Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro Limited has been nominated for the prestigious Gandhi Mandela Award to be held later this year.  In 2010, he was voted among the 20 most powerful men in the world by Asiaweek. He has twice been listed among the 100 most influential people by TIME Magazine, once in 2004 and more recently in 2011.

Premji was born in Bombay, India in a Nizari Ismaili Shia Muslim family with origins from Kutch in Gujarat. His father was a noted businessman and was known as Rice King of Burma. After partition, when Jinnah invited his father Muhammed Hashem Premji to come to Pakistan, he turned down the request and chose to remain in India. Premji gave up studies at Stanford in 1966 to look after the family's cooking oil business when his father died, expanding it into software.

Over his illustrious career, Azim Premji has received a lot of honour and respect and been conferred with many awards. Business Week has hailed him as one of the 30 Greatest Entrepreneurs of all Time, which is no mean feat considering the global reach of the said publication. This recognition was in honour of the role that he has played over the years in making Wipro one of the top business organizations across the world in terms of growth.