Topic: Case Study Analysis on Premji Rises as

World’s Top Philanthropists

Case 1: Premji Rises as World’s Top Philanthropists

Case Analysis:

Summary:

This case elaborates on Indian business tycoon, investor, and

philanthropist Azim Premji’s (Premji) philanthropic initiative – the Azim
Premji Foundation (APF) – which envisioned transforming the Indian
primary education sector. In 2001, Premji through his foundation, APF,
started taking initiatives to fulfil the goal. The case discusses the vision,
strategies, and programs that drove the change. It describes APF’s
efforts to accomplish the change in three broad phases of
implementation, elaborating on the objectives, initiatives, and
challenges that shaped each phase. Phase I, where APF played a
facilitator’s role in bringing about the change, elucidates the early
interventions of APF and the various challenges and lessons that
resulted in Phases II and III.
It also throws light on the persona of Azim Premji – the values, beliefs,
principles, and practices which shaped him into a successful
entrepreneur and a passionate philanthropist. The case shares a few
reminiscences from Premji’s early life that laid the foundation for his
leadership style.
Premji, who signed the ‘Giving Pledge’– a global declaration to give away
a substantial amount of one’s wealth to charity – worked relentlessly to
transform the Indian primary education sector. However, the task was a
mammoth one and the road ahead was replete with challenges –
systemic, administrative, involving people, etc. Though the primary
education sector in India attracted substantial donor interest, it was
known for the low quality of its outcomes due to inherent problems.
While Premji along with his associates worked relentlessly toward the
mission, how far they would succeed in achieving the ambitious targets
remained to be seen.
Questions:

1. Discuss the recent philanthropic move that had been taken

up by Premji in detail.

Indian business tycoon, investor and philanthropist Azim Premji’s

Philanthropic initiative – the Azim Premji Foundation – had envisioned
transforming the Indian primary education sector. In 2001, Premji
through his foundation, APF, started taking initiatives to fulfil the goal.
To uplift and to take it forward, Wipro boss recently behued worth $7.5
billion taking the total pledge to 67% of earnings from tech companies’
shares, his eponymous philanthropic initiative that boosts his total
commitment to Rs. 1.45 lakh crore ($21 billion), making it one of the five
largest private endowments in the world and the biggest in Asia. This has
cemented the 73-year-old billionaire’s place alongside the world’s most
influential philanthropists including Bill Gates, George Soros and Warren
Buffett.
The education-focused philanthropic initiative launched by the Wipro
chairman over a decade ago is focused on improving the quality of
teachers in some of the country’s most remote locations and also runs
the Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Premji, who signed the ‘Giving
Pledge’ – a global declaration to give away a substantial amount of one’s
wealth to charity – worked relentlessly to transform the Indian primary
education sector. However, the task was a mammoth one and the road
ahead was replete with challenges – systemic, administrative, involving
people etc. though the primary education sector in India attracted
substantial donor interest, it was known for the low quality of its
outcomes due to inherent problems. While Premji along with his
associates worked relentlessly towards mission, how far they would
succeed in achieving the ambitious targets remained to be seen.
Premji announced that all earnings from approximately 34% shares of
India’s fourth-largest software services exporter Wipro NSE -0.47 % —
worth about Rs 52,750 crore ($7.5 billion) — would be transferred to the
endowment that supports the Azim Premji Foundation. With this,
Premji has committed earnings from 67% of Wipro’s shares to the
charitable foundation. The Premji family and entities controlled by them
hold a 74.30% stake in the software exporter.

2. What do you know about “Azim Premji Foundation” and its

CSR programs and impact towards the society?

 Azim Premji Foundation is a not-for profit organisation that has been

working since 2000 with the elementary education system in rural
government schools.

The Foundation began by implementing various programmes to improve

educational quality across the country. By 2010 however it became clear
that working on a “project” mode was inadequate and it takes
continuous effort over many decades for any deep-rooted change to
happen. This can only be achieved by establishing “institutions” which
are embedded in the local context and can collaborate with local
government structures. Thus, the idea of setting up District Institutes in
field locations came into being.

Today, the Foundation with 1000+ employees has field institutes in 40+
districts across 6 states and 1 union territory (Karnataka, Rajasthan,
Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and
Puducherry).

The District Institutes work in collaboration with state governments to

engage with teachers, school leaders, teacher educators and other
education officials.

The range of work involves efforts to:

 improve the quality of processes and practices within schools,

 facilitate creative approaches to teaching and learning through
workshops, teacher forums, seminars, melas, etc.
  build professional networks of teachers and head teachers and
 reform school curriculum, teacher-education curriculum and
related issues of education policy.
CSR Activities of Azim Premji Foundation:

 Computer Aided Learning Programme (2001-2008)

- In response to the perceived need for computer-based
education both by the Government of Karnataka and the
Foundation, ‘The Community Learning Centres (CLCs)
Initiative’ was started. The aim of the programme was
application of technology in education for self-paced,
interactive and experiential learning and attracting children
to school. A CLC was a room in a government elementary
school where about five to eight computers were placed.
Efforts were also made to source and generate locally
relevant content that could be used on the computers. It
eventually became the Computer Aided Learning
Programme (CALP) covering 16,000 schools in 13 states.

 Accelerated Learning Programme (2002-2004)

- The Accelerated Learning Programme (ALP) was launched in
August 2002 in North-East Karnataka. It focused on
mainstreaming out-of-school children into formal
government schools by assisting them to learn the skills
appropriate to the grade into which they were
mainstreamed.

 Learning Guarantee Programme (2002-2008)

- The Learning Guarantee Programme (LGP) was launched in
November 2002 in Karnataka. The programme began with
the objective of identifying and rewarding outstanding
schools that were achieving expected learning
competencies, with a view to motivating other schools to
emulate their practices. It soon became the flagship
programme of the organization and between 2004 and
2005, LGP was launched in the four Indian states of Madhya
Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat and Rajasthan covering19
 Districts and reaching more than 3000 schools in
Uttarakhand and 46000 schools in Karnataka.

 Child Friendly Schools Initiative (2004-2011)

- The Child Friendly Schools Initiative comprised a series of
quality initiatives to ensure that all children come to school,
complete five years of schooling and learn during their time
at school. The programme was rolled out in the middle of
2004 in the Shorapur block of Yadgir district in North-East
Karnataka and in Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh. In
2006 the programme had to be terminated in Chitoor due
to various challenges. While the programme expanded to
336 schools in Shorapur block. This was a holistic
programme which covered all relevant stakeholders
(teachers, community members, students, and educational
functionaries), and a wide range of domains (classroom
processes, out of classroom processes, different
perspectives on learning, teacher professional
development, monitoring and support, curricular and
related activities). The programme was implemented as a
tripartite partnership between the state government, the
Foundation and UNICEF.

 Policy Planning Unit (2004-Present)

- The Policy Planning Unit (PPU) was a joint initiative between
the Government of Karnataka and the Azim Premji
Foundation to assist the Department of Public Instruction to
build administrative and technical capabilities in the officials
in the department, enhance community participation in
schools, document academic processes and practices for
learning. Positioned as an advisory body or a ‘think tank’,
the unit was not only intended to work ‘with’ the
Government but also work ‘within’ the Government. Policy
Planning Unit conducted and coordinated research studies,
provided ongoing support to Government of Karnataka,
initiated capacity building efforts in IT and education
management and also created booklets in the local
 language on how management principles can be applied to
address the needs of the education department.

 Andhra Pradesh Randomized Evaluation Study (2004-2013)

- APRESt was a research study to investigate the effectiveness
of various policy options to improve the quality of primary
education in rural government schools in Andhra Pradesh.
The various partners of the study included the government
of Andhra Pradesh, the Azim Premji Foundation,
Educational Initiatives, Venkatesh Sundararaman (World
Bank representative) and Karthik Muralidharan (Research
Consultant). The research study was intended to
understand the relative impact of input-based and
incentive-based education policies on student learning
outcomes using the methodology of a randomized
evaluation.

 Namma Shale (2007-2011)

- The Karnataka State Trainers’ Collective (KSTC), an NGO
with state-wide presence was invited by the Department of
Public Instruction to evolve a mechanism for effective
community participation to achieve quality education in
rural government primary schools. This came to be known
as ‘Namma Shale’, literally ‘My School’ in Kannada and the
Azim Premji Foundation agreed to support the work
through professional, technical, and financial assistance.
The scope of the programme was limited to 73 villages of 4
clusters from each of these districts - Karwar, Davangere,
Yadgir and Mysore. The basic premise of the programme
was that only when the key stakeholder institutions such as
the anganwadi, the SDMC, the gram panchayat and the
school were strengthened; individually, in terms of
democratic participation and decision-making; and
collectively, in terms of establishing accountability towards
each other; would the goal of quality education be achieved
in the village.
  Institutional Capacity Development (2010-2013)
- Institutional Capacity Development was conceived as a
project with the overarching goal of bringing about systemic
change that improved school performance by working at
the level of the school as well as at the level of other
supporting institutions (academic, administrative and
community). A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was
signed with the Government of Karnataka in November
2009 to implement the ICD project in Mandya district,
Karnataka.

The team identified eight types of institutions which took care of a

significantly large part of the academic, administrative and service
delivery activity of the education department:

 Schools, the final unit responsible for delivery of teaching-learning

 Three academic  institutions (at District, Block, Cluster levels),

responsible for teacher preparation, research & development and
academic support

 Three administrative institutions (at District, Block, Cluster levels)

responsible for oversight and logistics support

State Councils of Education Research & Training (SCERTs) responsible for

curriculum, norms for classroom practices, education technology and
research, training & development. 

 Education for Children of Migrant Labour (2007-Present)

- The Foundation had identified a critical need for providing
education to the children of migrant labour and began a
dialogue with builders for support in running schools at
construction sites. This resulted in the first schools for
children of migrant labour being set up - ‘Windmills’ was
started in February 2007 at Whitefield, Bangalore in
partnership with Total Environment Builders and ‘Epsilon’
was set up in June 2007 at Yemlur, Bangalore. All the
running costs of schools were shared equally between the
 builder and the Foundation. Since the inception of the
programme, nearly 180 children have been mainstreamed
into nearby government schools. Another 245 children have
joined government schools in their native village.

 Namma Shale Plus (2012-2015)

- Namma Shale Plus programme is a community owned
integrated quality education model with the overarching
goal of strengthening leadership qualities of head teachers,
improving the classroom performance of teachers,
encouraging community participation in school
management and development, and bringing about
institutionalization of community based school
management system under the Panchayati Raj Institutions.
Based on the pilot programme in four clusters representing
four different geographical regions within Karnataka, the
programme has been redesigned with the focus on
community involvement and teaching-learning aspects. This
is being implemented in 15 backward clusters of Gulbarga,
Raichur and Yadgir (covering 181 schools).

3. Why only Premji? Why not other business players in India?

Comment.

 India has the largest number of billionaires in the world per trillion
dollars of GDP. And Rajan believes that the predominant source of
this wealth creation has been land, natural resources and
government contracts. This government-business nexus has made
things difficult for new players to emerge.

The hygiene factor, the first wave of the business icons mostly emerged
out of sectors that were new, were not capital-intensive and were
relatively free from government controls. From IT, IT’S and telecom,
these sectors were sunrise sectors where newcomers with little capital
were well placed to begin from scratch. In a short span of time they built
business empires, and many got the iconic status conferred.

The government has dragged its feet on a range of second-generation

reforms that the economy needs badly. No wonder then that we have
hardly seen any new sunrise sector gaining critical mass over the past
decade.

4. Do you envision anything, as a responsible individual, about

CSR?

 As a responsible individual of this country we would like to follow the

foot-steps of leaders such as Azim Premji towards contributing to the
society.

1. We envision of creating awareness about over-use of plastics and it's

negative impact on the environment.

Would promote use of alternatives which are better replacement of

plastics in all possible applications.

Fund or collaborate with starts ups or manufactures who are making

alternatives of plastics.

Contributing towards initiatives such as Clean Ganga mission of Govt in

CSR activity.

2. CSR activity in areas of real need that is Rural areas of INDIA. Helping
them with basic needs such as water facility, transport, education,
health and skill development which will bring an economic growth and
development in rural INDIA.

Conclusion:

Premji felt the government’s commitment to primary education was not

commensurate with the importance of the sector. Though the primary
education sector in India attracted substantial donor interest, it was
known for the low quality of its outcomes due to inherent problems. So,
amidst the plethora of facts that painted a scary picture of Indian
primary education, Premji launched his campaign to transform primary
schools. The mission was guided by Premji’s vision to create a just and
equitable society through sustained quality education.