It’s not just because of Azim Premji’s enormous wealth that he is compared to the American technologist turned philanthropist. Granted, the chairman of the technology-services company Wipro is India’s third-richest citizen, with a net worth of $13 billion, according to Forbes. He inherited Wipro as a small cooking-oil company when he was just a 21-year-old engineering student at Stanford University and has since overseen its growth into a global giant.
It is Premji’s unprecedented philanthropy, however, that recently has borne out the Gates comparison. Last December, Premji made the largest charitable contribution in modern Indian history: $1.95 billion to his rural-education foundation, to help train teachers and improve exams and curricula for 2.5 million Indian children in more than 20,000 schools. The Azim Premji University, a training and research institution in Bangalore, welcomed its first 200 students in July, and the foundation just announced plans to open 1,300 free schools across the country.