Part IThe Story
In January 2012, HCL signed a contract with Penguin India to publish a book about the company and the man who had founded it. The writer was Kevin Maney, an American columnist for USA Today, and the template everyone seemed to have in mind was Walter Isaacson's life of Steve Jobs. One person familiar with the project described that model as a portrait of someone heroic "but, along the way, who was not always likeable to everyone." Shiv Nadar told his employees, his friends and his family to talk. He told them to be completely honest. He did not, the people who worked on the book said, want a flowery biography. He read the manuscript as the chapters came in and offered his inputs. A business author familiar with the case said that at no point was there any indication he disliked anything. Publication was set for October 2013.
Maney filed the completed manuscript early in 2013. After that came the lawyers. HCL's legal team invoked a clause in the agreement that required both parties to consent to publication, and, according to one person who worked on the project, asked that all the material Maney had gathered be handed over. In September 2013, HCL told Penguin it did not want to proceed. The publisher's advance was returned and the author and his researchers were paid. When Business Standard asked HCL why, a spokesperson replied with two words: "No comments."
What the manuscript contained, nobody outside a small circle can say with any confidence. The people who worked on it pointed to the early years. Nadar's relationships with his co-founders, Arjun Malhotra and Ajai Chowdhry in particular, were described as "a delicate area." There were the talented men who had left early to start their own companies, Dadhan Bhai and Bikram Dasgupta among them. And there was something one source called Nadar's grouse: his sense that the rest of the Indian technology industry had never properly acknowledged what he had given it.
The last item is the one that lingers. By then this man was a billionaire and a Padma Bhushan. In 1996 he had been the only person in India granted a private meeting with Bill Gates. He had already pledged a billion dollars of his own money to schools. And he still carried, by this account, the feeling of not having been thanked.
Count the founders of HCL and the problem shows itself. Ajai Chowdhry's memoir and its publisher say there were six. An encyclopedia entry lists eight. Nadar, writing in 2018, said he left DCM "with seven of my colleagues." The number of people who started the company depends on who is doing the counting, and in this story the counting has always mattered. So has the question of who controls the account. As far as anyone has said publicly, the manuscript has never been released.
By the Numbers
From a Barsati to Noida
₹1.87 lakhSeed capital pooled by the founders in 1976
250Computers in all of India when HCL was founded
$14.66BHCLTech revenue, FY2026 (US GAAP)
223,000+HCLTech employees across 60 countries
$1.83BInvested through the Shiv Nadar Foundation as of March 2026
57,000Students directly reached by the Foundation's institutions
₹2,708 crDonated by Nadar and family through the Foundation in FY2025
A Judge's Son and the Debt He Could Name
The village is Moolaipozhi, about ten kilometres from the temple town of Tiruchendur, near the southern tip of what is now Tamil Nadu. The boy's father, Sivasubramaniya Nadar, was a judge, and judges in the Madras Presidency were moved around. The family moved with him. There were schools in Kumbakonam, Madurai and Tiruchi, wherever the transfer orders sent them. His mother, Vamasundari Devi, was the sister of S. P. Adithanar, who founded Dina Thanthi, the Tamil daily. The family had a newspaper in its bloodline and a magistrate at the head of the table. They were not poor, though the sources do not agree on that, and the disagreement tells you something about how the story gets retold.
Nadar's own version is more precise than the legends that grew around him. He described a sheltered and protected childhood, and himself as a boy "oblivious to the harsh realities of life." Then his father died while Shiv was in the eleventh grade. "His early demise shook our entire family," he wrote decades later, "and especially me." The money became a problem and the future became a worry. When he later secured admission to PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, he got in on a full scholarship. The college had been founded by the PSG family, a family of philanthropists.
He would come back to that scholarship for the rest of his life. He tells it the way other founders tell the story of their first customer. "None of it would have been possible," he wrote in 2018, "if my college education wasn't sponsored through a scholarship offered by the philanthropists who started PSG Tech. So speaking in the strictest sense, the story of HCL that is known all over the world today started because somebody was thinking 'beyond business.'" It is an unusual way for a self-made billionaire to describe himself. Most prefer to be self-made. Nadar has always insisted on naming the debt.
There are other details, some stranger than others. He has said in interviews that he could not speak English until he was 21, because his schooling was in Tamil. An interviewer from Knowledge at Wharton once opened a profile by saying Nadar "was 22 when he saw his first city." That claim is hard to square with a boy who went to school in Madurai and Tiruchi, unless the city meant is Delhi. Then again, Madurai is not Delhi. Some cities count more than others.
What is not in doubt is what he learned at St. Joseph's in Tiruchi, the Jesuit school where his father's transfer from Kumbakonam had landed him. He was made class monitor in the fourth form. He gave his first public speech at Lawley Hall in St. Joseph's College after being appointed School Pupil Leader. Half a century later he praised the school for its "judicious mix of discipline and freedom," and that phrase could serve as a description of everything he later built. He finished his electrical engineering degree at PSG in 1967. That same year he took a job at the Walchand group's Cooper Engineering in Pune. He did not stay. He hardly stayed anywhere in those years. The Economic Times later noted that he switched three jobs within less than a decade, which it called "the career graph of a latter-day startup founder."
Three Hundred Calculators
In 1968 he went north to Delhi and joined Delhi Cloth & General Mills, then one of the country's top industrial groups, as part of its elite management-trainee system. He started in the textile division. It is worth picturing for a moment: an electrical engineer from a Tamil village who had only recently become comfortable in English, now working inside a North Indian business house that made cloth.
He did not stay in textiles. Vinay Bharat Ram, the DCM scion, noticed his performance and picked him to help run the group's new electronics venture, DCM Data Products. Nadar was given sales and marketing. His deputy was a young IIT Kanpur graduate named Arjun Malhotra, another management trainee a couple of batches behind him.
Malhotra is the first of the characters in this story whose life rhymes with Nadar's. He was technically trained and plucked out of a conglomerate's training scheme. He was among the founders who left with Nadar, and he later went on to run his own company, Headstrong, as CEO and chairman. "The first person I met was Arjun," Nadar said years later, in a CNBC-TV18 interview. "We became very good friends and we are still very good friends." Both halves of that sentence are true, and so is the word "delicate" in the account of the shelved biography.
DCM Data Products launched what was described as the first indigenously made desktop electronic calculator in August 1972. In 1974 it released the 1080 PS, a programmable calculator with 80 programming steps and 10 data-storage registers. Nadar sold about 300 of them. In a country that ran on carbon paper and manual ledgers, that was enough to make his name inside DCM as a sales wizard. The next product, launched in 1975, was the DCM 1101, which DCM described as India's first microprocessor-based computer.
It was going well, and it was not enough. The rules of the time were the problem. Indian industry ran on licences, capacity caps and the anti-monopoly regime known as MRTP, and inside DCM the electronics division was fighting for money against a management that did not see the point of it. "Though I was a success in all parameters at the time — a high-paying job, enough responsibilities, a highly successful venture, but still the restrictions were frustrating," he told Dataquest. "I was yearning to do something to bypass these restrictions."
One account says he was by then among the highest-paid executives in Delhi. He was also dating the woman he would marry. Kiran was an Asian Games medallist at bridge and would later become one of the largest collectors of Indian art in the world, with a Padma Shri of her own. Dataquest records that she, along with Arjun, "egged" him toward leaving. It took him a few more years. He liked a sure thing better than the legend suggests.
Hindustan, Not Uttar Pradesh
The canteen version of the founding has been told many times. A group of DCM engineers on their lunch breaks complained about the "little extra" the company would not give them. They had good salaries and no satisfaction, and a 30-year-old Nadar egged them on. Ajai Chowdhry, the HCL co-founder who would later be called the "father of Indian hardware," had grown up in Jabalpur, in a family that had migrated from Abbottabad after Partition. His father wanted him to sit the IAS exam and become a civil servant, which in that India was the safest and most respected path available. He quit DCM Data Products in 1975 instead. "In the 1970s," his publisher notes, "leaving a stable job with one of India's leading brands was nothing short of crazy." Chowdhry tells his own version in Just Aspire: Notes on Technology, Entrepreneurship and the Future. It is the founding story from someone other than Nadar, and it is worth reading for that reason alone.
The first company was called Microcomp. It sold teledigital calculators under the brand name Televista, and the purpose was to raise capital for the real ambition, which was to build a computer. India at the time had about 250 computers in total. The founders pooled roughly ₹1.87 lakh, which was by most accounts everything they had saved. They set up in a barsati, the rooftop room found on Delhi houses, in the upmarket neighbourhood of Golf Links. Later, the HCL company materials would call it "akin to a garage startup."
Then came the real obstacle, and it was not engineering.
— Shiv Nadar, to Knowledge at Wharton, 2006Interestingly, our toughest challenge was not designing or making computers but getting the government's approval to produce them.
A private group of six engineers was unlikely to be given a licence to make computers in 1976. So they looked for someone who already had permission. The government's Electronics Commission was interested in turning executives into entrepreneurs, and it asked them to write a report. They wrote that they could build an eight-bit machine. "We said we were sure we could do it," Nadar said. "Youthful exuberance and age were on our side." The way through the licence system was a joint venture with the Uttar Pradesh Electronics Corporation, which took 26 per cent. One account says the state put in ₹20 lakh. Nadar later recalled the combined starting capital as "just ₹2 million," which is about right if the state's money is included.
Then there was the matter of the name. The state corporation wanted the company called Uttar Pradesh Computers. Nadar argued for a name with national reach. On 11 August 1976, the company was registered as Hindustan Computers Limited.
That name fight runs through the rest of his life. He was a Tamil whose company was born in Delhi with Uttar Pradesh's money, and he chose to call it neither Tamil nor Uttar Pradesh but India. Decades later he would build a university in Uttar Pradesh named after himself, a college near Chennai named after his father, and free boarding schools for rural children in Uttar Pradesh, whose stated purpose was to produce a prime minister. He once told students in Tiruchi that Hindi had shaped his career and that they should learn it. He came from the far south and never quite let the place he came from or the place he arrived in claim him completely.
Luck helped. In 1977, under policies associated with Industries Minister George Fernandes, IBM left India. That opened space in a market most of the world was ignoring. In 1978, HCL produced the 8C, also known as the Micro 2200. The company calls it India's first indigenous computer, built on an 8-bit microprocessor. Nadar dates its first shipments precisely, and he does so with pride: "Apple and HCL shipped out their first computers in the same quarter." He likes to say that of the computer companies founded in the 1970s, only three survive: IBM, Apple and HCL. When an interviewer remarked that there had been no MS-DOS to run back then, Nadar answered: "Microsoft was just a gleam in Bill Gates's eye."
Two small scenes from those years, both from Nadar's own retelling, say more about him than the founding myth does.
In the first, the company was small enough that he walked to the bank every day to check what had been debited and what had been credited. "It was just that we were running with very tight cash balances," he wrote. When HCL applied for a loan from Syndicate Bank, Nadar went to the first meeting because he was managing director. Afterwards a fellow director stayed back to do the paperwork. The point of the story, he said, was the division of labour. A reader might take a different lesson: here was a man who wanted to see the balance for himself, every day.
In the second, his young wife dragged him to a 10 p.m. film at the Paras cinema in Nehru Place, the commercial district where HCL had its first registered office, on the eighth floor of a building nearby. When they came out he looked up and saw the office lights on. His first thought, he admitted, was that it was "a very wasteful habit to leave the office lights on." Kiran saw it differently. "I think everybody else is working except you," she said, "who has taken his young wife out for a film." The elevator had already stopped for the night.
He told that story at his own expense, and he clearly enjoyed telling it. It is also the earliest sign of something he would spend fifty years trying to build: an institution whose lights stay on when the founder is not in the building.
Coal to Newcastle
The 1980s were what Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill would later call HCL's "golden period." In 1980 the company opened Far East Computers in Singapore to sell hardware, and it brought in ₹1 million in its first year. The Singapore unit went on to develop imaging technology that let computers read handwritten tax returns. In 1983 HCL produced its own relational database management system, a networking operating system and a client-server architecture. In 1981 it took part in founding NIIT, a chain of computer-training institutes. Nadar said the idea came to him on a visit to a company called Edutronics in Singapore. The industry needed trained people, and as he put it, "no one had the financial muscle to invest in training." NIIT later grew into a separate business that, for a time, set the terms of corporate technology education in India.
HCL also hired differently. It recruited from the IITs and IIMs at a time when the best Indian engineering graduates generally left for America, either to study further or to work, and rarely did hands-on design work at home. "At HCL, they got an opportunity to lay hands on a microprocessor and do real design work," Nadar said. Nobody else in India was giving new graduates that.
Then came the decision that Vineet Nayar, who would later run HCL Technologies, has called "ahead of its time." In 1988 Nadar set out to sell high-end Unix minicomputers in the United States. Mint described it as sending coal to Newcastle. HCL stayed out of the crowded personal-computer market, which IBM and its many clones dominated. It went after minicomputers instead, a field Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard had recently opened. The product was a multiprocessor machine called Magnum, running an operating system written by HCL's own engineers. Nayar says the multi-chip Unix design left HP and Sun Microsystems three years behind. The company put $5 million into a US subsidiary, HCL America. That was a large sum for a business that had only just passed ₹100 crore in annual revenue.
It did not work, at least not in the way Nadar hoped. The American operation, which started around 1989, never became what he had planned. But the attempt left something behind, and Nayar is the one who named it.
— Vineet Nayar, former CEO of HCL Technologies, to Mint, 2020If Shiv was in California, HCL would have been a $500-billion company by now.
"Shiv had the audacity of starting to manufacture the product in California, and distributing it in the US," Nayar told Mint when Nadar stepped down as chairman. "The DNA of HCL is products."
Nayar's remark about being born in the wrong country is meant as a compliment. Read against the shelved biography, it reads like a diagnosis. It takes Nadar's own grievance about recognition and turns it into geography. Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji became the public faces of Indian IT. Nadar, as Mint put it, "rarely hogged the limelight." The point is not that he did less. He did it in hardware, before the boom, in Delhi rather than Bangalore, and in a decade nobody was yet celebrating.
Chop and Change
In 1991, the year India opened its economy under pressure from a balance-of-payments crisis, Hewlett-Packard bought a 26 per cent stake in HCL. The results were quick. The following year the company reported a record profit of ₹202 million. For Nadar personally, the deal brought what he called "a handsome windfall." His first instinct, he admitted, was to plough all of it back into the business.
On 12 November 1991 the company spun off a small unit called HCL Overseas Limited. It had grown out of the group's R&D division and was set up to provide software and technology development services. It would change names twice, to HCL Consulting in 1994 and then to HCL Technologies. In 1993 it won the contract to build the infrastructure for India's first floorless, electronic stock exchange, the National Stock Exchange. "We run the National Stock Exchange remotely," Nadar said in 2006, still pleased about it, adding that it handled "the third-largest number of trades in the world." By then HCL was managing about half a million servers from India. "We created that industry," he said of remote infrastructure management, and Gartner had said much the same.
The 1990s were also the decade of his failures, and they were real ones. The HP relationship ended in a separation. A move into telecommunications services with Singapore Telecom came to nothing. Rediff noted, without much charity, that he "even ventured into granite business and was thinking of setting up an aquaculture project" when that was the fashionable thing to do. The group kept adding companies. One magazine counted eighteen at the peak.
In September 2000, a Business Today reporter named Suveen K. Sinha went to see Nadar in Noida, the planned satellite city east of Delhi where the group was moving. Nadar was working out of a borrowed office across the road from a building site where HCL Technologies' new headquarters was going up. The room belonged to the company's chief technology officer, and Nadar apologised for how small it was. He was stooping slightly, Sinha noted, but dapper as always in his dark suit. As Nadar sank into the large leather chair, Sinha found himself thinking of Professor Binns, the ghost in Harry Potter who fell asleep by the staff-room fire and got up the next morning to teach his class, not realising he had left his body behind.
It was an unkind image and a precise one. The article's argument was that Nadar had worn the crown of India's infotech czar in the mid-1990s, won in the hardware wars, and lost it at the end of the decade when software boomed and hardware fortunes slumped. He had been setting up, winding up and merging companies at a dizzying pace, sometimes carving profitable pieces out of failing companies into new ones. "Chop and change," Sinha wrote, "has been the intense 55-year-old's credo." By then the eighteen companies had come down to three. Nadar had stepped off the boards of NIIT and HCL Infosystems. Taken together, the group still added up to India's largest infotech group, with revenues of ₹2,922 crore, ahead of the Tata technology companies. The man in the borrowed chair was not finished. He was starting over in his fifties.
Some of the starting over had already happened. HCL Technologies had gone abroad in the opposite order from its rivals. ZDNet observed that while Infosys and Satyam built offshore capacity first and then looked outward, Nadar "picked up the onsite-offshore model first, realizing the limitations of the offshore business model." HCL started serving American clients on site through HCL Technologies America in 1994. In 1996 it formed a 50:50 joint venture with Ross Perot's Perot Systems to reach a higher-value client base. It took full control of Intelicent, a joint venture with James Martin & Co. In December 1999 it ran an initial public offering at ₹580 a share and raised ₹823 crore. The shares began trading on 11 January 2000. Twenty-five years later, they had returned more than 1,300 per cent.
In 2003 HCL sold its stake in the Perot venture to Perot Systems for more than $105 million. It won a contract to write embedded software for the flight-warning system of the Airbus A340, and it worked on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. When the American downturn of 2001 and 2002 cut into revenue, Nadar went looking for what he called "the Next Big Practice," in healthcare and aerospace, where HCL had a few anchor customers. In 2006 he described one product to a Wharton interviewer with real excitement. It was an implanted insulin pump that measured the body's parameters, released insulin through the nervous system rather than the bloodstream, and could stay inside the body for seven years. The man had come up through calculators. He still liked machines.
— Shiv Nadar, to Business Standard, 2013When a business is steady and constant for a while, I get a very uneasy feeling – something is going to go wrong now. Business is meant to change.
The Dinner Table
Nadar has told the story of how his philanthropy began in at least two versions, and the differences are revealing.
In the first, told in a 2018 essay for Dataquest, the HP deal had just closed. He was at the dinner table telling his mother how he planned to take HCL to the next level, and she cut him off. "Don't you think it is time to start giving back?" In the second, told at a Chennai fireside conversation in 2023, he had been describing the fortune HCL had made him. She listened, then remarked that the money had been of no use to anyone except himself and his immediate family. "My mother told me," he said, "to stop looking at the things I'll have in the future, instead look at what I have today to give."
One version is a gentle question and the other is a rebuke. The moral is the same. She was a widow who had watched the money disappear when her husband died, and whose son had been rescued by another family's scholarship. Now she was telling him how to keep the books.
The Shiv Nadar Foundation was set up in 1994. The Economic Times says it was funded with the windfall from HP's exit from the joint venture, which makes the money that left the business the money that went to schools. Its first institution, opened in 1996 near Chennai, was the Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, named for his father. It became known as SSN. Nadar said openly that he had borrowed the idea from the PSG family of Coimbatore, the philanthropists who had paid for his own degree. He wanted the campus to feel like an IIT. He wanted no capitation fees, the large unofficial payments that private Indian colleges were notorious for charging for admission.
The college became the thing he guarded most closely. In 2001 he gifted it HCL shares. He brought in Carnegie Mellon to partner on a school of advanced software engineering, a collaboration that had lasted twelve years by 2013. By one count, the SSN institutions have given scholarships worth about $7 million to more than 5,000 students, more than 2,000 of them the first in their families to go to college. In 2013 he told a reporter, with clear satisfaction, that one minister had complained SSN was the only institution where he could not get a seat for anyone.
When The Economic Times asked whether he would follow Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji into venture capital, his refusal was blunt, and so was the affection behind it:
"I have no intention of doing that at all," he said. "I can't do anything, which is in conflict with the institutions I built." Then he turned to the college. "Every time I come to Chennai, have you seen me coming for a business trip? No, it's always SSN. I don't even go to the city. I come here only for this because I feel very fulfilled."
He drives from the airport to the campus and back again. He does not go into the city.
Permanently Paranoid
The soft-spoken man in the dark suit had a temper.
In 2011, Business Standard's Shyamal Majumdar met him for tea in the club lounge of Mumbai's Grand Hyatt. An executive warned at the start that Nadar could spare 45 minutes but it would be better if they finished in 40. The interview ran nearly an hour. Majumdar described a man whose voice choked when he spoke about the poverty he had seen in villages, and whose stern CEO face softened when he talked about his daughter. At one point an aide said that the boss was a "softie" at heart. Majumdar wrote that the word sat strangely on a man "known for a volatile temperament that petrified his colleagues when he was CEO." Nadar smiled and did not deny it. He said he could tolerate mediocrity, but not a lack of passion. "I have been severe on myself in my pursuit of perfection," he said, "and I expect my colleagues to roll up their sleeves and push the boundaries."
In 2011 he named Jack Welch as his role model for entrepreneurship. When CNN's Talk Asia asked him for the secret, he offered a story he had seen on an African poster:
— Shiv Nadar, on CNN's Talk AsiaIf you're born a gazelle, you get up in the morning and think that how I run faster than the fastest lion, and if you're born a lion, how do I run faster than the slowest gazelle. So, whichever way, if you're born in Africa, you get up and run. So, if you're going to be an entrepreneur you have to stay permanently paranoid.
The paranoia did not extend to holding on to power. In 2007, after thirty-one years as chief executive, Nadar gave the CEO job of HCL Technologies to Vineet Nayar. Nayar had joined the group decades earlier and made his name running HCL Comnet, the infrastructure-services unit. He was loud where Nadar was quiet, wrote books where Nadar shelved them, and arrived with a slogan, "Employees First, Customers Second," which he would later turn into a book. A founder with a lighter temper might have found the slogan cute. A founder of Nadar's temperament could have treated it as heresy.
Nadar backed him. When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 and the Indian IT industry braced for layoffs, Nayar's plan was not to fire anyone. HCL Technologies treated its employees as the company's core asset and kept them. "To back someone at the peak of the recession," Nayar said later, "it needed bold understanding of the strategic importance of employees." That same December, HCL completed its £440 million acquisition of Axon Group, a UK SAP consultancy, the boldest purchase any Indian IT company had made up to then. Within three years, the share of HCL's revenue coming from enterprise application services rose from 9 per cent to 22 per cent. Nadar had been saying "employee first" on CNN himself: put the employee first, he said, and the employee takes care of the customer, who takes care of the shareholder. Whether Nayar learned it from him or he learned it from Nayar is the kind of question the shelved biography might have answered.
"He also had the ability to pick the right leaders for the right role, and at the right time," Mint wrote. "Then, he backed them to the hilt." HCL became what one consultant called "a workshop of entrepreneurship and leadership." The chief executives of Tech Mahindra, Hexaware and Zensar all came out of it. For a man supposedly aggrieved at not being credited, he produced a remarkable number of people who would be credited elsewhere.
Then there was the question of succession. His only child, Roshni, born around 1982, was 29 and running HCL Corporation, the holding company, when Majumdar met Nadar for tea. Nadar made his position clear:
"In a highly skilled industry like IT, you have seen only one family succession so far – Tom Watson Sr and Jr – at IBM. I know the industry inside out; my daughter doesn't. So she can't play the role that I have played. Ownership has to be separated from day-to-day stewardship of group companies."
He kept to the principle and bent the details. In 2017, at 72, he was reappointed chairman and managing director of HCL Technologies for another five years. The family owned 59.88 per cent. The proxy adviser Glass Lewis urged shareholders to vote against him, arguing that an independent chairman could "set a pro-shareholder agenda without the management conflicts that a managing director or other executive insider often faces." A little more than 13 per cent of public shareholders voted no. The resolution passed anyway, since the family held a majority, and Nadar said nothing about when he would leave.
He left in stages. On 17 July 2020, Roshni Nadar Malhotra became chairperson of HCL Technologies, the first woman to chair a listed Indian IT company. A year later, in July 2021, Nadar stepped down as managing director, and C. Vijayakumar, the chief executive since 2016, took the role for a five-year term. Nadar became chairman emeritus and strategic advisor to the board. The family still held about 60.77 per cent of the company. Ownership and stewardship were finally separated, more or less as he had said they should be, about a decade after he first said it.
A Prime Minister from Bulandshahr
In 2011, a Forbes Asia reporter went to a residential school on a 30-acre campus outside New Delhi and met an eleven-year-old named Janhavi Sharma. She came from a village called Nawabgunj, where her parents farmed a small plot and earned less than $2,500 a year. She was one of seven daughters and the only one in school. At home the food was not always clean. At the school she was well fed. She had never touched a computer before arriving, and now she used one with ease. She was learning English, new words every day, after being taught in Hindi in her village school. "We are living so nicely [here]," she said. "The teachers are very caring."
The school was VidyaGyan. It picks the brightest fifth-graders from districts across Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India and one of the poorest, and pays every expense from sixth grade through twelfth. The first campus opened in 2009, in Bulandshahr, with 200 sixth-graders. A second followed in Sitapur, near Lucknow. The Foundation spends about $3,200 a year per child. Forbes noted that this is roughly what India's best institutes spend on an undergraduate engineering student.
Nadar was clear that he was not trying to produce more businessmen. "There are plenty of places doing that," Forbes wrote, summarising his view. The goal was to change the people who run rural India. "Our goal is to have a future prime minister come from one of these places," he said.
It is the most ambitious sentence he has ever said in public. Think of who is saying it: a Tamil who did not speak English until 21, who named his first company for the whole country rather than the state that paid for a quarter of it, and who now proposes to find a future prime minister among the farm children of Uttar Pradesh. The man who could never quite be claimed by any single region had decided to build a leader for all of them.
He was reaching for something else too, and he said so in an interview with Wharton's Michael Useem. "When we wanted to give something back, I looked at myself, I said, 'What am I?' I'm a product of education. Education and scholarship gave me a lot of confidence. And aspirations I picked up from friends and the ambience in which I grew. If I could provide a similar ambience, it could help a lot more people." The scholarship paid his fees. The ambience gave him the aspirations. VidyaGyan was his attempt to supply both at once.
In 2011 the Foundation also opened Shiv Nadar University on a 286-acre campus at Dadri, near Greater Noida. The first engineering class paid no fees. Nadar insisted on a four-year undergraduate degree at a time when the Indian standard was three, and on mixing disciplines at a time when Indian universities kept them apart. The university says it was the first in the country to offer a four-year multidisciplinary research degree. On 3 August 2022, it became the youngest institution the Indian government had ever designated an Institution of Eminence. In 2025 the national rankings placed it 85th overall. In Tamil Nadu, the state assembly passed the Shiv Nadar University Act in July 2018. It was the first private university legislated in Tamil Nadu in nine decades, since Annamalai University. It opened in October 2020 on the SSN campus, and in 2026 SSN College itself began merging into it as the SSN School of Engineering. His father's name is being absorbed into his own.
He ran the Foundation the way a man who used to check the bank balance daily would run anything. For nineteen years its accounts were audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers but never published. On 5 November 2013 the Foundation released its first annual report. Nadar's explanation reads like a manifesto from a man who no longer trusted other people's press releases:
"We want to state what we have done, not after we are dead and gone. It's a statement of the expenditure we have incurred, not something we plan to do, and it's in front of everybody." He had pledged $1 billion, about ₹6,000 crore, and the report showed ₹1,800 crore actually spent. He drew a sharp line between corporate social responsibility and philanthropy. "CSR is a lot of shareholders, including me. It's not ours. Here, between Roshni and me, whatever we have spent has gone out of our bank accounts." And then the sentence that is really his definition of giving: "To us, the definition of philanthropy is what we spend."
That same week he committed another ₹3,000 crore over five years. He gave the timelines with an operator's lack of sentiment. A postgraduate business school, he said, breaks even on running costs in its sixth or seventh year. An engineering school takes fifteen or sixteen years. "Research will take a long time." Fees covered only 15 per cent of the budget. VidyaGyan, Roshni added, was never meant to be self-sustaining at all. Her father had said the Foundation might take two generations to build. "Education business is a continuous and long journey," he said, "and is like an endless loop."
The amounts kept growing. The Hurun list put his 2022 donations at ₹1,161 crore, about ₹3 crore a day. In 2024 it was nearly ₹6 crore a day, which put him at the top of India's list of most generous donors. In fiscal 2025 the family gave ₹2,708 crore through the Foundation. By March 2026 the total stood at $1.83 billion. The Foundation says it has reached about 57,000 students directly, across eight institutions. Kiran's museum of art, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, sits under the same umbrella.
The Machines Come Home
In November 2013, HCL Infosystems announced that it would stop manufacturing personal computers. The company was the direct heir of the 8C and the Micro 2200, and of the claim that HCL shipped a computer in the same quarter as Apple. It had been one of India's leading makers of PCs and laptops and had steadily lost ground to HP and Dell. It turned to distribution and services. The hardware dream that began in a barsati had ended, with an announcement and little fanfare.
The products did not entirely go away. They came back from an unexpected direction. In October 2017, IBM handed HCL the development of its Lotus Notes, Domino and Sametime collaboration tools. In 2019 HCL Technologies paid about $1.8 billion for a portfolio of IBM software products, including AppScan, BigFix, Commerce, Connections, Notes/Domino and Unica. They became the core of a new division, HCLSoftware, which earned about $1.2 billion in fiscal 2024. In 1977 IBM's departure from India had cleared the ground for a small company in a rented rooftop room. Forty-two years later, that company bought part of IBM. Nobody at HCL seems to have publicly made much of the symmetry. Nadar's silence on it is either restraint or the grievance turned inward. With him it is hard to know which.
The hardware came back too. In 2025 HCL Group formed a semiconductor joint venture with Foxconn, with HCL holding 60 per cent. In May of that year the Union Cabinet approved a ₹3,706 crore chip assembly-and-test facility at Jewar, in Uttar Pradesh. In January 2026 the venture got its name: India Chip Private Limited. The foundation event at the Jewar site was set for 21 February 2026. Fifty years after the Uttar Pradesh Electronics Corporation took 26 per cent of a company it wanted to call Uttar Pradesh Computers, the Nadars were building chips in the same state, under a name that once again claimed the whole country.
The holding company's numbers no longer resemble anything from the barsati days. HCLTech closed fiscal 2026 with revenues of $14.66 billion, more than 223,000 employees and offices in 60 countries. Its return on invested capital was above 40 per cent. In December 2025, Business Today reported that Nadar was the worst-hit Indian billionaire of the year. He had lost $4.85 billion on paper as investors cooled on Indian IT services while companies poured money into AI infrastructure, and he was left with $38.2 billion. He had told Business Standard in 2013 that steadiness made him uneasy. The market was supplying the opposite.
There remains the February of 2011, which brings the story back to where it started.
That month Nadar went back to Town Higher Secondary School in Kumbakonam, where he had studied from June 1955 to June 1957, and gave it computers and equipment worth ₹8 million. Around the same time, he returned to St. Joseph's in Tiruchi for the first time in fifty years. He left the suit behind and wore a plain white kurta and pyjama. He hoisted the national flag at the morning assembly. His brother Balakrishnan, a professor at an American university and also an alumnus, stood with him. Nadar learned that the school had 35 computers for 3,500 students, and he announced that HCL would supply about 350 more and train the teachers. He told the boys that the seeds of his leadership had been sown there, that he had been made class monitor in the fourth form, and that he had first spoken in public at Lawley Hall. "It all started here," he said.
A day or so later he was in Mumbai at Nasscom's India Leadership Forum, the industry's annual gathering of the people who had built Indian IT. It was the closest thing that industry had to a hall of the peers whose acknowledgment he had wanted. He did not talk about business. He talked about VidyaGyan. He talked about the gap between children in rural Uttar Pradesh and children in the rich cities, drawing, the account says, on his own less privileged student years. He compared the bright, deprived children of the villages to lotuses that bloom above the mud around them. He described the first school and his plans for more. One observer wrote that the hall sat speechless, and many in it were close to tears.
Near the end, Nadar choked. He stopped, apologised, and said: "I can't speak further."
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below come from fifty years of decisions: in the licence-raj hardware business, in a 1990s portfolio that grew to eighteen companies and was cut to three, in an IT services company built in a different order from its peers, and in a foundation run with the accounting habits of a founder who once walked to the bank every day. They are not about personality. Nadar's personality, the temper and the grudge and the self-severity, is part of the evidence, but the lessons are structural. Several cut against the received wisdom of the Silicon Valley playbook. That should be expected from a man whom one of his own successors described as born in the wrong country.
The Nadar Playbook
- 1.Solve the permission problem before the product problem.
- 2.Name the company for the market you intend, not the partner you have.
- 3.Build the talent pipeline your industry is missing.
- 4.Design the org chart before you rent the office.
- 5.Know the cash balance personally.
- 6.Prune the portfolio as hard as you grew it.
- 7.Treat an ambitious failure as a capability you keep.
- 8.Sequence globalisation backwards from the customer.
- 9.Separate ownership from stewardship, then back the steward at the worst moment.
- 10.Fund giving from dividends, not from good years.
- 11.Define generosity by audited spending, not pledges.
- 12.Treat stability as a warning sign.
Principle 1
Solve the permission problem before the product problem
In 1976, six engineers who had already built India's first microprocessor-based computer inside DCM did not doubt they could build another. What they lacked was the legal right to try. Nadar said so directly: the toughest challenge "was not designing or making computers but getting the government's approval to produce them." The answer was not a lobbying campaign. It was a structure. The Uttar Pradesh Electronics Corporation already had the permissions, so it got 26 per cent of the company. The state's stake was the licence.
Founders in regulated markets tend to treat the regulator as a nuisance they will deal with later. Nadar treated it as the first engineering problem and solved it by giving up equity. The same thinking runs through his whole career: the HP stake in 1991, the joint ventures with Perot, Deutsche Bank and, eventually, Foxconn. His own company materials say he "always acknowledged that successful institution-building depends on forging result-oriented partnerships." In his hands, partnership was often a way to get access.
Tactic: Before you build, list every permission your product needs to exist legally, and price what equity or partnership would get you each one faster than asking would.
Principle 2
Name the company for the market you intend, not the partner you have
The state corporation wanted "Uttar Pradesh Computers." Nadar talked them into "Hindustan Computers." The choice cost nothing at the time and saved the company a rebrand it might never have survived. A regional name would have marked HCL as a state-government project. A national name made it a contender, and later a household brand.
The lesson goes beyond branding. The partner who funds you will want the company to look like them, and that pull is strongest at the start, when you have the least leverage. Nadar used what leverage he had, which by one account was "a little bit of" his powers of persuasion, on the one decision that would grow in importance every year.
Tactic: When an early investor or partner wants the company to reflect their identity, spend your persuasion there rather than on valuation, because the name and positioning grow in importance while the valuation fades.
Principle 3
Build the talent pipeline your industry is missing
HCL helped found NIIT in 1981 because, in Nadar's words, the industry "badly needed trained manpower" and "no one had the financial muscle to invest in training." At the same time, HCL hired IIT and IIM graduates and gave them real microprocessor design work at a moment when India's best engineers were leaving for America. Those two moves were connected. One trained the people the market lacked and the other kept the best of them.
The return came well beyond HCL's own payroll. The chief executives of Tech Mahindra, Hexaware and Zensar are all former HCL executives. One consultant credited Nadar with building "a workshop of entrepreneurship and leadership" for the whole Indian IT industry. A founder who feels the industry has not credited him has, in a sense, trained much of that industry.
Tactic: If you cannot hire the people you need, spin off or fund the institution that produces them, and give new hires harder work than your competitors dare to.
Principle 4
Design the org chart before you rent the office
"An organisational structure was put in place even before we had office space," Nadar wrote. He named the most common founder mistake as "inadequate bandwidth creation and utilisation." The Syndicate Bank episode shows how it worked. The managing director took the first meeting because his title carried weight. A co-founder stayed behind to finish the paperwork. Each person did what only they could do and nothing more.
The same principle explains the later restructuring. Rediff noted in 2001 that the reorganisations had produced "several companies, each with a chosen professional head." Decentralisation was not something HCL arrived at after it got big. It was how the founders worked when there were six of them in a rooftop room.
H
Bandwidth by Design
How the six-founder structure carried into HCL's later leadership choices.
| Conventional founder habit | Nadar's approach | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Founder does everything until hiring is affordable | Divide roles among partners from day one | Structure set "before we had office space" |
| Founder runs every business unit | Each company gets a chosen professional head | Group restructured into distinct units, each led separately |
| Founder stays CEO indefinitely | Hand over operations, keep strategy | Vineet Nayar named CEO in 2007 |
| Heir inherits the operating role | Heir inherits ownership, not stewardship | Roshni Nadar Malhotra chairs; C. Vijayakumar runs |
Tactic: Before you raise money or sign a lease, write down who owns which decisions among the founders, and hold to it when someone's title tempts them to do another person's job.
Principle 5
Know the cash balance personally
"There is one bank where I used to go every day and check what all has been debited and what all is credited," Nadar wrote. The company was running on very tight cash balances, and he wanted to see the number himself, not hear it secondhand from a report.
The habit stayed with him. Decades later he insisted that the Foundation publish an audited annual report because a pledge "does not mean anything unless stated publicly." It is the same instinct moved from the company's survival to its credibility: don't trust a number you haven't seen. Delegation, which Nadar practised widely, never extended to the books.
Tactic: Whatever your scale, keep one number, cash on hand or its equivalent, that you look at yourself on a fixed and frequent schedule rather than through a summary.
Principle 6
Prune the portfolio as hard as you grew it
By the late 1990s the group had grown to eighteen companies, including telecom with Singapore Telecom, granite, and a planned aquaculture project. Business Today called the pattern "chop and change": setting up, winding up and merging companies, and sometimes carving profitable parts out of struggling ones into new entities. By 2000 there were three, and Nadar had stepped off two boards to focus on one company.
Many founders can grow a portfolio. Fewer can cut it back as decisively. The pruning made HCL Technologies possible, along with its IPO and later its acquisition spree. It also showed a founder willing to look like a failure, in a borrowed office across from a building site at 55, rather than keep a large group of companies with no centre.
T
Expansion and Contraction
The group's portfolio shifts, by phase.
| Period | Move | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| 1976–1988 | Calculators, 8C microcomputer, Far East Computers, NIIT, US minicomputers | Scan |
| 1991–1999 | HP stake, HCL Overseas, Perot JV, telecom, granite, aquaculture plans, eighteen entities | Try |
| 2000 | Group reduced to three; Nadar steps off NIIT and HCL Infosystems boards | Risk |
| 2000–2024 | IPO, Axon, IBM products, dozens of targeted acquisitions | Scale |
Tactic: Once a year, list every business line you would not start today, and close, merge or sell enough of them that the remaining core gets all of your attention.
Principle 7
Treat an ambitious failure as a capability you keep
The 1988 plan to sell Indian-made Unix minicomputers in America did not produce an American hardware business. It did produce a multiprocessor design that Vineet Nayar says put HP and Sun three years behind. It also produced an operating system written in-house and an engineering culture built around products. "The DNA of HCL is products," Nayar said. That DNA later showed up in the R&D outsourcing work, where Nadar described HCL holding joint patents and taking royalties. It showed up in the Boeing 787 and Airbus A340 work, and in the $1.8 billion bet on IBM software products in 2019.
The usual founder lesson from failure is to stop doing the thing that failed. Nadar's record suggests a better question: what did the failed attempt teach the organisation that no safer project would have? The minicomputers lost money. The engineering ability they built became a business line of its own.
Tactic: After any failed bet, write down the specific skills the team acquired and assign each one to an existing or new business line before you write off the project.
Principle 8
Sequence globalisation backwards from the customer
ZDNet's 1999 profile identified the strategic difference clearly. Infosys and Satyam built offshore delivery first and looked for overseas clients afterwards. HCL went the other way, putting people on the ground at client sites in America from 1994 and building the offshore machine behind them, after "realizing the limitations of the offshore business model." The Perot Systems joint venture added access to a higher-value client base. The NSE contract proved the remote-management capability at home before it was sold abroad.
The order matters because trust in services is earned in person. A company that starts at the customer's site learns what the customer needs before it builds the delivery operation, which keeps it from building a large offshore capacity for demand that may not come.
Tactic: When entering a distant market, put a small team at the customer's site before you build delivery capacity at home, and size the home build to what that team learns.
Principle 9
Separate ownership from stewardship, then back the steward at the worst moment
Nadar said in 2011 that "ownership has to be separated from day-to-day stewardship." His reasoning was competence, not modesty: "I know the industry inside out; my daughter doesn't." He applied the same test to himself. He handed the CEO role to Nayar in 2007, and later his daughter chaired the board while a professional manager ran the company.
The handover was not the hard part. Backing the successor was. When Lehman collapsed, Nayar's decision not to lay anyone off was the opposite of what the rest of the industry was doing. Nadar supported it. "To back someone at the peak of the recession," Nayar said, "it needed bold understanding." Founders who appoint successors and then second-guess them in a crisis have only handed over on paper.
A caution: Nadar did not always follow his own rule. His 2017 reappointment as both chairman and managing director at 72 drew opposition from Glass Lewis and from more than 13 per cent of public shareholders. The principle is sound. Keeping to it is harder than stating it.
Tactic: Decide in advance which crisis decisions your successor can make without your sign-off, and when the crisis comes, defend those decisions in public even if you would have chosen differently.
Principle 10
Fund giving from dividends, not from good years
Nadar's criticism of corporate philanthropy was structural. "If we say that we will put in one percent of our profit or five percent of our profit, and then put it in, what happens when you do this in a year in which there's no profit? Then they all become projects. Projects are by nature discontinuous." His alternative was a pipeline. Dividends from the operating companies, which had been paid since inception, flowed into a family corporation, which passed a large share to the Foundation. That steady funding let the Foundation take on commitments lasting ten or twenty-five years.
He thought about the time horizon the way an investor would. Business schools break even on running costs in six or seven years and engineering schools in fifteen or sixteen. VidyaGyan never will. Only a funding stream that does not depend on how a given year went can support a portfolio like that.
S
Projects vs. Institutions
Nadar's distinction, as he described it to Knowledge at Wharton.
| Projects | Institutions |
|---|---|
| Funded as a percentage of annual profit | Funded from a steady dividend stream |
| Stop when profits stop | Planned on 10- to 25-year horizons |
| Run as one-off efforts | Run with "processes and structures" |
| CSR: "a lot of shareholders, including me" | Philanthropy: "gone out of our bank accounts" |
Tactic: If you intend to give at scale, set up a funding path, such as dividends into a holding entity into a foundation, that operates regardless of whether a given year was profitable.
Principle 11
Define generosity by audited spending, not pledges
"To us, the definition of philanthropy is what we spend," Nadar said when the Foundation published its first annual report in November 2013, nineteen years after it was set up. Money moved "from one holding company to another, from one trust to another," he said, "does not mean anything unless stated publicly." His reason for doing it then was blunt: "We want to state what we have done, not after we are dead and gone."
Disclosure became a strategy. Being open about how SSN admitted students meant that, as he told one reporter, even a minister could not get a seat for anyone there, and state governments, he said, were "always willing" to work with an institution they trusted. In a philanthropic world built on announcements, the man who published his actual spending also stood out from his peers. That may have been part of the point.
Tactic: Report your giving the way a listed company reports earnings, with audited figures, an annual schedule and spending separated from commitments, and let the gap between the two be public.
Principle 12
Treat stability as a warning sign
"When a business is steady and constant for a while, I get a very uneasy feeling – something is going to go wrong now." Nadar's "permanently paranoid" line on CNN, the story of the gazelle and the lion, is often quoted as a motivational slogan. His career suggests it was an operating habit. He moved from hardware to services when the 1990s software boom arrived. He looked for new practices in healthcare and aerospace after the American recession of 2001. Hardware came back as a semiconductor venture with Foxconn decades after HCL stopped making PCs.
What he did with the paranoia matters more than the paranoia itself. He did not make defensive cuts. He searched for "the Next Big Practice," and he told a business magazine that "the paranoid strive for the best, but are always prepared for the worst." The unease drove expansion, not retreat.
R
Reinventions Under Pressure
Each pivot followed a period when the existing business looked settled.
1976
Leaves a successful DCM career; starts HCL to build computers under the licence raj.
1988
Takes Unix minicomputers to the US instead of staying in a protected home market.
1991
Spins off HCL Overseas, the services business that becomes HCL Technologies.
2000
Cuts eighteen group companies to three; HCL Technologies lists.
2001
After the US recession hits revenue, pushes into healthcare and aerospace practices.
2019
HCL Technologies buys IBM software products for about $1.8 billion; HCLSoftware is formed.
2026
India Chip Pvt Ltd, the HCL–Foxconn semiconductor venture, breaks ground at Jewar.
Tactic: Put a recurring review on the calendar for whichever business line has been most predictable, and require it to propose its own successor practice before the market forces one.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Shiv Nadar, writing in Dataquest, 2018So speaking in the strictest sense, the story of HCL that is known all over the world today started because somebody was thinking 'beyond business'.
— Shiv Nadar, to Knowledge at WhartonWhen we wanted to give something back, I looked at myself, I said, "What am I?" I'm a product of education.
— Shiv Nadar, to The Economic Times, 2013We want to state what we have done, not after we are dead and gone.
— Shiv Nadar, to Forbes Asia, 2011Our goal is to have a future prime minister come from one of these places.
— Shiv Nadar, at the Shiv Nadar University convocation, 2023If you have never failed, you have not tested yourself. Treat failure as a learning and continue to move on.
Maxims
- Permission is the first product. In a controlled market, the hardest engineering problem is getting the right to build, and equity is a fair price for it.
- Name the ambition, not the backer. "Hindustan" outlasted the partner who wanted "Uttar Pradesh."
- Train the industry you want to lead. A company that creates talent ends up shaping its rivals' leadership benches.
- Divide the work before you divide the office. Bandwidth is designed in at the start, not added later.
- See the cash yourself. Delegate everything except the number that decides whether you survive.
- Cut as boldly as you expand. Eighteen companies down to three is what made the next twenty-five years possible.
- Failures leave capabilities behind. The minicomputers lost money; the engineering culture they built became a business.
- Ownership is not stewardship. Keep the shares, give away the operating job, and defend your successor's hardest call.
- Institutions, not projects. Giving tied to good years stops when the good years stop.
- Count what is spent. A pledge is a promise; an audited report is a fact.
