In a country where almost 70% of population lived in villages and was dependent on agriculture, the foray of information and technology served as a boon for the educated middle class youth who suffered from unemployment. Post Globalization, India also saw a boom in the IT and Software sector like the rest of the world. Many Indian entrepreneurs like Ratan Tata, Azim Premji and N.R. Narayana Murthy saw the opportunity and delved into the sector. Now their companies TCS, Wipro and Infosys are identified among the top global companies. The advancement in the IT sector also coerced the traditional sectors as banking and insurance to modernize and adopt more tech-savvy techniques. As the plethora of avenues in the IT and Software industry is numerous, the youths of India are empowered to start their own business and the internet serves as the perfect launch pad for their venture. The story of Flipkart founders, Bansal brothers, bears testament to this fact. Here we present the biographies on some of the famous Indian IT and Software entrepreneurs. The biographies serve as an insight to the lives and timelines of these business giants. You will be intrigued with the interesting facts about the famous entrepreneurs, presented in the trivia section of the biography.
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Ratan Tata is a well-known Indian industrialist and the former charman of Indian multinational conglomerate Tata Sons. His reign as chairman was marked by acquisitions of iconic global brands, such as Tetley, Jaguar Land Rover and Corus by the Tata Group. Ratan Tata was instrumental in turning Tata Group from a largely India-centrist group into a global business.
Business magnate Azim Premji revolutionized the Indian software industry with Wipro Limited. Twice listed to Time 100, he transformed his vegetable oil and soap manufacturing company to a leading IT solutions brand, through marked diversification. He owns a non-profit foundation and is the first Indian to join The Giving Pledge.
Kumar Mangalam Birla is an Indian industrialist best known as the chairman of the Indian multinational conglomerate company, Aditya Birla Group. He also serves as the chairman of IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Delhi. Over the course of his career, Birla has received several honors like the Business Leader of the Year award and Outstanding Business Man of the Year award.
Padma Bhushan-winning Indian billionaire businessman Shiv Nadar is known as the founder and chairman of the IT company HCL and the Shiv Nadar Foundation. While he transformed HCL from an IT hardware company into an IT enterprise, by 2021, he also turned himself into the third-richest Indian.
Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani is also the man behind the Indian biometric ID Aadhaar. Named to the Forbes list of India’s Richest in 2021, he also once teamed up with Ratan Tata to form Avanti Finance to help the poor get loans. He unsuccessfully contested as a Congress candidate, too.
Apoorva Mehta is a serial entrepreneur and a former Amazon.com employee. He founded the grocery delivery and pick-up service Instacart in 2012. An engineer by qualification, he tried to start at least 20 other services, including an ad network for social gaming companies, before launching Instacart. He was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2013.
The son of former Wipro chairman Azim Premji, Rishad Premji has now taken over as the new chairperson of the company. Equipped with an MBA from Harvard, he now also serves on the board of the non-profit Azim Premji Foundation. He was also named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani is an Indian entrepreneur best known as the founder of Info Edge where he is currently serving as the executive vice-chairman. Bikhchandani is also credited with co-founding Ashoka University, a liberal arts college in Haryana, India. In 2008, he received the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. In 2020, he was awarded the Padma Shri.
