template. He didn’t just write checks — he built institutions, invested in people, and stayed committed for the long haul.
His brand of giving is rooted in discipline. As one senior leader at the Foundation noted, “He approaches philanthropy with the same rigour he brought to building HCL.”
Mr. Nadar is also part of the Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, promising to give away a majority of his wealth in this lifetime.
Shiv Nadar is not flashy. He rarely gives interviews, doesn't dominate Davos panels, and prefers to let his work — and his students — speak for him.
But few Indian entrepreneurs have built as much, given as much, and stayed as committed to their country’s future as he has.
And he doesn’t believe in short-term results. He once told Forbes India, “You don’t create impact in two or three years. It takes a generation to see the real change.”