🇮🇳 Azim Premji

Azim Premji was born in 1945 in Mumbai into a Gujarati Muslim Khoja business family. His father, Mohamed Hashim Premji, had refused Muhammad Ali Jinnah's personal request to migrate to Pakistan at Partition and had built up Western India Vegetable Products — a small Amalner-based maker of vanaspati cooking oil and laundry soap. Azim grew up between Mumbai and Amalner, attended St. Mary's School in the city, and then sailed for Stanford in 1965 to study electrical engineering.

When his father died suddenly the next year, Premji came home, finished only what he could finish at Stanford much later by correspondence (he eventually completed his degree in 1999), and took over a vegetable-oil company at twenty-one. For the first decade he simply ran it well — added bath soap (the Santoor brand much later), then hydraulics, then babywear (the Wipro Baby line), then lighting. The company quietly became one of India's most diversified consumer brands of the 1970s.

The pivot came in 1977. IBM, ordered out of India by the Janata government, left behind a mainframe-shaped vacuum. Premji and his managing director Ashok Soota looked at the gap and decided that a company that knew hydraulics could learn computing. They built Wipro's first minicomputer in 1981. The Wipro logo appeared on hardware in homes that had never heard of vanaspati. By 1990 the company was India's third-largest IT services player. By 2000 it was the largest Indian IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

Premji ran Wipro with what insiders described as obsessive frugality. He drove a 1996 Ford Escort. He flew economy. He stayed in three-star hotels on business trips. He famously demanded a junior employee fly back to Bangalore one weekend because he was using up an extra hotel-room night for a personal extension. He insisted that internal toilet paper be rationed. The frugality was not theatre — it was, his lieutenants said, who he actually was. He believed every rupee was a rupee that could be deployed at the Azim Premji Foundation.

The foundation, started quietly in 2001 with a small grant for primary education in rural Karnataka, has become the most consequential private philanthropic operation in Indian history. It now operates over 250,000 schools in collaboration with state governments, runs the Azim Premji University in Bangalore with multiple campuses, and as of 2019 holds roughly two-thirds of Premji's Wipro stake — over $21 billion in committed assets, the largest single philanthropic transfer by any Indian.

He signed the Giving Pledge in 2013, the first non-American to do so along with two other Indian signatories. He retired as Wipro chairman in 2019 and handed the company to his son Rishad. He stayed on as chairman emeritus and as full-time chairman of the foundation, where he works longer hours now than he did at the company.

His wife Yasmeen, whom he married in 1976, is rarely photographed. His two sons, Rishad and Tariq, both work in the family enterprise — Rishad as Wipro chairman, Tariq running Premji Invest, the family office that manages the secondary investments. There is no Antilia, no superyacht, no private jet. Premji lives in a modest bungalow in Bangalore's Koramangala. He has been seen, more than once, picking up a paper napkin he dropped under a restaurant table.

Asked at a Yale lecture in 2013 why he was giving away so much, Premji said: 'I have far more than I will ever need.' The audience applauded politely. The interviewer pressed: surely there was more to it? Premji said: 'No.' He paused. 'There really isn't.'