Rohini Nilekani at 2026 Indiaspora Forum

TRANSCRIPT:

Namaste everyone, how are you? Good. I know you had a good meal and like Shweta said, those of you who want to take a small nap, well, I’m going to challenge you because I know who’s on the panel after me and I think they’re going to win by keeping you awake and the lazy summer of Bangalore is going to lose. So let’s see what happens.

You know, first of all, I do want to thank India Spada for having me here, Sanjeev, MR, everyone behind this very amazing organisation that has been working so tirelessly for so many years to connect the diaspora of India from all around the world with a continuing epic saga of this marvellous country. So thank you India Spada and I know how impactful you all have become and the people in this room are telling me so so yay to India Spada, we can all give them a hand.

So I read the news today, not a good idea anymore. I think many of you might have read the news as well. The world seems to have gone quite crazy and it’s not just March Madness. It’s been horrifying now for quite a while and there’s no point in disregarding or denying what is going on and you know, I feel like sometimes around me I see a lot of people just not knowing what to do and you can’t blame people for feeling hapless, helpless and hopeless because especially young people when they are hearing bombs and rockets and missiles being thrown around so recklessly in so many parts of the world, I think they might be hearing that as a pop of their own dreams bursting and we have to feel for that and try to prevent those dreams from bursting in whichever things that we can do. But that’s not what I’m going to talk to you about.

Obviously, I think we can absolutely refuse to be cowed down by fear and for me the best way I have found to do that is to open my heart as wide as I can and I find that when I manage to do that, it’s not always that I succeed, but when I do manage to do that, not only can I heal my own wounds and light up my own dark corners, but I find in myself then, once my heart is open, I find the courage to expand my work for others who are actively working on healing and I truly believe, I truly believe that right now in this darkness there is a perfect moment for us all to open our hearts. It’s a heart-opening opportunity for us all and when we look back, I hope at some point what I said today will resonate, if not in the next few weeks, at least in the next few years. So for example, when we talk about climate change and the effects of climate change become so much clearer every day, just think how much work that is ahead to heal ourselves first by healing this planet of ours, this home of ours, in so many kinds of ways and then remember all the organisations and individuals and institutions that are already hard at work doing this repair, doing this reconstruction, doing this restoration effort all over the globe.

So my question to us all today is can we open our hearts to them? Many of them are in this room, in fact, you should find them and talk to them later. So a friend told me, imagine actually all eight billion of us here on this planet, all of us human beings actually have one common goal and that is to heal our home. Now imagine if all of us saw this as our collective and joyful responsibility, then we would not only heal ourselves, we would also heal so many other living creatures alongside us and we would secure the future of those yet unborn. So imagine the magic that could happen if everyone would open up their hearts and minds with such a possibility and then my friend told me that I actually began to see this eight billion sort of sort of organism that is all in their own way trying to do something to give ourselves a decent chance in this century.

So all of you after a nice lunch must be thinking this woman is too idealistic by far. Well, maybe you think wrong because right here, right now, right here in India, there is tremendous amount of innovation, tremendous amount of effort underway for mitigation, adaptation, resilience and much more. And through my philanthropy, I work on many issues like Shweta was kind enough to point out from education and justice, to active citizenship and mental health. Together with my husband Nandan at EKSTEP, our very talented teams are helping to build digital public infrastructure to increase the equity of opportunity for all. We are deploying newly and excitingly AI in education, in agriculture, in livelihood creation. At the Centre for Exponential Change with multiple global funders, we plan to take the work of hundred social entrepreneurs to very serious scale across five countries in the global South. It’s all very inspiring and very satisfying work that we all love to do. But for me, environment and climate are my biggest investments and I feel very privileged and very lucky to have supported more than a hundred organisations, amazing organisations, amazing model leaders who are working on environmental issues across the length and breadth of this country. And I would say to you all, if those of you who are not familiar with this work, there’s very creative work going on to reduce human-animal conflict for ecological restoration. There’s a whole ecological restoration alliance building up with different models of restoration and different topographies. There’s a lot of work on agroecology, on disaster mapping, rapid response.

We recently produced a report together with Dalberg on disaster resilience and, you know, it’s important to note that 85% of the districts of India had some disaster related event in the year in which the research was carried out in 2023. There’s a lot of work to do there and there’s a lot of innovation happening there. Disaster wallets, parametric insurance, there’s so much innovation and it’s all being tried out as we speak. We know of all our conservation success in India. For example, everyone knows how we’ve brought our tigers back from the brink. We know that people are working on distributed renewable energy, on nature-based solutions, heat action plans, flood mitigation. We are using information technology and biotechnology being brought into play now for waste and water management, for example, for remote sensing and for ground truthing.

Our extremely talented filmmakers, many of whom I’m so happy to support, are creating heartwarming documentaries of the incredible biodiversity in our country. They are winning international awards. I could just go on and on and on about the kind of work that is happening in this space. It’s not only Samaaj institutions, but also the Bazaar and Sarkar that have become seriously invested in making our country’s future more sustainable. I always believe that for us our biodiversity is actually a national strategic investment and we will actually be protected from the shocks of the world and the way the world is heading now if you would invest much more in keeping the unique biodiversity that India has. Because it is the future of our food, the future of our forests, the future of our water, and the future of our medicines and health as well. So there are a lot of people looking at new pathways, but the old ones may not work, to make this country’s future more sustainable. And I’m so happy to partner with some of them.

So I want to say to this room that there are truly exciting, scalable, investable opportunities for anyone who wants to open up not only their hearts, but also their minds and hopefully their wallets to all this work, which is happening on the ground. For many of you from the Indian diaspora, you all have traditionally, I have seen from reports and analyses, that you have been very invested in education and in health and in livelihood, which are very, very critical. But my offering to you is that whether you’re working in any sector at all, there are inevitable climate adjacencies right now in each of those sectors. And that we need, for example, we will need to understand poor school attendance today. Why are some children again falling back from school? To do that, we probably have to do heat mapping in those areas. If you have to understand why there is loss of income in the summer, we’ll again have to look at the heat maps and to see what is going on with people’s health in summer. So work on healing our planetary ecosystem and driving a much smarter future is, I think, of interest to everybody in this room and outside. And to me, it is an area of work that can bring us all together with urgency and with hope.

And to me, and I say this very often in public, so those of you who have heard me before, do please forgive me. But for me, really, hope is my new religion. And it is, I do believe, the one religion that can unite people and not divide them and polarise them across the lines of their religion. So I ask this room today, even while we are reading the news, can we all recharge the aquifers of our collective current despair? With the wellsprings of hope. And I would say to you that hope, I do not see as empty optimism. Nor do I see hope as a romance. Not at all. For me, hope is not a denial of reality, so much as it is a fuel for action. It is because of my hope that I get up every day and do the things that I do. For me, it is the opposite of lazy cynicism. And that’s what allows people to just sit back and say, oh, nothing is going to change at all. So for me, hope is that positive energy that propels right action, which allows us to see abundance where other people see only scarcity, which inspires us to make the change that we want to see in the world. It gives me the energy, personally, to do small things, which may not make a big difference, but make a small thing, small difference. But it moves me out of stasis. It moves me out of inaction. It moves me out of despair. So I do believe that if we practise hope together, we can strengthen a societal muscle to build the future that we want. No matter what anybody tells us, the future is not yet written.

We all will have to create it together. And in this room of about, I guess, 300 people or so, I know that we all have two things in common for sure. One is we all have extraordinary privilege. There are still 300 million people outside who would love to be able to be part of this room. And whether we live in India or we live abroad in so many of the countries that I was told the Indian diaspora comes from over here, we all have extraordinary privilege that we have to be very grateful for at all times. And the second thing I know for sure that we all have in common is that all of us want to use their privilege so that this beloved country can meet its twisted destiny. And I know that all of you, many of you, already do so much. But I also know that we are all painfully aware that we all need to do much more.

So luckily, there are so many opportunities for us to do so here in India, working together with India’s thriving, highly committed civil society institutions of the Samaj. So many, as I said, I met right here in this room today. And if not, if you are more of a kind of a person who prefers to work with the bazaar, India’s hundred thousand startups give us enough opportunity because they are working in some very unique areas like energy. And if not, you can work with the state or the union governments of the Sarkar to deepen agency, dignity, and choice for our 1.4 million Bharatiya citizens.

That I see as the joyful responsibility before us. And it’s wonderful when I see that I met so many people today, I can feel the energy in this room to adopt this joyful responsibility. Together, I think we can do so much more. And I’ll just say I hope we can all do it in good faith and with fellow feeling for all. All those good values, old ideas, just the belief in human goodness. We should not get cynical about it at all. Never has change happened if not when people began to believe in humanity and the good that human beings can do for each other and for the planet.

So I’ll just end by saying let’s snatch back the wings of hope from the abyss of despair that we can feel sometimes in moments like today’s. But I truly believe that better times will come and it is definitely up to us. So don’t look away. Look straight into the eye of things and most importantly let hope give you the fuel and the energy to keep working for the much better world. Nanyavada and Namaste to all.