Like education, healthcare also needs to be given importance.
Shiv Nadar
Education is and will be the most powerful tool for individual and social change, and we must do all that it takes to facilitate it.
Any institutions' alumni are key to its growth. We are focused on giving a global experience to our students.
A founder can carry an institution only so far, and then others have to step in, even the alumni. That's how an institution becomes one.
Re-skilling has to be much wider with a strong foundation.
When you are running a business, there is a constant need to reinvent oneself. One should have the foresight to stay ahead in times of rapid change and rid ourselves of stickiness in any form in the business.
It is good to start as young as you can. What is more important is to carve out your vision and assess your readiness to start giving. Commitment and purpose are core to giving.
If you are calm about your ambitions, you become confident of achieving what you set out to do.
If you get to think of sharing wealth with people who need it and the purposes that need it, it gives a very different sense of satisfaction. I think I can build an institution which is very unlike the Gates' foundation. Gates' foundation is totally project-driven, that will serve a specific purpose and then self-destruct.
I was the seventh child in a family of eight siblings. We lost our father very young, and my mother had pretty much single-handedly brought us up.
In philanthropy, you have to take the attitude of a mother... You have to be patient, and we have been very patient for a long time.
Adaptability and constant innovation is key to the survival of any company operating in a competitive market.
HCL is a corporation. It is for profits. A corporation stands for its shareholders, its profits, its employees, its discoveries, and its customers.
India's connection with philanthropy didn't begin with western influences. The connection with philanthropy is age-old and ingrained in our value systems.
My daughter has no interest in succeeding me in the business. She is going towards social entrepreneurship, an area she is interested in.
One time, the teacher was the storehouse of knowledge. That will no longer be so. So what would a teacher do? A very good teacher will play the role of augmenter. Also, the teacher will be located anywhere and helping students.
I would like to share something that is being done extremely well by Bill Gates through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation is only going to address areas which are seen by Bill or Melinda as ills of the world. The foundation has no perpetuity.
Buffett gave significant portions of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett made money for 50 years before he donated.
Major forces that have contributed to the evolution of philanthropy in India in the pre-modern era have mainly been driven by religion, family, and society. The Hindu teaching of 'daan' or 'giving' is present in different ways in almost every celebration or ritual.
Since its inception, HCL's core focus area has been technology and product development, and hence, we continued to remain in the high end of technology throughout the '90s.
I have talked about the 'fractal organization'. Those smaller pieces should innovate and lead the rest of the organization. There will be parts that will be thinking about technologies of the future, and you need to nourish them.
A 5-acre school each in Noida and Gurgaon is what we have; it costs Rs. 50 crore to buy the land and another Rs. 50 crore to build the property. That's the capital cost alone.
Government, in its ultimate form, is the biggest philanthropher based in the world. And Bill Gates also said that he could do a small part of what the government can do, which is business philanthropy, equalling people and making sure there is inclusiveness.
The FM proposed to set up a Credit Guarantee Fund to ensure better flow of funds to students.
The Bharat Ram family was into philanthropy a way earlier. They build institutes such as Shri Ram College of Commerce, Lady Shri Ram College, and Shri Ram Schools. They are very inspiring.
The 1980s were fantastic. This was a time when we were at the peak of our creative work. The question of whether we would exist or not - something which everybody used to ask, including ourselves - stopped. Profits kept pace with growth requirements. HCL had credibility - that was the biggest barrier we had to break.
Supposing I write out a cheque for a billion dollars to the foundation, does it mean anything? There must be evidence of philanthropy. Otherwise, I'm sitting with that money, earning interest exactly the way in my holding company.
A residential school also takes cares of the problem of malnourishment and interaction with their peers, and their teachers help build the qualities of a leader.
I admire companies that give back to communities. It is an absolute essential for organizations to watch, mitigate, and improve their impact on the environment, people, communities, their health and overall well-being. But this is a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition.
Though easy to define, it is important to understand the significance of philanthropy. I believe it is really a state of mind: where one feels empowered and equipped to fill the huge gaps in the existing system.
We got our land at the right time, but when we go for additional land for our schools or the museum, there will be extra cost.
We need a world class institution which will create leaders out of the children who have not had a good start in life.
Each quarter, Indian IT firms publish their results, and these are broadcast on CNBC. From the comfort of their boardrooms, executives say how many new employees have been added, how many more Fortune 500 companies have been signed up as clients, how many million-dollar companies were added, and so on.
I was with top CEOs in 2009, and they were clearly shaken. Top leaders of Wall Street and elsewhere, shaken. The ones at the top did get by because if they are seeing a decline somewhere, there is also growth elsewhere, like in emerging economies.
As a product of education, I have always believed in the power of education as the most powerful, high-impact catalyst for transformation. Look at the impact that the Indian Institutes of Technology have had globally.
After Independence, there were periods of very high taxation. So you didn't create wealth, how will you distribute it? When was the first time capital gains tax was introduced? It was 1992 March. Till then, everything was taxed one way.
To us, the definition of philanthropy is what we spend. A P&L account means expenditure, lines of revenue. There is a surplus; it goes to the balance sheet. A transparent foundation should disclose this.
If you go to Wall Street, there is someone from Harvard, Stanford, etc, who relate to each other by the batch they studied in, the dorm they lived in, and so on.
Shiv Nadar University was established in 2011, and our first batch graduated in 2015. The first batch mostly had engineering courses and a B.Sc. programme in Mathematics.
Any organisation has to go through at least one depression to see how it survives, and a normal economic cycle takes seven years.
The moment I write out a cheque, it's an asset I have written off.
The SSN Institute will be expanded in areas such as liberal arts, social sciences, natural sciences, communications.
We didn't create an institution to increase land value or asset value.
My colleagues and I were engineers who worked for DCM's calculator division. These electronic calculators used digital integrated circuits, and then they started using chips. The advanced versions of those chips were used for programmable calculators, which were the forerunners of PCs.
In South, getting admission in SSN is not possible just because someone is my relative. One of the ministers said SSN is the only institution where I can't get a seat for anyone. That's true of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi governments, too.
We invited HP executives to participate in the management and in the board. HCL had this concept of corporate officers since inception in 1999. We had a remuneration committee. Now everyone is talking about nomination and remuneration committee. We had this from 1999.
I believe good corporate governance is critical in enhancing competitiveness and creating industry - leading profitable growth and superior returns for every stakeholder of the institution.
When you take the best of universities in the world, all of them have research and education contiguous; the person who teaches you could be a Nobel laureate. Some subjects are at the tri-junction of many subjects put together.
The anti-Hindi agitation changed the entire face of Tamil Nadu with a local party emerging on the top, relegating the Congress.
I was a very good student. But I didn't have the latitude to study more. I was never allowed to do anything cross-disciplinary. Why can't an engineering student learn physics?
