India Inc honchos to talk philanthropy with Bill Gates at an event hosted by Azim Premji

BANGALORE: Wipro’s billionaire founder Azim Premji and some of India’s wealthiest people will get together in Bangalore to talk philanthropy with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has donated more than $1 billion to support social causes in India.

At a private event hosted by Premji, the first Indian to join Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge club, they will discuss how to put their wealth to work on social causes. “The basic theme is to make the world a better place,” said Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chief of Bangalore-based pharmaceutical company Biocon. “We all have been fortunate to have wealth. We want to tell other wealthy to share with (the) community and (want) more people to be philanthropic.”

Premji, 69, signed the Giving Pledge in 2013, donating more than 20% of his stake in the software exporter to Azim Premji Foundation, which works in the education sector. In 2012, a similar event was hosted by Premji, Gates and Ratan Tata to discuss philanthropy in the areas of education, healthcare, water and agriculture.
Cyrus Mistry of the Tata Group, GMR Group’s GM Rao, GVK Reddy from the GVK Group, Infosys co-founders S Gopalakrishnan and Nandan Nilekani, Naveen Jindal of Jindal Steel & Power, Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal and VG Sidhartha of Cafe Coffee Day were among those who attended that meeting.

“This is a private meeting, so we can’t share any details,” said Anurag Behar, chief executive of the Azim Premji Foundation, on the latest event. The idea is to have candid conversations among participants, away from public glare.

“All of us are meeting to learn from each other,” said Rohini Nilekani, founder of Arghyam, a not-for-profit that works in the area of water, and wife of Nandan Nilekani. “It’s important for philanthropy in India.” Earlier this year, Premji hired Amnesty India head G Ananthapadmanabhan to look at grants for external agencies. Premji has a net worth of $16.7 billion, making him the third-richest in India, according to the Forbes Rich List.

Bill Gates and wife Melinda, who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday, started their trip to India earlier this week. In a blog post citing India’s achievement in polio eradication and works on rotavirus, which kills over 100,000 children in the country every year, Gates wrote all these add up to “a pivotal moment for India”.

Gates, who also met political leaders such as Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari and Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu, announced $700,000 towards flood relief in Jammu & Kashmir.

Gates counted health, sanitation and financial inclusion among some of the priority areas for the country. “We hope to talk with India’s leaders about how we might help accomplish some of their goals,” he wrote. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which started working in India in 2003, has contributed nearly $1 billion to projects in areas such as HIV/Aids prevention and polio eradication.

India has the sixth-largest billionaire population with a combined net worth of more than $175 billion, according to the Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census 2014.“Philanthropic donations do not seem to be raising enough funds to solve some of the toughest problems our world faces,” said Subhash Dhar, founder of Gudville, a private social network to discover and share causes. “We have to find ways to connect causes to our mainstream economy.”

However, philanthropy among wealthy Indians has been on the rise. Some of the biggest donors include HCL Group founder Shiv Nadar, Infosys co-founders Nilekani and Gopalakrishnan, and GMR’s Rao. Gopalakrishnan recently set aside Rs 225 crore to set up a centre for brain research at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, the largest donation from an individual the institute has ever received.