Shiv Nadar, founder of the Indian IT company HCL, is ranked No. 71 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, tied with Elaine Marshall, with a net worth of $30.9 billion. His daughter Roshni Nadar is now HCL’s chair.
Shiv Nadar was born on July 14, 1945, in Moolaipozhi village, in what is now Thoothukudi district, Tamil Nadu, to Sivasubramaniya Nadar and Vamasundari Devi. His mother’s brother, S. P. Adithanar, founded the newspaper Dina Thanthi.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 71 (tied with Elaine Marshall), with $30.9 billion
- Earlier estimate: Wikipedia cites Forbes at $34.1 billion as of March 26, 2025
Education and Early Career
Nadar studied at schools in Kumbakonam, Madurai and Trichy, took a pre-university course at the American College in Madurai and graduated in electrical engineering from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, in 1967. He began his career at Cooper Engineering in Pune in 1967 but soon left to start his own venture with several friends and colleagues. Their first company, Microcomp, sold tele-digital calculators in India.
HCL
- 1976: Nadar founded HCL, which over three decades he turned from an IT hardware company into an IT enterprise
- August 2020: he handed over to his daughter, Roshni Nadar, who became the first woman to chair a listed Indian IT company
- July 2021: he stepped down as managing director of HCL Technologies, and C. Vijayakumar, the CEO, succeeded him for a five-year term
Education and Philanthropy
- Shiv Nadar Foundation: since the mid-1990s he has focused on developing India’s education system through the foundation, which he chairs; in FY25 he and his family donated ₹2,708 crore through it
- SSN College: in 1996 he founded SSN College of Engineering in Chennai in his father’s name; in 2025 it was announced that it will merge with Shiv Nadar University
- Honour: he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2008
Why It Matters
HCL is one of India’s largest IT services firms, and the Nadar family’s stake is the source of its wealth and of its major donations to education.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Shiv Nadar (right) with Sir Richard Stagg, the British High Commissioner to India, on October 12, 2009. Photo: British High Commission, New Delhi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
