Shiv Nadar is an Indian billionaire industrialist. He is the founder and chairman of HCL Technologies Limited and the Shiv Nadar Foundation. Nadar founded HCL in the mid-1970s and transformed the IT hardware company into an IT enterprise over the next three decades by constantly reinventing his company’s focus.
Shiv Nadar is the Founder of HCL Enterprise, a $9.9 billion global organization with over 153,000 professionals operating from 50 countries. He is also the Chief Strategy Officer of HCL Technologies, a group company and India’s third largest IT services organization. Nadar is credited with being one of the pioneers of the computing and IT industry in India. Under his guidance, HCL has continued to ride the waves of the changing IT landscape for over 40 years, remaining at the forefront of every technological revolution since 1976. While HCL started off as a hardware organization, manufacturing the country’s first indigenous computers and introducing them to the Indian consumer, it eventually evolved into a more comprehensive software services organization. HCL is, in fact, one of the few global IT companies founded in the 1970s that remains in existence to date.

Throughout his career, Nadar always acknowledged that building successful institutions is dependent on forging result-oriented partnerships and creating new knowledge. He steered HCL to create several valuable joint ventures and alliances that aided the organization’s emergence as a global technology enterprise. His pioneering spirit and belief in engineering and research shaped the course of the organization and is the reason that, today, HCL Technologies boasts one of the largest IT Engineering and R&D divisions in the world.

Nadar started his career as part of the elite DCM management trainee system. It was at DCM that he met the people with whom he later started HCL in a Delhi “Barsati” (akin to a garage startup) with a compelling vision that the microprocessor would change the world.

Nadar credits his success to the education and scholarships that he received during his early years. He has always maintained that access to quality education is the most potent tool of transformation and, therefore, in 1994, he established the philanthropic Shiv Nadar Foundation. The Foundation draws heavily on Nadar’s experience of building a world-class organization such as HCL. It endeavors to create institutions of transformational education that will continue to influence and nurture the country’s youth for decades to come. To this effect, the Shiv Nadar Foundation has established six institutions covering the entire spectrum of education, which aim to address the issue of quality in education, create lasting partnerships, and have a strong research orientation.

As of 2020, Nadar has invested ~ US$ 900 million through the Foundation, impacting over 30,000 students directly. However, the Foundation’s ultimate aim is to nurture the next generation of leaders in the ideologies of symbiotic growth so that each of them may in turn aspire to affect a small change, creating a large multiplier effect. The impact of the Shiv Nadar Foundation institutions is reflected in the aspirations of meritorious students who started their journeys from humble, geographically remote backgrounds, and are pursuing their dreams in India as well as other countries.

In recognition of his pioneering role in business and philanthropy in India and across the globe, Nadar has received several honors and accolades, notable among them being the Padma Bhushan from the President of India in 2008.
Nadar was born in 1945 in Moolaipozhi Village, in Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu, India. Nadar studied at Town Higher Secondary School, Kumbakonam and in Elango Corporation Higher Secondary School, Madurai.. Later, he joined St. Joseph Boys Higher Secondary School, Trichy, and completed high school education here. Nadar received a pre-university degree in the American College, Madurai and a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore.