Calling himself “wrongly idealistic”, Murthy said in an interview with CNBC-TV18 that his wife was “more, or as qualified as” the seven engineers (including himself) who helped establish Infosys, creating one of the earliest successful startups in India after liberalisation.
Meanwhile, Murthy also said that Rohan Murty, his second child, is stricter than him and he would “never say that” he wants to join Infosys.
“First of all, I am just a shareholder and I have not been consulted on any issue in Infosys since August 4-5, 2017, when Nandan took over. Not once. It’s the right thing, he’s doing the way we all did. Apart from being the largest family shareholders of Infosys, we have nothing to do with Infosys…that’s the reality,” he said.
In December 2022, Murthy had said in response to an ET query that he was “completely wrong” in not allowing the next generation of the promoter-founder families to take up active roles in the now Bengaluru-headquartered tech giant.
“I had this feeling that good corporate governance means not bringing in family into it (same firm), because those days it was only family rule…children (of business owners) used to come and run the companies, there used to be violation of all laws,” Murthy said in the latest interview to the channel.
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However, his opinion changed a few years ago after a long discussion with two professors of philosophy from renowned universities.“They told me as long as a person has merit and goes through the normal procedure, you have no right to prevent that person from being part of the thing (company), that way you are taking away some of the rights,” he said.
Infosys was set up by Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, S Gopalakrishnan, SD Shibulal, K Dinesh, NS Raghavan and Ashok Arora. The company started operations from Pune in 1981.
As one of Infosys’ first investors, Sudha Murty provided the initial seed funding of Rs 10,000 for what is now an $18-billion software services business.
