From donating a billion dollars of his personal wealth to philanthropy to pushing the education agenda in the country to, now, helping accelerate development in rural India, he is giving both time and money to causes bigger than himself
Shiv Nadar is a restless man these days. The chairman of the $6.3 billion HCL Technologies has been preoccupied with his self-admittedly most ambitious project yet and, he says, he can’t seem to get a handle on it. “I just can’t seem to figure it out,” says Nadar, promoter of India’s fourth-largest software company. “It”, in this case, is Samudhay, the latest initiative from the Shiv Nadar Foundation, the philanthropy organisation started by Nadar in 1994. He confesses that he doesn’t remember spending as much time on any of his big-ticket IT projects as he has on this one. “I spend a minimum of three hours every day thinking about this,” he says.
And here’s why Samudhay is presenting such a challenge: The initiative is a grand plan to develop a replicable model of development for villages across five critical parameters—education, employability, health, infrastructure and water. According to Nadar, “This is the biggest project anyone has ever dared to do in our country.”
But, like any astute businessman, Nadar is taking inspiration from his primary domain of expertise—in his case, the IT industry. “Have you heard of crowdsourcing?” he asks Forbes India. “We will use this process (of getting work done or drawing inputs from a crowd of people) to find the best NGOs in the country, whether large or small, learn about the work they are doing and apply their best ideas to this project.”
NGOs such as Atmashakti Trust, Pratham and Biocon Foundation are already on board and the foundation is in talks with more potential partners. And, strengthened by these associations, in the next three to five years, it expects to find solutions to the manifold issues it is—quite ambitiously—hoping to fix.
B Banerjee, principal of the school in Bulandshahr, says Roshni pays close attention to the smallest details. Take, for instance, uniform design. And her passionate involvement is comforting for her father. “You need someone to spend time on philanthropy,” Nadar says. This is a lesson Nadar learnt from the founders of PSG College. PSG & Sons Charities Trust, established in 1926, has set up many educational institutions, one of which is PSG College of Technology where Nadar studied. “The founders of the trust have a rule that in every generation, one person in the family will give up business-related work and devote time to the institutions run by the trust,” says Nadar. “It is an excellent practice which inspires us.”
He especially attributes this impact to PSG’s founder GR Damodaran. Recognising that publicly, “on the birth centenary of GR Damodaran, we instituted a scholarship in his name because he had a profound influence on me,” says Nadar.
And, like Damodaran, Nadar wants to create prestigious educational institutions. “We aspire to be a Carnegie or a Rockefeller,” says Roshni. “By the time we become that famous, we will all be gone. But the aim is that 100 years from now, we will be dead but the institutions set up by us will live on. The only way a foundation will outlive its founders is if it can function without us.”
In many ways, Roshni has been a catalyst for the leap of faith taken by Nadar in his thrust towards education. “My father has always felt that apart from IIT, there are few universities and schools that are aspirational in India,” says Roshni. “Our foundation had set up SSN College of Engineering 20 years ago which, today, is a reputed college. But apart from that, we didn’t have anything.”
(This story appears in the 09 January, 2015 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)