Indian IT mogul pledges 2 billion dollars for education in villages

Dec 2, 2010, 8:07 GMT

New Delhi - Azim Premji, chairman of the Indian information-technology company Wipro Ltd, has pledged 2 billion dollars to improve primary education in rural areas, a spokesman for his philanthropic foundation said Thursday.

'The endowment will partly go towards augmenting the work we have been doing for a decade and in part to set up a university to create education and development professionals,' Radha Radhakrishnan of the Azim Premji Foundation said.

Premji, listed by Forbes as the third-richest Indian with an estimated worth of 17 billion dollars, is to transfer 213 million equity shares of Wipro held by a few entities controlled by him to the foundation.

At current market price, they are valued at 88.4 billion rupees (2 billion dollars), the foundation said.

Over the past 10 years, the Azim Premji Foundation has spent an estimated 6 billion rupees on its work with government-run schools across 14 states, Radhakrishnan said.

'Our experience of the past 10 years has motivated us to significantly scale up our initiatives,' Premji said.

According to UNICEF, an estimated 8 million children ages 6 to 14 were not in school in 2009 in India, and almost half of those enrolled drop out before reaching grade eight.

India passed legislation in 2009 that gave children the right to free elementary education and made it compulsory.

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