Shiv Nadar

Shiv Nadar was a salaried engineer until he was thirty. Then he and a handful of colleagues pooled their savings, started a company that sold calculators, and turned it into HCL, one of the pioneers of India’s computer industry. In later life he became the country’s most generous philanthropist.

Moolaipozhi, 1945

He was born on 14 July 1945 in Moolaipozhi, a village in what is now the Thoothukudi district of southern Tamil Nadu. His father, Sivasubramaniya Nadar, was a judge. His mother, Vamasundari Devi, was the sister of S. P. Adithanar, the founder of the Tamil newspaper Dina Thanthi.

Because his father’s job moved around, he went to school in several towns in Tamil Nadu. He studied at the American College in Madurai and then took a degree in electrical and electronics engineering at PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore.

The Salaried Years

His first job, in 1967, was at Cooper Engineering in Pune. He then moved to Delhi to join DCM, one of India’s older industrial groups, which had set up a unit making calculators and data products.

It was at DCM that he met the people he would go into business with. They were young, technically trained and frustrated by how slowly a large company moved. They could see that electronics and computing were going to matter enormously, and that the old conglomerates were not built to move fast.

Colleagues and a Barsati

In 1976, Shiv Nadar and a group of DCM colleagues — among them Arjun Malhotra and Ajai Chowdhry — left their jobs to start their own company. They raised about ₹1.87 lakh between them. By the company’s own account, they started out of a barsati, a small rented room on a rooftop in Delhi.

It is worth remembering how hard that was in 1976. Importing electronic components needed government licences, foreign exchange was rationed, and most Indian businesses had never seen a computer. Starting an electronics company without a family fortune, a foreign partner or political connections was, by the standards of the time, close to reckless.

The first company, Microcomp, sold teledigital calculators. It soon became Hindustan Computers Limited — HCL — in partnership with the Uttar Pradesh state electronics corporation, which gave the young company access to capital and credibility.

The timing was lucky. In 1977 IBM left India rather than comply with new rules on foreign ownership. The country was suddenly short of computers. In 1978 HCL launched a microcomputer designed and built in India, and it went on to become one of the leading computer makers in the country through the 1980s.

From Hardware to Services

Making computers in India was hard. Components had to be imported, the market was small, and once the economy opened in 1991, global brands arrived. Nadar saw that the long-term value lay not in the boxes but in the people who knew how to make them work.

In 1991 HCL set up the business that became HCL Technologies, focused on software and engineering services for foreign clients. It went public at the end of 1999. The hardware business continued separately as HCL Infosystems, and HCL also formed a joint venture with Hewlett-Packard.

HCL Technologies grew into one of India’s largest IT companies, with more than $13 billion in annual revenue and more than 200,000 employees. Its distinctive idea, promoted under the slogan “Employees First, Customers Second” during the tenure of chief executive Vineet Nayar, was that the people doing the work matter more than the managers above them.

HCL’s particular strength became engineering and research services — designing and testing the software and electronics inside other companies’ products, from aircraft systems to medical devices — alongside the more common business of running banks’ and retailers’ IT.

There was a neat reversal in 2018. HCL Technologies agreed to buy a group of software products from IBM, including the Lotus Notes and Domino collaboration tools, for about $1.8 billion. Four decades after IBM’s departure had opened the Indian market to Nadar’s company, that company was buying part of IBM.

How He Ran It

Nadar was never a showman. He gave few interviews, avoided the conference circuit and was known inside HCL for asking detailed questions and then leaving managers to get on with the work. He believed, and said repeatedly, that the company’s job was to find ambitious people and give them room, which is what he and his colleagues had wanted from DCM and not found.

That belief shaped the company’s culture and, later, his philanthropy. Almost everything the foundation does is about finding able young people from modest backgrounds and giving them a better start than they would otherwise get.

The Shiv Nadar Foundation

In 1994 he started the Shiv Nadar Foundation. Its first major project was SSN College of Engineering in Chennai, opened in 1996 and named after his father.

It went on to set up VidyaGyan, boarding schools for bright children from poor rural families in Uttar Pradesh; Shiv Nadar University, near Delhi, which opened in 2011 and was later recognised by the government as an Institution of Eminence; and the Shiv Nadar Schools. His wife, Kiran Nadar, a noted art collector and competitive bridge player, founded the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in 2010.

VidyaGyan is the clearest statement of his thinking. It picks academically strong children from government schools in villages across Uttar Pradesh, gives them free residential schooling to the end of secondary school, and prepares them for the country’s best universities. It is, in a sense, an attempt to repeat his own story — a village boy whose education took him somewhere his birth did not predict — on purpose and at scale.

In the 2020s he has repeatedly been ranked India’s most generous donor on the EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List, giving more than ₹2,000 crore in a single year.

Handing Over

In July 2020 he stepped down as chairman of HCL Technologies. His only child, Roshni Nadar Malhotra, became chairperson — the first woman to chair a listed Indian IT company. He stayed on as chairman emeritus and strategic adviser.

She had studied at Northwestern University and the Kellogg School of Management, worked briefly in television news, and joined HCL in 2009, becoming chief executive of the family holding company within a year. She also leads much of the foundation’s work and has served as a trustee of its institutions.

In March 2025 he transferred a large part of his stake in the family’s holding companies to her by gift, making her the controlling shareholder of the HCL group.

What He Built

The Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan in 2008.

He belongs to the small generation of founders who built India’s technology industry before anyone called it that — alongside the founders of Infosys and the leaders of Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services. Of that group, he is the one who began with hardware, in a market that barely existed, and moved to services only when the hardware stopped making sense. That willingness to walk away from the thing that had made him successful is, as much as the founding itself, what kept HCL alive.

He has also been careful about succession in a way many Indian founders are not: stepping back from the chair while still healthy, handing over in stages, and making the transfer of ownership public and formal.

The measure of him is that he did it twice. He was one of a small group of engineers who showed, in the 1970s, that Indians could build a computer company without a family fortune behind them. Then he spent the second half of his life trying to give other village children the kind of education that made the first half possible.

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