Behind every billionaire there is a story!

Wipro’s Azim Premji

Forbes: When we were just on the street, somebody recognized you and said what a great honor it was to meet you. What does that mean to you when something like that happens?

Premji: I think some of us who were early in a sunrise industry and have done reasonably successfully get an undue amount of credit. We caught the wave at the right time.

You recently dined with Bill Gates. What did you discuss?

We were discussing our foundations because we do some joint work with them in India. I’ve known him for a few years, and they are a big partner of ours.

How has India been able to attract such high-tech industries that require such highly skilled people so quickly?

Because of a very strong base of engineering colleges. We will graduate 580,000 engineers this year. The United States will graduate 75,000 engineers this year. The population of U.S. is almost 300 million. Our population is 1 billion. So just using mathematics, the U.S. should be graduating at least three times the engineers they are graduating. Technical careers are not favored in the U.S. now. There are just too many options.

read the  rest published by Forbes here:

http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/05/27/billionaires-india-premji-biz-billies-cx_af_0527wipro.html