Winning Bizness Desk

Mumbai. There are very few people who believe in charity along with doing business. Wipro founder Azim Premji is one of them who is fondly called as Bill Gates of India and he is given the title of biggest donor. In the year 2001, he founded Azim Premji Foundation, an NGO and through this he donated a major portion of his wealth. A few days ago he had donated 350 crores to IIT Mumbai from where he has done B.Tech. Azim Premji donated around Rs 22 crores i.e. around Rs 7904 crores every day for charity in 2019-20. In the year 2022-21, Premji topped the list of donors as he donated Rs 9713 crore. In the year 2022, he donated Rs 27 crore daily. However, in the year 2022, he slipped to second number in the list of donors and donated a total of Rs 484 crore. Azim Premji Foundation, Wipro and Wipro Enterprises donated Rs 1125 crores to deal with the Covid pandemic.

Premji's entry into the oil business

Premji's grandfather was involved in the rice business. His father Mohammad Hussain Premji also carried forward his father's business. There was not much profit in the rice business. The deficit was increasing and the shortage of money was increasing. He had given a loan to a mill owner, for whose recovery he went to Maharashtra. On failing to repay the loan, the mill owner handed over his oil mill to him. With this, the entry of Mohammad Hussain Premji was done in the oil business. He named the company Western Vegetable Products Limited. During the partition of the country in the year 1947, Mohammad Ali Jinnah offered Mohammad Premji to come to Pakistan and become the Finance Minister, but Premji rejected his offer.

Premji had to leave his studies midway

Father sent Azim Premji to England for studies, but after the death of his father in the year 1966, he had to leave his studies midway and come to India. He took over his father's company. Azim Premji's elder brother Farooq Premji left the family and went to Pakistan in 1965, a year before his father's death. Along with handling his father's business, he tried his hand at many other businesses. In the year 1977, he changed the name of the company to Wipro. Azim Premji had sensed the demand of time and the future. He understood that he has to move forward and that he has to enter the IT sector. In the year 1980, when the big IT company IBM was winding up its business in India, Azim Premji entered the IT sector. They understood that a lot of work is going to be done in this sector. With this thought, he started Wipro and it took off as soon as it started. Wipro started making its move in the field of hardware as well as software. Today Wipro is the third largest IT company in the country.