Narayana Murthy Biography: The Rs 10,000 That Built Infosys

Key facts
Born	20 August 1946, in the old Mysore State (now Karnataka); records give the place variously as Sidlaghatta, Kolar or Mysore city [1] [37] [48] [40]
Family roots	Kannada-speaking family; father a government high-school teacher; one of eight children; grew up in small towns and then Mysore [1] [42]
Education	BE in electrical engineering, National Institute of Engineering, University of Mysore (1967); M.Tech, IIT Kanpur (1969) [40] [48]
Family	Wife Sudha Murty (author, philanthropist, Rajya Sabha member); children Akshata Murty and Rohan Murty [98] [9]
Company	Infosys: co-founder, chief executive 1981-2002, chairman to 2011, executive chairman 2013-14. Family office: Catamaran Ventures [7] [94]
Wealth	US$3.95 billion, No. 78 on Forbes’s list of India’s 100 Richest, September 2026 [96]
Known for	Building Infosys from Rs 10,000 of his wife’s savings into a company with US$20 billion in annual revenue, and sharing its ownership widely with employees

On a Sunday night in 1974, by his own account, a young Indian engineer boarded the Sofia Express at Niš, a railway town near the border of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. He was hitchhiking home from Paris. He had not eaten for a day because he had no local money, and he struck up a conversation in French with a young woman in his compartment. A young man in the compartment fetched the police. The Indian was dragged off the train and locked in an eight-foot-by-eight-foot room with a cold stone floor and a hole in the corner for a toilet [3] [1].

He says he was held for about three days without food or water, then put in the guard’s compartment of a freight train to Istanbul. The guard’s parting words stayed with him for life: “You are from a friendly country called India and that is why we are letting you go!” [3]

He had gone to Europe a convinced leftist. He came home, in his own words, “a determined, compassionate capitalist” [3]. Seven years later he started Infosys with Rs 10,000 from his wife’s savings [1] [52]. In the year to March 2026 that company reported revenue of Rs 1,78,650 crore and said it employed more than 3.25 lakh people [10].

The surprise is how little of it he owns: 0.40% [9]. The rest was shared, sold or given up by design. That choice, and the strict rules he wrote for himself and then struggled to live by, run through the whole life of N. R. Narayana Murthy.

Where it began

Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy was born on 20 August 1946 [1] [28]. Sources differ on where. IIT Kanpur’s alumni office says Sidlaghatta, a small town in what was then Kolar district; Britannica says Kolar; the oral history he recorded in 2018 and the citation for his 2012 Hoover Medal say Mysore city [37] [48] [1] [40]. He calls Mysore his hometown [3].

His father, Rama Rao, was a government high-school teacher who taught English, physics and mathematics and later became an inspector of schools. His mother, Padmavathamma, ran a household of eleven: eight children, the parents and a grandmother [1] [42]. Transfers took the family from Tumkur to Srinivasapur, Mandya and Madhugiri before it settled in Mysore when Murthy was in Class 10 [42].

“We were a lower middle-class family,” he recalled. They could afford neither a newspaper nor a radio. On Sundays his father read Shakespeare and Dickens aloud with a dictionary at hand [1].

He was a strong enough student to win a national scholarship and clear the IIT entrance examination. But the scholarship was paid only at the end of the year, and a hostel would have taken a third of his father’s salary, which Murthy has put at Rs 250 a month [1] [44]. His father told him: “Look, if you are smart, if you work hard, it doesn’t matter where you study. You will do well in your future.” Murthy’s verdict, decades later: “That’s how I did not go to an IIT. But I don’t regret it at all” [1].

He studied electrical engineering in Mysore instead, graduating in 1967, and then went to IIT Kanpur for a master’s degree, which he finished in 1969 [40] [48]. Kanpur had two IBM computers and only 12 students in its graduate computer science course [1]. At breakfast one Sunday in 1968 he listened to a visiting American computer scientist describe where the field was heading. “I was hooked. I went straight from breakfast to the library,” he told graduating students at New York University in 2007 [3].

His first job choice was unusual. TELCO, TISCO and Air India offered him about Rs 1,600 a month. He took Rs 800 at IIM Ahmedabad to become chief systems programmer on an early time-sharing computer, where he also worked on a BASIC interpreter for the state-owned Electronics Corporation of India [39] [1].

In the early 1970s he moved to Paris to work for a software company called SESA, where he helped design an operating system for handling air cargo at Charles de Gaulle airport [1] [48]. He was then a socialist, shaped by “Nehru’s idea of socialism, Nehru’s idea of planning” [45]. Paris wore that down. Watching a prosperous market economy at close range, he concluded that “the only way a society can solve the problem of poverty is through creation of jobs” [1].

Niš finished the argument. By his own account he gave away his Paris earnings and set off overland with US$450 [44]. His figures for the ordeal have varied over the years: 60 hours in a 2000 interview, “over 72 hours” in the cell and 108 hours without food in his 2007 speech, “about 120 hours” in 2018 [44] [3] [1]. The outline is the same in each telling.

The first break

Back in India, he joined a research institute in Pune. In October 1974 a flatmate introduced him to Sudha Kulkarni, a young engineer at TELCO, now Tata Motors [1] [42].

In the mid-1970s he started his first company, Softronics, to write software for Indian businesses. It failed in 1976, in less than a year. There were hardly any computers in India to write software for. “The biggest mistake I committed was not ascertaining the size of the market,” he said later [47] [1] [2].

He took a job as head of software at Patni Computer Systems in Bombay and stayed about four years [1] [2]. Murthy has said that Wipro turned down his job application at some point, and that Azim Premji later told him that not hiring him was one of his biggest mistakes [55].

He and Sudha married on 10 February 1978 at his mother’s house in Bangalore. The ceremony took half an hour and cost Rs 800, which they split equally. Her wedding gift was to tear up the notebook in which she had recorded the Rs 4,200 he had borrowed from her during their courtship. She and the children spell the surname Murty, which she considers closer to the Sanskrit; he has kept Murthy [49].

At Patni he led a team of young programmers, and he had set himself a deadline: “if I did not become an entrepreneur before my 35th year then I would not succeed” [1]. In May 1981 seven of them met in the bedroom of his Bombay apartment and argued for four hours about what the new company should aim to be. Not the biggest, he said, and not the most valuable. “I want this to be the most respected software services company in the world” [43].

The seven were Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, S. Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh, N. S. Raghavan and Ashok Arora [51]. The seed money was Rs 10,000. Sudha Murty has said she had Rs 10,250 saved, kept Rs 250 and gave him the rest. It was a risk, she said, because his earlier venture had failed [52]. Infosys was incorporated in Pune on 2 July 1981, according to its annual report; Murthy himself gives the date as 7 July [4] [7] [1].

Sudha wanted to join. He refused, because he did not want a husband-and-wife company, even though, as he later admitted, she “was much more qualified than all the founders” [53] [52]. In 2024 he went further: “I think what I was doing those days was wrong. I was wrongly idealistic” [54].

The first client, and for years the only one, was Data Basics Corporation of New York [7] [50]. Infosys had no computer of its own, so his six co-founders worked at clients’ sites abroad while Murthy ran things from India, with Sudha helping “as a programmer, as an assistant, as an accountant” [2]. A 2024 biography written with the couple’s cooperation says the client once had Murthy sleep on a box in a storeroom during a visit [53].

Building the empire

The licence raj years

In 1983 the company moved to Bangalore [7]. Then came the licence raj. Permission to import a computer took, by his various tellings, two to three years and as many as fifty trips to Delhi. A telephone line took a year [2] [45] [44]. When customs officers in Bangalore wanted a bribe to release the machine, by the founders’ account, Infosys paid duty of 135% instead and applied for a refund [50]. Officials would say, “Be nice to us and we will be nice to you,” Murthy recalled. “We decided not to succumb,” and approvals were delayed or denied as a result [101].

Banks would not lend to a business with no physical collateral. The loan finally came from a Karnataka state finance corporation after, Murthy says, he happened to sit next to one of its officials on a flight [2] [44]. Once, when a client payment was late, Sudha offered her jewellery as security to raise about Rs 20,000 for salaries [50]. Revenue crawled from Rs 12 lakh in the first year to Rs 8.66 crore in 1991-92 [4]. A side venture into hardware between 1985 and 1987 was sold, and the first overseas office opened in Boston in 1987 [50] [7].

By 1990 the founders had worked for nine years and had little to show for it. An offer came to buy the company for about US$1 million. Five of the seven met one Saturday morning in their Bangalore office and talked for four hours about selling. Murthy said nothing. Then he said that if they were all bent on selling, he would buy out every one of them, “though I did not have a cent in my pocket”. There was, he recalled, “a stunned silence in the room”. An hour later they had agreed to carry on [3]. (Gopalakrishnan dates the offer to 1989 [50].)

Then the rules changed. The 1991 reforms scrapped import licensing, eased foreign-exchange controls and ended government control over the pricing of share issues [45] [2]. “Ever since 1991, there is not a single instance when I went to Delhi for any license for any business of Infosys,” he said in 2001 [45].

The IPO that almost failed

Murthy had run the private company as if it were listed, handing its accounts to any journalist who asked. He wanted a listing mainly to show American clients that Infosys was transparent and financially sound [2].

Infosys went public in February 1993 at Rs 95 a share (a face value of Rs 10 plus a premium of Rs 85), after delays caused by Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the Harshad Mehta scam and the Babri Masjid demolition. It was only the second Indian software company to do so [2] [8] [56]. “Nobody had any idea what a software company was,” Murthy said. “We barely managed it.” The company’s own history says the issue “barely squeezed through, with help from its investment bankers”, and Business Today has reported that Morgan Stanley picked up 13% of the equity [2] [4] [56]. The shares listed in June 1993 at Rs 145. That year Infosys had 750 employees, 25 projects, two offices in India, a sales office in Boston and revenue of about US$5 million [8] [4].

Sharing the wealth

Murthy’s first big decision as head of a listed company was to share its ownership with employees. Infosys started its employee stock plan in 1994, and by March 1999 some 1,747 staff were beneficiaries [5].

By March 2000 he could tell an audience at Wharton that the company had created 219 dollar millionaires and about 2,000 rupee millionaires. He called himself “an unabashed creator of wealth because the power of money is the power to give” [46]. By 2007 he counted more than 2,000 dollar millionaires and 20,000 rupee millionaires among the staff [3]. He later estimated that 19% of the company’s equity, worth about US$9 billion in 2020, had gone to employees through stock options, and described it as one of the world’s largest experiments in the “democratization of wealth” [2].

Walking away from GE

In May 1995 General Electric, a client since 1990 and by then about 25% of Infosys’s revenue, called its Indian software vendors to a Bangalore hotel to renegotiate prices. By Murthy’s account, its team spent two days moving from room to room, negotiating with each vendor in turn, and the others were ready to sign. He declined, and offered to hand the work over smoothly to whichever rival GE chose [2] [3]. “My colleagues were unhappy with me,” he admitted [2].

The scare produced a rule that outlasted his tenure: a risk council to ensure Infosys would “never again depend too much on any one client, technology, country, application area, or key employee” [3]. By 1999 its largest client accounted for 6.4% of revenue and the top five for 28.4% [5].

The model, the campus and the Nasdaq

The business was simple to describe and hard to do. Split a software project into parts, do the client-facing work on site and the rest in India at lower cost, and use the time difference so that work continued almost round the clock. Infosys called it the Global Delivery Model [3]. Murthy’s own definition of globalisation was blunter: “producing where it is most cost-effective and selling where it is most profitable” [46].

To make foreign clients trust that model, Murthy spent heavily on things they could see and audit. In 1992, he said, the company committed 1.5 times its annual revenue to building a campus in Electronic City, Bangalore, where it moved in 1994 [11] [7]. It began reporting under US accounting standards voluntarily in 1995, and in 1999 reached CMM Level 5, the top software-quality rating [2] [7]. His rule for dealing with investors was “when in doubt, disclose”; his rule for promises was to “under promise and over deliver” [12]. His formula for authority inside the company was just as compact: “Performance leads to recognition. Recognition leads to respect. Respect brings power” [101].

On 11 March 1999 Infosys became the first India-registered company to list on a US stock exchange, selling 20.7 lakh American depositary shares on Nasdaq at US$34 each, about US$70 million in all [5] [8]. Murthy called it “a small step for Nasdaq, but a giant leap for Infosys and the Indian software industry”, and years later named that morning as his greatest success [58].

The numbers followed. Revenue passed US$100 million in 1999, US$1 billion in 2004 and US$2 billion in 2006; by 2008 annual net profit alone was above US$1 billion [7]. On 31 July 2006, the day Infosys celebrated its 25th anniversary, he pressed a button at its Mysore campus, one of the largest corporate campuses in the world, to open that day’s trading on Nasdaq remotely [3].

Headcount grew with revenue. Infosys had about 3,150 software professionals in 1999, more than 50,000 employees by 2006 and 1,30,820 by March 2011, when annual revenue reached US$6.04 billion [5] [7] [4]. Along the way it built a banking software product, Finacle, and in 2002 launched a back-office outsourcing arm, Progeon [7]. To mark the silver jubilee, an employee welfare trust distributed Rs 126 crore among all staff [11].

Letting go, in stages

Murthy was chief executive for 21 years. In 2002 he handed the job to Nilekani and took the title of chairman and chief mentor [7] [102]. On 20 August 2006, his 60th birthday, he retired from executive service under the company’s own age rule and stayed on as non-executive chairman [7] [59].

On his 65th birthday in August 2011 he left the board. K. V. Kamath, the former head of ICICI Bank, became the first non-founder chairman [13] [60]. When the board raised the non-executive chairman’s retirement age from 65 to 70, Murthy insisted the change must not cover him: “It should not apply to me, because then we would not be putting the institution above the individual” [60].

The founders had taken turns at the top: Nilekani, then Gopalakrishnan from 2007, then Shibulal from 2011 [7]. It was an orderly relay. By 2013 it was no longer working, a story told in the next section.

The company today

Growth continued under the professionals who followed the founders. Infosys crossed US$10 billion in annual revenue in the year to March 2017 and Rs 1 lakh crore in 2020-21 [6] [7]. For the year to March 2026 it reported revenue of Rs 1,78,650 crore (US$20.16 billion) and net profit of Rs 29,440 crore [10]. Its market value on 30 June 2026 was Rs 4,05,920 crore, and it employs more than 3.25 lakh people, against 750 at the time of the IPO [8] [10] [4]. It remains one of the main engines of India’s US$221 billion software export business.

How the wealth is actually held

Murthy personally owns 1.51 crore Infosys shares, or 0.40% of the company by the stock-exchange filing’s count. Sudha Murty holds 0.92%, Akshata Murty 1.04% and Rohan Murty 1.63%. Together the four hold 14.95 crore shares, just under 4%, and none of it is pledged. All the founders’ families combined hold 13.82% [9]. (The filing’s percentages leave out shares held through American depositary receipts; counted on all shares, each figure is slightly lower.)

At about Rs 1,000 a share, the price implied by the company’s reported market value and share count on 30 June 2026, the four family members’ shares were worth roughly Rs 15,000 crore by our arithmetic, and Murthy’s own about Rs 1,500 crore. On those holdings, the dividends of Rs 48 a share for 2025-26 work out to about Rs 715 crore before tax [9] [8] [10].

The stake shrank by design and by sale. In November 1999 the founder-directors together held about 30% [57]. They issued new shares, shared equity through stock options and sold blocks to fund other things. In 2009-10 Murthy and his wife sold part of their holding to set up a family investment office, Catamaran Ventures, with about Rs 600 crore [92]. In December 2014 four founder families, the Murthys among them, sold shares worth Rs 6,484 crore, saying the money would fund philanthropy and encourage entrepreneurship [91]. The promoters, the Murthy family among them, said they would not tender shares in the company’s Rs 18,000 crore buyback in late 2025 [95].

Catamaran, led by former Infosys executive Deepak Padaki, managed about US$1.3 billion by August 2025, mostly in listed shares, along with private holdings such as SpaceX and the National Stock Exchange [94] [93].

Forbes put Murthy’s net worth at US$3.95 billion in its list of India’s 100 Richest published on 30 September 2026, ranking him No. 78. It noted that the fortunes of India’s software founders had fallen as AI-led automation put pressure on the sector [96]. Forbes does not publish a breakdown. The figure is far larger than his personal Infosys shareholding, which suggests it counts family holdings and assets outside Infosys, such as Catamaran. Hurun’s 2024 India list valued him at Rs 36,600 crore; we could not confirm his entry in Hurun’s 2026 list [97]. Either way, he sits far below peers such as Shiv Nadar and Azim Premji, whose families kept majority control of the companies they built.

The setbacks and failures

The early failures are already in this story: Softronics, the near-sale of 1990, an IPO that barely got subscribed and the loss, by choice, of a client worth a quarter of revenue.

Murthy has also owned up to smaller errors in public. At the 25th anniversary he reminded staff that Infosys had once “erred in investing some of our free cash flows in the secondary market and lost it”, and that he had told 1,500 investors so himself [11].

The largest setback came after he retired. Infosys fell behind TCS and Cognizant; in 2012-13 its revenue grew 5.8% [62] [61]. On 1 June 2013 the board called him back as executive chairman at a salary of Re 1 a year. “This calling was sudden, unexpected, and most unusual. But, then, Infosys is my middle child,” he said [14]. To make it possible, the company raised the retirement age for that executive post from 60 to 75 [61].

The second innings was a partial success. Operating margin rose from 23.6% to 25.5% and revenue growth doubled to 11.5%. But TCS grew 16% and Cognizant 20% in the same year, seven of the 16 members of the executive council left, and all three internal candidates for chief executive departed [62]. He gave up executive duties on 14 June 2014, after the board hired Vishal Sikka from SAP as the first non-founder chief executive, and stayed on as non-executive chairman until that October [64].

He later called that exit a mistake. His co-founders had told him “not to leave Infosys in 2014”, and “I should have listened to them” [58]. He has named two other regrets: keeping Sudha out of the company, and not giving the earliest employees the kind of stock the co-founders received. “Their contribution was more or as much as mine” [54] [57].

Controversies and allegations

The Phaneesh Murthy harassment lawsuits (2002-04)

Allegation: A former employee in the United States sued Infosys and its then head of sales and board member, Phaneesh Murthy (no relation), alleging sexual harassment. A second former employee later filed a similar suit [17] [19].

Response: Phaneesh Murthy resigned on 22 July 2002. Infosys settled the first case on 25 April 2003 for US$3 million, half paid by the company and half by its insurers. Narayana Murthy said the company settled because “the allegations in the lawsuit were serious” and that the executive “did not disclose to the company certain important facts” [17] [18]. Phaneesh Murthy said publicly that settling was not his preferred route and that he had not contributed for that reason. Infosys called his assertions “blatantly false” and said he had signed the settlement voluntarily [18].

What happened next: The second suit was settled in November 2004 for about US$800,000, shared by the insurers and Phaneesh Murthy. Infosys paid nothing [19].

Status: Both cases ended in out-of-court settlements, with no court finding. In the filings and reporting we reviewed, no allegation was made against Narayana Murthy personally.

Deve Gowda, land and the airport (2005)

Allegation: In October 2005 former prime minister H. D. Deve Gowda blamed Murthy, then chairman of Bangalore International Airport Ltd, for delays in the airport project and questioned his contribution. He also accused Infosys of land-grabbing and asked why it needed 845 acres for new facilities [74] [75].

Response: Murthy resigned from the airport company on 20 October 2005, writing to the chief minister that he was “pained” that leaders in the government “did not even clarify my role”. Infosys maintained that it had not received land at a concessional price [74] [75].

What happened next: Chief minister Dharam Singh set up a panel under his deputy to examine the land allegations [74].

Status: In the records and reporting we reviewed, we found no report of Murthy returning to the airport board, no court or regulatory finding against him or Infosys on land, and no published outcome of the 2005 panel.

The national anthem case (2007)

Allegation: On 8 April 2007, when President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam visited the Infosys campus in Mysore, an instrumental version of the national anthem was played although a choir was present. Asked why, Murthy reportedly said many in the audience were foreigners and the company did not want to embarrass them. Two private criminal complaints, in Bangalore and Mysore, accused him of an offence under the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act [20] [21] [76].

Response: Murthy apologised if his remarks had hurt anyone’s sentiments, and asked the Karnataka High Court to quash the complaints [76] [20].

What happened next:

• 14 August 2007: the High Court quashed the Bangalore case, holding that playing a recorded version of the anthem “is not prohibited” and that Murthy “has not shown any dis-respect to the National Anthem” [20].
• 6 February 2008: it quashed the Mysore complaint too, calling the episode “an unintended controversy brought about by a curious press reporter” [21].

Status: Both complaints were quashed. The matter is closed.

The US visa settlement (2011-13)

Allegation: Jay Palmer, an Infosys employee in Alabama, complained to US authorities that the company was using B-1 business-visitor visas for work that required H-1B work visas, and sued it, saying he was sidelined and threatened afterwards; Infosys contested the suit. Federal authorities then alleged that Infosys had used B-1 visa holders for skilled work, misrepresented the purpose of their travel to consular officials, and failed to keep proper I-9 employment records in 2010 and 2011 [77] [22].

Response: Infosys said it “denies and disputes any claims of systemic visa fraud” and that there were “no criminal charges or court rulings against the Company” [23].

What happened next:

• 20 August 2012: a federal judge dismissed Palmer’s suit under Alabama law, while calling the alleged threats “deeply troubling” [77].
• 30 October 2013: Infosys paid US$34 million in a civil settlement, which the US Attorney’s office said “represents the largest payment ever levied in an immigration case” [22]. The years under investigation fell at the end of Murthy’s time as non-executive chairman; the settlement came five months after his return.

Status: Closed by civil settlement, with no criminal charges. Infosys denied fraud.

The comeback and his son’s role (2013-14)

Allegation: When Murthy returned in June 2013 he brought his son Rohan, who holds a PhD in computer science, as his executive assistant. Governance adviser Shriram Subramanian said the move discarded the company’s earlier principles on retirement age and on hiring founders’ family members [61] [63].

Response: Murthy said Rohan’s only role was “to make me more effective”, that he would draw a salary of one rupee, and that “I do not think that there was any issue of violation of corporate governance” [61] [63].

Status: On 14 June 2014 Rohan left the company, Murthy gave up executive duties and the chairman’s office was dissolved [64]. No regulator was involved. In 2022 Murthy said of his old rule against founders’ children: “I was completely wrong” [100].

The battle with the board (2017)

Allegation: From early 2017 Murthy publicly accused the Infosys board, then chaired by R. Seshasayee, of governance failures. His targets were a severance of about Rs 17.4 crore agreed for former chief financial officer Rajiv Bansal, which he called “excessive” and a sign of a “total lack of fiduciary responsibility”; a steep rise in Sikka’s pay; and questions raised by anonymous whistleblower letters about the US$200 million purchase of the Israeli firm Panaya [65] [69] [68] [25].

The board made an allegation of its own. When Sikka resigned on 18 August 2017, citing “baseless and malicious” attacks that had become “extremely personal”, it said Murthy’s “continuous assault” was “the primary reason” and accused him of a “misguided campaign” [66] [67].

Response: Murthy said he was “extremely anguished by the allegations, tone and tenor of the statements” and was “not seeking any money, position for children or power” [66]. In February 2017 Seshasayee had accepted that the founders’ concerns about the severance were valid, while defending it as a business judgement [65]. An investigation by the law firm Gibson Dunn and the consultancy Control Risks into the whistleblower complaints “did not find any evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing” [24]. IiAS, a firm that advises investors on shareholder votes, faulted the board too, but wrote that in “constantly belittling the board” Murthy had not been statesmanlike [70].

What happened next:

• 24 August 2017: Nilekani returned as non-executive chairman. Seshasayee, Sikka and two other directors left the board [68].
• 24 October 2017: the new board said there was “no merit to the allegations of wrongdoing” in the Panaya deal and declined to publish the full report. Murthy replied: “I am disappointed” [71] [72].
• April 2018: Infosys put Panaya up for sale and booked an impairment of Rs 118 crore on it [73].
• September 2018: an arbitral tribunal ordered Infosys, which had paid Rs 5.2 crore before stopping payment, to pay Bansal the outstanding Rs 12.17 crore, with interest [25].
• February 2019: Infosys settled SEBI proceedings over the severance agreement by paying Rs 34.35 lakh, without admitting the findings [26].

Status: Closed. No investigation found wrongdoing in the acquisition. The severance agreement, one of Murthy’s main complaints, ended in an arbitration loss and a regulatory settlement for the company. Whether he protected Infosys’s standards or destabilised its management is still argued.

Catamaran, Amazon and Cloudtail (2014-22)

Allegation: Catamaran was Amazon’s Indian partner in a joint venture whose subsidiary, Cloudtail, became one of the largest sellers on Amazon.in. In February 2021 a Reuters investigation based on internal Amazon documents reported that Amazon had for years given preferential treatment to a small group of sellers, including Cloudtail, and used them to get around India’s foreign-investment rules for e-commerce. Separately, The Guardian reported in June 2021 that the Directorate General of GST Intelligence had issued Cloudtail a show-cause notice for Rs 5,455 lakh (Rs 54.55 crore), plus interest and penalties, over service tax [78] [80] [79].

Response: Amazon said the report was based on “unsubstantiated, incomplete, and/or factually incorrect information” and that it “remains compliant with all Indian laws” [78]. A spokesperson for Catamaran said “Cloudtail has not violated any law” and called the allegations “baseless and incorrect”. Cloudtail said it was contesting the tax notice [79].

What happened next:

• August 2021: Amazon and Catamaran said they would not extend the venture beyond 19 May 2022 [80].
• March 2022: the Competition Commission of India cleared Amazon’s purchase of Catamaran’s stake [81].
• August-September 2024: investigation reports of the regulator, reviewed by Reuters and not a final order, concluded that Amazon and Flipkart had breached competition law by favouring select sellers. The reporting we read did not name the sellers. In January 2025 the Supreme Court sent the sellers’ legal challenges to the Karnataka High Court [82] [83].

Status: The venture has ended. The findings reported so far are directed at Amazon and Flipkart; we found no order or finding against Catamaran, Cloudtail or Murthy personally. In the reporting we reviewed up to 8 October 2026, neither the competition case nor the Cloudtail tax notice had a published final outcome.

The 70-hour week (2023-25)

Allegation: In October 2023, on a podcast with Mohandas Pai, Murthy said India must improve its work productivity and that “our youngsters must say ‘This is my country. I would like to work 70 hours a week’”. Doctors warned that such hours raise the risk of heart disease and stress. Some business leaders, such as Ronnie Screwvala, disagreed; others, such as Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal and JSW’s Sajjan Jindal, supported him [84] [85].

Response: He did not retreat. “I am sorry, I have not changed my view. I will take this with me to my grave,” he said in November 2024 [86]. In January 2025 he said he had himself worked from 6.30 am to 8.30 pm for 40 years, but that these were matters for individuals to “introspect on” [87]. In November 2025 he cited China’s “9, 9, 6” culture of 72-hour weeks [88].

Status: A public debate, not a legal matter.

The Karnataka caste survey (2025)

Allegation: In October 2025 Murthy and Sudha Murty declined to take part in Karnataka’s Social and Educational Survey, widely called the caste survey. The form they returned cited “personal reasons”, and Sudha Murty added in writing that the family did not belong to a backward community. Chief minister Siddaramaiah said they had misunderstood the exercise: “This is not a backward classes survey.” He added: “Just because they are Infosys, are they all-knowing?” [89] [90]

Response: We found no public reply from the couple to the chief minister in the reporting we reviewed.

Status: Participation was voluntary under the survey commission’s notice and an interim order of the Karnataka High Court, so the refusal carried no legal consequence [89] [90].

As of 8 October 2026, in the court records, regulatory orders and reporting we reviewed, there is no conviction or regulatory penalty against Narayana Murthy personally.

Giving back

Most of the giving linked to Murthy’s name runs through institutions. The Infosys Foundation, set up in 1996 and chaired by Sudha Murty until December 2021, works in education, healthcare, rural development and the arts [7] [32]. In 2025-26 it reported 217 projects reaching about 71.6 lakh people [33]. Its projects include a 350-bed block at Bengaluru’s Jayadeva heart hospital, built for Rs 103 crore [34].

In 2009 Infosys and its board members set up the Infosys Science Foundation with a corpus of Rs 21.5 crore, to reward research [30]. The Infosys Prize is now worth US$100,000 in each of six fields, and Murthy remains a trustee [31].

The family’s own gifts are harder to count, because he rarely discusses them. “You don’t do charity for publicity,” he told the Associated Press in 2006 [59]. Those on record include a Rs 10 crore endowment in 2003 for a research foundation in IIT Kanpur’s computer science department, and the US$5.2 million the Murty family gave Harvard University Press in 2010 to create the Murty Classical Library of India, which publishes Indian classics in translation [38] [37] [35]. After the 2014 share sale he said he intended “to devote the rest of my life to philanthropy” [91].

He has also given time. He chaired the SEBI committee on corporate governance whose 2003 recommendations rewrote Clause 49, the listing rule on audit committees, whistleblower policies and disclosures [27]. He chaired IIM Ahmedabad’s board from 2002 to 2007 [39]. He has served the Ford Foundation, the UN Foundation and Cornell University as a trustee or councillor [41] [16].

The honours include the Padma Shri (2000), the Padma Vibhushan (2008), an honorary CBE from Britain (2007), France’s Legion of Honour (2008), the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year award (2003) and a place on Fortune’s 2012 list of the 12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time [28] [29] [41] [102] [103].

His personal style is part of his public image. Lee Kuan Yew, launching Murthy’s book in Singapore in 2009, said he “leads a simple life”, with “a 3-bedroom house” and “a 1.5 litre Opel Astra” [36]. His best-known lines: “The softest pillow is a clear conscience”; “in God we trust, everybody else brings data to the table”; “when in doubt, disclose” [101] [12].

Succession

Infosys has no dynasty, and that is deliberate. Since 2014 its chief executives have been professionals, not founders. Salil Parekh has led the company since January 2018, and in July 2026 the board named Ashiss Kumar Dash, an Infosys veteran of three decades, to take over on 1 April 2027 [7] [15] [104]. Nilekani, the chairman, has called himself the last of the “jokers”, his word for the founders, and says he will hand over to a non-founder [100].

Murthy has had no executive or board role since 2014. “I am just a shareholder in Infosys. I have not been consulted on any issue in Infosys since August 2017,” he said in 2024 [54]. Asked whether Rohan, now the family’s largest shareholder, would ever seek a position, he replied that Rohan is stricter about such things than he is and “will never say this” [54] [9].

The family’s money is managed by professionals at Catamaran [94]. Sudha Murty was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in March 2024 [98]. When Akshata’s husband, Rishi Sunak, became Britain’s prime minister in 2022, Murthy’s statement was brief: “We are proud of him and we wish him success” [99].

Murthy turned 80 on 20 August 2026, to tributes that included Congress leader Jairam Ramesh calling him “a living legend” [105]. In February 2026 he argued that AI will change the nature of software jobs rather than wipe them out [106].

What their journey teaches

Pick a goal that money cannot fake. In 1981 Murthy rejected “biggest” and “most valuable” and chose “most respected”. The US accounting, the refusal to pay bribes and the habit of disclosing bad news early are all consistent with that choice [43] [12].

Measure the market before you build the product. Softronics failed in under a year because India had almost no computers. Infosys worked because he had studied where the demand was: abroad [47] [2].

Turn down the deal that makes you dependent. He refused US$1 million for the whole company in 1990 and walked away from 25% of revenue in 1995. Both looked reckless at the time [3].

Share ownership early, and widely. Stock options turned thousands of employees into millionaires and tied their fortunes to the company’s. His own regret is that he did not go further with the first hires [46] [57].

The rules you write will be tested on you. He retired at 60 and 65 as his own rules required, kept his wife out and barred founders’ children. Then he came back at 66 with his son beside him, and later called two of those rules mistakes.

Leaving is a skill. The 2017 fight showed how hard it is for a founder to become just a shareholder. The chairman of the day accepted that his questions about the severance were valid. The public fight still ended with a chief executive resigning and the board blaming Murthy, a charge he rejected.

A schoolteacher’s son who could not afford to take up his IIT seat built a company that made Indian software believable to the world, and shared its ownership far more widely than most founders do. By his own admission he was sometimes wrong, and his critics say he was slow to let go. Both halves belong in the story.

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 8 October 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.

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