Wipro Ltd Chairperson Azim Premji on Wednesday gave away 34% of his shares in the company, worth $7.5 billion (Rs 52,750 crore) to charitable causes.
“With this action, the total value of the philanthropic endowment corpus contributed by Mr Premji is $21 billion [Rs 1.45 lakh crore], which includes 67% of economic ownership of Wipro,” the company said in a press release
The statement added that the Azim Premji Foundation will scale up its activities in the next few years.
“ The team driving the field work in education is expected to grow significantly from the current 1,600 people, while the Azim Premji University [in Bengaluru] will expand to have 5,000 students with 400 faculty members across multiple programs,” it added.
“The grant-making activities will also continue to expand rapidly, growing three times from its current levels, supporting good work across multiple domains of social importance in India.”
In a release, the Azim Premji Foundation said: "The Foundation's extensive field work in education has been in some of the most disadvantaged parts of India, to help contribute to the improvement of quality and equity of the public (government) schooling system.
All this work has been in close partnership with various State Governments. Currently this field work is spread across Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Puducherry, Telangana, and Madhya Pradesh, along with some work in the north-eastern states of India.
The foundation works in the education sector, and supports over 150 other non-profit organisations serving underprivileged Indians through financial grants for a number of years, the press release said.
Indian households with over $50 million in net worth are expected to double by 2022, Mint reported. In 2017, there were 1,60,600 such households with a net worth of Rs 1.53 trillion. In 2022, this will rise to 3,30,400 households with a combined net worth of Rs 3.52 trillion.