ABSTRACT
B. Ramalinga Raju grew up in the village of Bhimavaram in southeast India, not far from the Bay of Bengal. Although many rural Indians suffered terrible poverty during the 1950s and 1960s, Raju’s family was relatively prosperous. Raju’s father was a successful grape farmer, who later started a textile business. Raju’s family’s wealth enabled him to receive a first-class education. After completing a Bachelor of Commerce degree at local Andhra Loyola College, Raju traveled to the United States, where he earned an MBA degree from Ohio University. Rather than returning home after finishing his MBA, Raju stayed in the
United States and began providing information technology support services to John Deere & Company. Initially, Raju’s staff of expatriate Indian software engineers worked in a rented office down the street from Deere’s Moline, Illinois headquarters. But in 1987, Raju returned to India, where he could find hundreds of well-educated, English-speaking computer specialists willing to work for a fraction of the cost of American employees. The advent of broadband communications allowed Satyam’s employees in Hyderabad, India to provide services to companies around the globe. Business boomed during the late 1990s as hundreds of corporations sought help to prevent their computers from crashing at the turn of the millennium. Twenty years after founding Satyam, Raju was one of the wealthiest men
in India, with an estimated net worth of $670 million. Raju founded the Byrraju Foundation in 2001 to help villagers in his native Andhra Pradesh region of India. The Byrraju Foundation aided thousands of rural Indians by operating clinics, schools, and clean water projects in more than 200 villages. Raju and his immediate family members provided more than 50 percent of the foundation’s annual operating budget. Not that Raju gave all his money to charity: a 2009 article in the Harvard Business School student newspaper reported that Raju allegedly owned 310 belts, 321 pairs of shoes, and at least 1,000 designer suits.2 The son of a textile merchant apparently appreciated good clothing.
