N. R. Narayana Murthy

He was born on 20 August 1946, in Sidlaghatta, Karnataka, in a middle-class family.

His uncle was a civil servant and Narayana’s father wanted him to follow the same route. But the young boy had other plans; he wanted to be an engineer as that was the “in” thing in India in those days.

He appeared for the entrance test for the India Institute of Technology (IIT) after completing his schooling and cleared it with a high rank and a scholarship. However the scholarship was not enough to completely cover his educational expenses and his father could not afford to pay the fees.

On his father’s advice he joined a local engineering college, the National Institute of Engineering and graduated in 1967 with a degree in Electrical Engineering.

He then went to the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and earned his master’s degree in 1969. While at the IIT he had a chance meeting with a famous computer scientist from the US and was thoroughly impressed by the scientist’s talks. This influenced Narayana to pursue a career in the IT sector in future.

He took up the position of a chief systems programmer at the IIM, Ahmedabad. There he worked on installing a time-sharing computer system—India’s first, making IIM the third business school in the world to install a time-sharing system after Harvard and Stanford.

The work at the IIM was hectic but extremely fulfilling. He used to work 20 hours a day and learned a lot. Even today Murthy feels that joining the IIM was the best decision he had ever made in his professional life.

He worked overseas in the 1970s, and the years he spent in Paris had a deep influence on him. Initially a staunch leftist who supported Communism, he eventually changed his views and concluded that compassionate capitalism and the large-scale creation of jobs was the only practical method of eradicating poverty.

He learned a lot from the western countries, but ultimately wanted to settle in India and start a company in his homeland. He started a company called Softronics which failed after just a year and a half. So he joined Patni Computer Systems in Pune.

Eventually he decided to become an entrepreneur again and teamed up with six other software professionals to found another company, “Infosys Consultants Pvt Ltd." (now known as Infosys Ltd.) with a capital of Rs. 10,000 in Pune in 1981. The company’s headquarters was shifted from Pune to Bangalore in 1983.

Murthy is best known as one of the co-founders of Infosys Ltd., one of India’s largest IT services company with offices all across the globe.

Under his leadership Infosys became the first Indian company to be listed on the Nasdaq. It also became the first listed Indian company with revenue of $1 billion a year.