Azim Premji

Azim was studying engineering at Stanford in America when his father died suddenly. He came home at 21 to run the family's small vegetable-oil company.

Instead of selling it, he turned it into Wipro — first making soaps, then computers, then some of the world's biggest software services. He also gave away more than half of everything he owned to help teach India's children through the Azim Premji Foundation, one of the largest private grants for education in the world.

Azim Hashim Premji (born 1945) took charge of Western India Vegetable Products Ltd (later Wipro) in 1966, aged 21, after the sudden death of his father M. H.

Hasham Premji. He diversified the company from vanaspati and soap into IT hardware in the 1980s and, from the 1990s, into IT services — Wipro became one of India's 'big three' IT firms alongside Infosys and TCS.

Premji is best known for his philanthropy: through the Azim Premji Foundation (founded 2001) and the Azim Premji Endowment Trust, he has committed the majority of his personal wealth — reportedly more than US$21 billion — to improving public-school education in India. The Foundation runs Azim Premji University and works in thousands of government schools across several states.

He was awarded the Padma Bhushan (2005) and Padma Vibhushan (2011).