Ramalinga Raju

Byrraju Ramalinga Raju (born 16 September 1954) is an Indian businessman.

Ramalinga Raju, the eldest of four children, was born on 16 September 1954.

He earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Andhra Loyola College at Vijayawada and subsequently earned an MBA from Ohio University in the United States.

After returning to India in 1977, Raju married at the age of twenty two.

He ventured into many businesses including Dhanunjaya Hotels; and a cotton spinning mill named Sri Satyam Spinning, funded by Andhra Pradesh Industrial Development Corporation (APIDC), with an investment of ₹ 9 crore (worth almost $7 million in 1983 prices).

As the businesses failed Raju moved into real estate and started a construction company named Maytas Infra Limited.

Ramalinga Raju is married to Nandini and the couple had two children Teja Raju, and Rama Raju.

Teja Raju is married to Divya, a Bharatanatyam dancer, while Rama Raju married Sandhya Raju, the daughter of P. R. Venkatarama Raju, managing director of Ramco Cements.

He is the founder of Satyam Computer Services and served as its chairman and CEO from 1987 until 2009.

Raju stepped down following his admission to embezzlement from the company to the tune of ₹7,136 crores (approximately US$1.5 billion), including ₹5040 crores (approximately US$1 billion) of non-existent cash and bank balances.

In 1987, Raju incubated Satyam Computer Services along with one of his brothers-in-law, DVS Raju at P&T colony in Secunderabad and 20 employees.

Raju was enrolled in the Owner/President Management (OPM) program at Harvard Business School in the 1990s.

In 1991, Satyam won its first fortune 500 client – John Deere.

Raju navigated Indian bureaucracy to obtain the required clearance to transmit data from India.

The company went public in 1992.

In September 1995, as Raju was building Satyam, Andhra Pradesh had a new Chief Minister, Chandra Babu Naidu, who wanted to bring in change.

Naidu saw IT as a strategic industry to focus on and Raju became instrumental in shaping the state's information technology initiatives like 'Mee Kosam' ("For you" in Telugu).

Raju had unfettered access to the chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh at a very personal level.

Research into his life has exposed close links between business and politics.

In an interview with Deccan Chronicle way back in 1998, Raju was talking about Satyam's ambition of operating out of 50 countries with an employee count of more than 50,000.

In 1999, Raju launched Satyam Infoway (Sify) as Satyam's internet subsidiary, thereby becoming an early participant in the Indian internet service market.

Sify was later sold to Raju Vegesna.

The major philanthropic foundations he has founded and grown to large scale between 2000 and 2008 are:

Byrraju Foundation:

The Byrraju Foundation, a family run philanthropic organization, was started in July 2001 by him and his 2 brothers in the memory of his father Late Byrraju Satyanarayana Raju.

The Foundation adopted 200 villages in 6 districts of Andhra Pradesh namely East Godavari, West Godavari, Krishna, Guntur, Ranga Reddy and Visakhapatnam.

The foundation built progressive self-reliant rural communities by adopting a holistic approach.

It provided 40 different programs like healthcare, environment improvement, sanitation, primary education, adult literacy and skills development ., GramIT etc. which impacted over 3 million people.

Some significant achievements of the foundation are: Over 7 million patient visits, 53,250 persons made literate, 89,000 toilets built in rural homes, Livelihood skill training and certification for over 26,000 unemployed rural youth, setting up 61 drinking water plants and 4 GramIT Centres which employed 500 rural youth.

Currently, after the Satyam episode, the foundation has 117 adopted villages where it runs 110 health centers with the help of CARE foundation and operates 18 water plants.

The local people across the region hail the development works undertaken by the Byrraju Foundation and are appreciative of the positive impact it had on them.

Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI 108):

Raju also set up a state of the art and first of its kind 24X7 emergency service named Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI 108) in August 2005.

It was modelled after the 911 service in America and had an aim of giving citizens in an emergency the benefit of getting timely attention and support.

This was done by providing a single toll-free number accessible from mobile and land line.

Recently Forbs magazine has published an Article about the "Emergency Management System in US".

Initially started with just 75 ambulances, EMRI has currently expanded to 10,697 ambulances covering 15 states and 2 union territories, serving over 26,710 emergencies per day, covering a population of 75 Crores (increasing reach of health care in rural, hilly & tribal areas). EMRI has more than 45,000 employees on its rolls.

Till date 4.7 crore beneficiaries have availed these services, 4.38 lakh deliveries were assisted, and 18.56 lakh lives were saved since inception.

All the call-centre activities and support activities for emergency handling were automated.

In 2015, he was convicted of corporate fraud, which led to the collapse of Satyam Computers.