Mr. Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy (1946- ), co-founder of Infosys, is an iconic business leader who was instrumental in forging India’s growth momentum in the Information & Technology (IT) sector.

Mr. Murthy was born on 20 August, 1946 in Sidlaghatta (in present-day Karnataka). He studied Electrical Engineering at the National Institute of Engineering in 1967. In 1969, he got a Master’s degree from IIT Kanpur. Straight after that, he declined a lucrative job to take up a challenging assignment as Chief Systems Programmer for a few years in the Computer Centre of IIMA that had got India’s first time-sharing computing system under the aegis of Prof. J Krishnayya. After experimenting with different jobs, he co-founded Infosys in 1981 and oversaw its dramatic rise over the next three decades. He stepped down as the Chairman of Infosys in 2006 and retired fully from the company in 2011. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2000 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2008. Currently, he runs Catamaran, a venture capital firm. His wife, Sudha Murthy, also a computer scientist, is a famous author in English and Kannada.

In 2002, Mr. Murthy returned to the place he started out as a young researcher - IIMA, after thirty years, as the Chairperson of the Board of Governors. He defended IIMA’s functional and financial autonomy during his tenure which witnessed confrontations with the government over several matters.