Tech magnate Azim Premji may be India’s second wealthiest man, but he certainly takes the top spot as the country's most charitable person, hitting headlines in March for his huge $7.5 billion (£5.8bn) donation to charitable causes. This takes his total philanthropic contribution to a staggering $21 billion (£16.3bn). But how did Premji go from a college dropout to India's very own Bill Gates? Let’s take a look.

Azim Premji was born on 24 July 1945 in Bombay, now Mumbai, into a Shia Muslim family. His father, Muhammed Hashim Premji, was already a successful businessman, selling sunflower oil through his company Western India Vegetable Products Ltd, and earning him the nickname ‘Rice King of Burma’.

However, instead of following his father and going straight into the family business, Premji went to off to study electrical engineering at Stanford University, USA, in the early 1960s. His choice of degree showed his interest in all things electrical, and was undeniably part of Premji's future success...

However, in 1966, just before completing his degree, the young student received the sad news that his father had died, and so Premji returned home. He took the decision to abandon his studies, dropping out to take up the management of the family’s cooking oil business.

Premji immediately began to demonstrate his brilliance as an entrepreneur. Firstly, he began to diversify, producing not just oil but toiletries and bakery fats, and also other goods such as light bulbs, hydraulic cylinders, and even shoes. The young businessman also completely broke away from India’s rather nepotistic tradition of hiring family members within a company, instead opting to bring in graduates from fields relevant to the required jobs.

Premji continued to make changes, rebranding the business in 1977 and renaming it Wipro Products Limited. Soon after, this became Wipro (Western India Palm Refined Oils). But he kept a nod to the past, incorporating a sunflower into Wipro's logo in honour of the business's beginnings in oil. But it was in 1979 when Premji’s fortunes truly began to bloom...

In 1979, India's socialist minister, George Fernandes (pictured), ordered both Coca-Cola and IBM to leave the country. Premji saw this gap in the market and interpreted it as an opportunity. Almost overnight, he veered Wipro towards the tech and computer industry. By 1980, Wipro were manufacturing minicomputers in collaboration with an American company, while still creating products such as Wipro Jasmine, a popular toilet soap.

Moving further away from soap and oil to software and tech, Premji’s Wipro had finally found its niche and began to expand rapidly. By 1988, it was a leader in the field, and more than capable of partnering with US giant General Electric on the manufacture, as well as sale and service, of diagnostic and imaging equipment.

But the company's roots were not forgotten, and at the same time, Premji still continued to honour his father’s original business ideas, launching a range of baby toiletries and a talcum powder in 1990.

In these years, he married a woman called Yasmeen, and they had two sons, Rishad and Tariq. Remarkably his lifestyle remained frugal, with reading and music as favourite activities, and religious worship – Premji retained his family’s Shia Muslim beliefs – a focal point. But he took business seriously, dying his hair white when he was a young man in order to be taken more seriously in the workplace, according to reports from Bloomberg.

In 1999 Premji again proved that Wipro was ahead of the rest by launching a range of personal computers – the Wipro SuperGenius range. And the following year, Premji collaborated with KPN (Royal Dutch Telecom) to form a joint venture company, Wipro Net Limited. This would provide internet services across India.

It was in 2000 that Wipro was also listed for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange. At the time Premji was India's richest man due to his 75% stake in the company.

It was now that the billionaire began to demonstrate his philanthropic nature by setting up the Azim Premji Foundation, and in 2001 he donated $125 million (£97m) of his own Wipro shares to fund it. This not-for-profit organisation works to support the elementary education system in rural Indian government schools. One of its main aims is to make primary education available and accessible to all.

Over the following years, Wipro continued to command attention and to expand globally. It partnered with Intel, in 2004, and soon after Premji signed a huge deal with global defence, security, technology and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. In 2007 he entered into a research and development partnership with Germany’s Nokia Siemens Networks, now known as Nokia Networks.

In 2005, the Government of India honoured Premji with the title of Padma Bhushan, one of its highest civilian accolades, for his outstanding achievements in trade and commerce.

Concern for the environment continued to motivate the businessman, however, and in 2008 Premji entered the clean energy market with a new branch of the organisation, Wipro Eco Energy.

Education, too, is a keen concern for this college dropout. As the Azim Premji Foundation continued to grow and carry out good works, the tycoon looked towards education for undergraduates and, through the Foundation, established the Azim Premji University in Karnataka (formerly Bangalore) in 2010.

In 2010, Premji gifted a further $2 billion (£1.52bn) of Wipro shares to the Foundation. On top of other donations made over the years, this brought his total charitable contributions to a staggering $4.4 billion (£3.35bn), making him officially the most generous philanthropist not just in India but across Asia.

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It was in 2012 that Premji took his philanthropic practice to the next level by signing Bill Gates's Giving Pledge, a commitment by the world’s wealthiest individuals to give away most of their money. He was the third non-American to join this grand philanthropy club, and he donated another $2.2 billion (£1.67bn) to good causes through his Foundation upon signing. That year Premji also spoke out about his endorsement of a tax upon the super-rich, to the dismay of many of his peers.

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In 2013, Premji was quoted as stating that he had, by that time, already given away more than 25% of his personal wealth to charity. Then, in 2015, he bestowed an additional 18% of his stake in Wipro, taking his total contribution to charitable causes to 39%.

In April 2017, India Today magazine ranked him 9th in its 50 most powerful people of 2017. Wipro, in turn, continued to grow, expanding its operations into London that year and, in 2018, winning contracts to create software to assist with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and also the National Grid in the USA.

This year, of course, Premji’s donation to charity of $7.5 billion (£5.7bn) shares again demonstrated his dedication to giving. In the words of the businessman himself: "I strongly believe that those of us, who are privileged to have wealth, should contribute significantly to try and create a better world for the millions who are far less privileged". Words which Azim Premji has certainly, as we have seen, lived his life by.

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