India's Azim Premji’s (WIPRO ) Very Generous $2bn Charity Donation

Time to give back to the society - Indian Billionaires inspite of being small have great  hearts.....I hope one day if all the worlds billioanires donate generously their will not be any poverty nor uneducation in the world.......MK

Azim Premji's Very Generous $2bn Charity Donation

Image courtesy: Reuters

 

Billionaires will be proud of Wipro’s Azim Premji, who has donated Rs. 8846 crore for education in India. Premji’s philanthropic act is the largest ever by an Indian.

 Just months ago, the two billionaires were asking other members of the Rich List to donate large chunks of their wealth to charity. And now, Premji, chairman of Wipro and India’s third richest man, has pledged $2 billion of his estimated $18 billion wealth to the Azim Premji Trust.

 This money will finance the activities of the Azim Premji Foundation that works to promote education in rural India as well as the Azim Premji University in Bangalore.

Others Who Are Giving their Wealth Away

 Well-known Indian industrialists like Sunil Mittal of Bharti and Shiv Nadar of HCL Technologies are spending money on education. Recently, Nadar donated over 5.8 billion rupees ($128.1 million) by selling his 2.5 percent stake in HCL Technologies to fund the education initiatives of his foundation. Mittal’s Bharti Foundation is running free English-medium schools for about 30,000 students in the Indian states of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

 Anand Mahindra of Mahindra & Mahinda donated $10 million to the Humanities Centre at Harvard University while the Tata group gave away $50 million to Harvard Business School to fund a new academic and residential building on its campus. Anil Agarwal Foundation of Vedanta announced an endowment of $1 billion in July 2006 to set up Vedanta University in Orissa.

 Earlier this year, Gates said he would donate half of his $53 billion wealth to charity. He recently made the largest charitable donation ever, of $10 billion for vaccines for children. Buffet too pledged $37 billion or 99% of his wealth to charity in 2006.

 

Recently, the Tata group and millionaire businessman Anand Mahindra pledged $50 million and $10 million to Harvard University.

via luxpresso