From hardware startup to IT services
Shiv Nadar's fortune comes from HCL, the technology group he started in 1976 with a handful of colleagues who left their jobs at the DCM group in Delhi. The founders began by making calculators and then microcomputers for the Indian market at a time when foreign computer companies faced heavy restrictions in India. The company was first called Microcomp and soon became Hindustan Computers Limited, or HCL.
For its first two decades HCL was mainly a hardware company, selling computers and office equipment and distributing products for foreign partners. Nadar saw that the larger opportunity lay in software and services for overseas clients. In the 1990s HCL set up a separate unit for that work, which became HCL Technologies. It listed on the Indian stock exchanges in 1999 and grew quickly by managing computer systems, applications and infrastructure for large companies in the United States and Europe.
The family's holding in HCL Technologies, held through promoter companies, is the core of its wealth. The listed company now employs a very large workforce in India and many other countries and earns most of its revenue abroad, from banks, manufacturers, technology firms and other large customers.
HCL Technologies and the wider group
HCL Technologies offers three broad kinds of work: IT and business services, engineering and research services for product companies, and its own software products. The products arm grew after HCL bought a portfolio of enterprise software from IBM in 2019, including well known tools for collaboration, marketing and systems management.
Other parts of the HCL group include:
- HCL Infosystems, the original hardware business, which has shrunk as the company shifted to services
- HCL Healthcare, which runs clinics and corporate health programs in India
- Investments managed through the family's holding companies, which own the controlling stake in HCL Technologies
Nadar stepped down as chairman of HCL Technologies in 2020, and his daughter Roshni Nadar Malhotra took over the role. In 2021 he retired as managing director and became chairman emeritus and strategic adviser. In 2025 he gave a large part of his holdings in the family's main promoter companies to Roshni, making her the controlling shareholder of the group. The transfer formalized a succession plan that had been under way for several years.
A Tamil Nadu village and a Delhi career
Shiv Nadar was born in 1945 in Moolaipozhi, a village in Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu. His father was a judge, and the family moved several times as he was posted to different towns. Nadar studied at schools in Tamil Nadu and earned an engineering degree in electrical and electronics engineering from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore.
After graduating he worked briefly in Pune before joining DCM in Delhi, a large industrial group that was starting a data products business. There he met colleagues including Arjun Malhotra, who would become his co-founder. The group felt the company was not moving fast enough and decided to strike out on their own, starting HCL with modest savings.
Nadar has lived in Delhi for most of his working life. He married Kiran Nadar, an art collector and philanthropist who is also a champion bridge player.
A foundation focused on education
Nadar has devoted much of his later career to philanthropy through the Shiv Nadar Foundation, which he set up in 1994. Its first major project was SSN College of Engineering near Chennai, named after his father, which opened in 1996.
The foundation later created Shiv Nadar University in Greater Noida, near Delhi, which opened in 2011 and has grown into a research university with campuses in more than one city. It also runs VidyaGyan, a residential school program for academically gifted children from poor rural families in Uttar Pradesh, and Shiv Nadar Schools in several Indian cities.
Kiran Nadar founded the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi in 2010, one of the first private museums of modern and contemporary art in India, and it is supported by the family.
The government of India awarded Shiv Nadar the Padma Bhushan in 2008. He is regularly listed among the most generous donors in India, and he has said that he wants education to be his main legacy.