Board of Directors

SHIV NADAR
Founder - HCL
Chairman & Chief Strategy Officer - HCL Technologies

AAt a time when India had a total of 250 computers, Shiv Nadar led a young team which passionately believed in and bet on the growth of the IT industry. That vision in 1976, born out of a Delhi “barsaati”, akin to a garage start-up, has resulted 3 decades later in a $5 billion global transformational technology enterprise today. From designing India’s first PC at the same time as global IT peers in 1978; to working on the Boeing Dreamliner’s Flight Management Systems now, HCL has stayed a true Pioneer of Modern Computing. HCL’s range of offerings spans Product Engineering, Custom & Package Applications, BPO, IT Infrastructure Services, IT Hardware, Systems Integration, and distribution of ICT products - across a wide range of focused industry verticals. The HCL team comprises over 60,000 professionals of diverse nationalities, who operate from 23 countries including over 500 points of presence in India. HCL has global partnerships with several leading Fortune 1000 firms, including leading IT and Technology firms.

Acknowledged as a visionary by the IT industry and his peers, Shiv Nadar has often made daring forays based on his conviction of the future. At a time when hardware was the name of the game, Nadar foresaw the huge potential in the area of IT education & learning from which NIIT was born. Albeit a more recent entrant in the software services space, since its listing in 2000, HCL is already among top Indian IT software majors and a force to reckon with for global technology giants.

Shiv Nadar firmly believes that, "If you want to empower people, give them the tools. There's enough entrepreneurship in this country to take care of the rest." He is quick to grasp new opportunities, select a team to transform his ideas into reality and delegate the project to competent professionals.

In January 2005 Shiv Nadar received the CNBC Business Excellence award from the Prime Minister of India. In February 2005 he was listed by “India Today” in the Power List of India’s leaders from all walks of life, for building a global IT Enterprise from scratch in 3 decades, creating valuable JVs with marquee partners such as Deutsche Bank, and creating jobs in Belfast when India was being criticized for just the opposite. More recently, Shiv Nadar received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2007 in the ‘Services’ category for being “a doyen of the Indian IT industry and perhaps its chief architect”. The University of Madras awarded him an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Science in November 2007, for his contribution to not just the IT industry in India, but also for his “transformation of technological culture globally”.

Shiv Nadar has been conferred the Padma Bhushan Award - the third highest civilian honor conferred by the President of India - in January 2008, in recognition of not just his contribution to trade & industry in India but also his deep commitment to public good. In February 2009, Forbes Magazine featured him in its list of 48 Heroes of Philanthropy in the Asia Pacific region.

Determined to give back to the society that nurtured him, Shiv Nadar has been quietly supporting many critical social causes through the Shiv Nadar Foundation. The Foundation is committed to provide the means to empower individuals to bridge the socio-economic divide and to contribute to the creation of a more equitable, meritocracy based society, and aims to achieve this primarily through outstanding educational institutions of higher learning. It has established the not-for-profit SSN College of Engineering in Chennai, which is today among the top ten private engineering colleges in India. Shiv Nadar is also building “VidyaGyan” public schools in Uttar Pradesh that will provide free, world class education to rural children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

He is an active member of the Executive Board of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. Concerned with the public health issues in India, Shiv Nadar is involved with the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) - working to establish standards in public health education and to create a network of innovative world class India-relevant institutes of public health. He is a Global Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), which works to promote entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship globally. He also supports initiatives for the girl child and the empowerment of women.