Wipro founder Azim Premji is India’s ‘most generous’ person having donated Rs 7,904 crore to philanthropy in 2020, which amounts to Rs 22 crore a day, according to the EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List 2020. A large part of Premji's donation is to the Azim Premji Foundation that works to enrich the field of education. Hurun said, "Azim Premji has committed 67% of economic interest in Wipro towards philanthropic activities. In 2020, the promoter holdings in Wipro earned a dividend of INR 422 crore and the 2019 share buyback program fetched another INR 7,347 crore – all of these would be donated towards philanthropy based on his endowment pledge."
The endowment pledge was made in March 2019, when Premji earmarked 34 percent of his shares worth Rs 52,750 crore to an endowment under the Azim Premji Foundation. The foundation donated Rs 1000 crores to the PM Cares fund when the pandemic started to help India's efforts to combat it. When Premji set aside a portion of his wealth towards the foundation, the collective wealth of Indian billionaires had come down, according to Forbes.
Premji was followed by HCL’S Shiv Nadar who donated 795 crore. Meanwhile, India and Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani was third with a donation of Rs 458 crore towards philanthropy. The 2020 list, according to EdelGive and Hurun, saw the number of individuals who donated more than Rs 10 crore towards charity more than doubled to 78 from 37 over the last two years, an increase of 100%.
The top 10 also included Aditya Birla Group’s Kumar Mangalam Birla (Rs 276 crore), Vedanta’s Anil Agarwal (Rs 215 crore), Primala Group’s Ajay Piramal (Rs 196 crore), Nandan Nilekani, Hinduja Brothers, Gautam Adani and Rahul Bajaj and family.
This year’s list features individuals who have donated Rs 5 crore or more during the period under review. Donations were measured by the value of their cash or cash equivalents from April 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020.
Three co-founder of Infosys also made it to the list: Nandan Nilekani (Rs 159 crore), S Gopalakrishnan (Rs 50 crore) and SD Shibulal (Rs 32 crore).
With a donation of Rs 47 crore, Rohini Nilekani,61, was the most generous woman philanthropist in the list.
Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal debuted on the list this year and is also the youngest on the list, having donated Rs 5.3 crore.
In terms of causes that philanthropists donated for, education the most favoured cause with 90 philanthropists cumulatively donating Rs 9,324 crore. This was followed by healthcare, which saw a 111% increase in total donation. This was followed by disaster relief.
In terms of the top five philanthropists in the country, Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar and Kumar Mangalam Birla primarily donated towards education, while Mukesh Ambani primarily donated towards disaster relief. Vendanta’s Anil Agarwal, who is 5th on the list donated primarily towards healthcare.