“I needed a push, I needed some miracle,” recalls Prashant Kumar Dixit, then a school student in rural Uttar Pradesh, waiting for a break. Now a second-year engineering student in SSN College, Dikshit's miracle came in the form of a seven-year stint in Vidya Gyan, which runs two leadership academies, that mentors rural school students with potential to excel. It is one of the numerous philanthropic initiatives by the Founder and Chairman of HCL Shiv Nadar, who also heads the Shiv Nadar Foundation.

Last year alone, he gave away over ₹650 crore to various charitable efforts.

Dixit was participating in an interaction with Shiv Nadar organised by the Chennai International Centre.

Responding to a question if he has a annual target to spend on charity, Nadar said: “it is not about earning but the heart to give”. He does not believe in setting targets but gets done what needs to be done.

Nadar said education is close to his heart and that is what he would like to be remembered for in the future.

SSN College of Engineering, that he set up near Chennai in 1996, has supported over 6,000 students with over ₹65 crore in scholarships and that is just the tip of the iceberg. The doors of the institution are open to deserving school students from rural areas. Janu, who graduated from SSN last year and now working with a multinational IT company, said she passed out of a government school 150 km from Chennai, a school that did not have teachers for half a dozen subject.

Explaining his reason for focussing on the education sector, during the course of the interaction organised as a fireside chat with R Srinivasan, Founder, Redington, and Pradeep Gupta, Founder, Cyber Media, coinciding with the first anniversary of CIC, Nadar said: “I was more impacted by what you can do, if you do well in education.”

After taking a step away from running HCL, he spends most of his time on his philanthropic activities. HCL Samuday, is a five-year project where he is focussing on building two model clusters of villages “that are close to perfection” in Hardoi District, UP. A similar effort is also on in Vijayawada with the support of the government, he said.

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