Shiv Nadar, the Indian billionaire, sitting on the throne of $8.2 billion HCL Technologies

Nadar is probably the only Indian founder whose story resembles that of American tech billionaires. Like Bill Gates, he co-founded his HCL technologies with five partners in a garage in 1976. Back then, he intended to make calculators and microprocessors with an investment of ₹187,000.

And his bet on the chips that make computers was also ahead of its time, in the eighties. He was one of the world’s first few to introduce PCs in1978, alongside Steve Jobs’ Apple.

Within four years, the company had started operating internationally in as Singapore. HCL reported revenue of ₹1 million in 2016.

Nadar’s father was a judge and his mother came from the same family as the founder of popular Tamlil tabloid Dina Thanti. He studied electrical and electronic engineering from PSG College of Technology and Coimbatore and later joined Walchand group in 1967, heading to Delhi.

Between 2010 and 2019, his net worth swelled by a massive 247% from $4.2 billion to $14.6 billion. His company HCL’s revenue too increased parallelly from $172 million in 2010 to $309 million in 2019.

Interestingly, his net worth dropped from $14.8 billion in 2015 to $11.1 billion in 2016. It was the very same year when he was named India's top philanthropist. He donated as much as $662 million to Shiv Nadar Foundation.

He is also generous with his time, as he spends 60-65% with time with his foundation since 2007. He continues as the chairman of the company he founded, and his daughter Roshni Nadar who graduated with an MBA from Kelloggs college is the CEO.

During his first job, a lot of Nadar’s colleagues had high profile degrees from reputed colleges. Later on in his life, he turned education as his choice of charity. He had never learnt English until he turned 22. Nadar who hails from Moolaipozhi village in Tamil Nadu also started a chain of schools in rural areas.

"Education is, and will be the most powerful tool for individual and social change, and we must do all that it takes to facilitate it," he said.

He founded SSN College of Engineering in Chennai in 1996 and gifted shares worth ₹1 million to the college. In his lifetime, he intends to donate as much as $1 billion for promoting education.