When we help others, we help ourselves. It is a win-win described for samaaj by good science
Just five minutes a day of contemplative practices to improve mindfulness, connection, insight and purpose have been scientifically proven to create positive changes in the brain’s chemistry. Compassion training has demonstrably shown reduced implicit bias towards people you knowingly or unknowingly dislike. Meditating monks have zero anticipatory anxiety and a quick recovery from an experiment of planned exposure to extreme heat. Pregnant women who practise awareness in the second trimester can give their children a health advantage that lasts for years.
These and other scientific data were included in a talk by neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who has spent years studying the brains of Buddhist monks. His advice to Indians? You have rituals and practices already deeply embedded in your society that you can conserve and enhance in order to flourish. Davidson was speaking at the second edition of the National Mental Health Festival, called Manotsava (a celebration of the mind) in Bengaluru, co-created by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, the National Centre for Biological Sciences and my foundation, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. There is no other festival like this, at this scale, anywhere in the world, though there is an urgent need to have one in every state in India, if not every district.
According to the pre-pandemic National Mental Health Survey 2015–16, 150 million people in India need mental health interventions, yet the treatment gap ranges between 70 per cent and 92 per cent, with the gap for common mental disorders that are easily prevented or treated remaining at 85 per cent. The goal of Manotsava is to flip the existing model and associate mental health with wellness, not just disease, and bring science and society closer. Manotsava was free and open to the public, catering to people of all ages, from young children to senior citizens. The curation was selected from more than 700 responses to a request for proposals and had extremely diverse offerings. There was a solid science track, including a stall of the Centre for Brain and Mind with brain models, genetic testing and other methodologies to discover mental illness. There were sessions on digital distractions and addictions, gender discrimination and problems with marital intimacy, workplace stress, parenting, and ageing. Alongside a development track for NGOs, there was a philanthropy lunch to invite investment in this neglected area of public health.
One workshop titled “Living after the storm: A toolkit for adult survivors of sexual abuse” was deluged by people who had not found any such safe space before. There were psychiatrists and counsellors to answer questions and help people who might get triggered by discussions that evoke painful memories. Kaz De Jong, of Doctors Without Borders, a network of volunteers present in some of the most difficult areas of the world, spoke of trauma and conflict, of people who had lost their entire families in regional wars, had witnessed daily disease and suffering, and yet were able to leave their loss behind and focus on helping other people. In any situation, he said, there are always some things that still work, and hope is a powerful antidote to despair and helplessness. The government’s helpline Tele MANAS has received 25 lakh calls since its inception in 2022, and nearly 40,000 of those were for suicidal thoughts. The overwhelming response from the general public surfaced a deep latent demand to understand issues of mental health and wellness.
One of the most potent sessions was called “Deewanagi: My Tryst with Madness”, a title chosen by the panellists. Three people openly and bravely shared their personal journey with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. All of them thanked their doctors, but expressed even greater gratitude to family and friends. Mental health discourse and practice currently focus more on intra-psychic aspects, and not enough on relational methods and the importance of family and community. Most of the work is between the patient and the doctor. Yet there is increasing evidence to show that when a whole community finds the inner resources to help a troubled mind in its midst, it develops its own resilience and a pathway to overall well-being. When we help others, we help ourselves.
It is a win-win described for samaaj by good science. That should be reason enough for Indian philanthropy to help create many more Manotsavas around the country.
By Natasha Joshi, Chief Strategy Officer, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies
Last year, we at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies interviewed 14 social sector leaders and funders to inquire what they thought were the biggest issues in society today, and what role philanthropy could play in addressing them.
It was no surprise that mental health, absence of climate resilience, urban infrastructure strain, rural distress, and unemployment-induced crime came out on top.
The group also evaluated India’s funding landscape and arrived at some interesting observations. First, even though individual and family wealth has multiplied in India, it has not led to a proportionate increase in giving. And second, which might explain the first, was a frustration with donors wanting to draw straight lines between the money they have given and benefit accrued on the ground. This, our respondents said, has led to a standardisation and over-quantification of complex human work. The final point of feedback was that donors have started confusing numerical scale for social change.
These three reflections led to one insight: Social change needs activism, but we have gotten stuck with ‘datavism’, that is, a push to define all outcomes of social programmes in quantifiable, visible ways.
This shift is regrettable. Given the limits of data, an over-reliance on it to make sense of social programmes leaves us neither here nor there. Unlike bazaar, we cannot drive nor measure outcomes because the incentives, feedback loops, mandates, as well as a singular focus on the bottom line (that makes market action possible) is missing here. And we do not have the writ or budgets like sarkar to make social programmes work at scale universally.
Pushing nonprofits to express the value and power of social programmes in bazaar or sarkar terms just results in the sector losing its true merit which has always been samaaj-driven work—work that puts values, relationality, and care at its centre.
Philosopher and professor C Thi Nguyen puts it perfectly when he writes, “These limitations [of data collection and the content of big datasets] are particularly worrisome when we’re thinking about success—about targets, goals, and outcomes. When actions must be justified in the language of data, then the limitations inherent in data collection become limitations on human values.”
What data does not tell us
The word ‘data’ was first used in 1946 to mean transmissible and storable computer information. Today, the word has become analogous with information and, by extension, understanding. This is obviously problematic.
Data does not equal understanding, which is a deep human capacity that goes beyond articulation. We often understand, even when we cannot explain.
There is no such thing as clean and unbiased data when it comes to social programmes.
Data, information, and knowledge are not the same. Data is information a computer can process. It is a specific rendition of reality, but it is precisely that: arendition. Not the whole, and often not even accurate. Still, data-backed policies, data informed curriculums, and so on are seen as the gold standard for decision-making.
Data is limited in many ways, including how it is collected, by whom, and for whom. There is no such thing as clean and unbiased data when it comes to social programmes. The objective use of data is also rare, because who uses it and for what is again a question of incentives, power dynamics, and prior experiences.
A friend who works at a think tank once remarked, “In the West, they talk of data-backed policymaking. In India, we do policy-backed data-making.”
When source and application are both compromised, why has datavism taken over in the field of development? One obvious reason is that market economics is the dominant method for valuing goods and services. So, the same method is being deployed to ascertain value in the social realm. All the while, care is confounding, because it violates a lot of economic principles, including the assumption that people always pursue their self-interest over others.
But what do we stand to lose when we privilege data science over human understanding?
C Thi Nguyen explains this through ‘value capture’. It is the process by which “our deepest values get captured by institutional metrics and then become diluted or twisted as a result. Academics aim at citation rates instead of real understanding; journalists aim for numbers of clicks instead of newsworthiness. In value capture, we outsource our values to large-scale institutions. Then all these impersonal, decontextualizing, de-expertizing filters get imported into our core values. And once we internalize those impersonalized values as our own, we won’t even notice what we’re overlooking.”
One such thing being overlooked is care.
Interpersonal caregiving makes no sense from a market lens. The person with power and resources voluntarily expends them to further another person’s well-being and goals. The whole idea of care is oceanic and hard to wrap one’s head around. ‘Head’ being the operative word, because we are trying to understand care with our brains, when it really exists in our bodies and is often performed by our bodies.
Data tools have only inferior ways of measuring care, and by extension designing spaces and society for it.
Outside of specific, entangled relationships of care, humans also have an amorphous ability to feel that they are part of a larger whole. We are affiliated to humanity, the planet, and indeed the universe, and feel it in our bones rather than know it to be true in any objective way.
We see micro-entrepreneurs, inventors, climate stewards, and scores of people, both rich and poor, across circumstances who engage in collective care to make the world a better place. This kind of pro-sociality doesn’t always show in ways that is tangible or immediate or measurable.
Datavism, which we seem to have learned from bazaar, has convinced capital allocators that the impact of social programmes can and should be expressed arithmetically. And, based on those calculations, acts of care can be deemed successful or unsuccessful.
What datavism misses
Datavism tends to favour marginal improvements in measurable outcomes at the expense of social costs, because the former is easy to assess in the short run, while the latter only shows up over time.
With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), we risk seeing a proliferation of what economist Daren Acemoglu calls ‘so-so technologies’: technological advances that disrupt employment and displace workers without generating much of a boost in productivity or quality of service. Think self-checkout kiosks at grocery stores or automated customer service over the phone.
Datavism reduces the creative potential of technology as well. This is explained by author Lata Mani in The Integral Nature of Things: Critical Reflections on the Present. By seeing technology only as a tool, datavism ignores the fact that technology “reorganises perceptions and generates its own longings”, and becomes part of the social process instead of just a mediator.
Technology is now being applied to almost every programme in the philanthropic sector, but questions of whether and how it enables relationships of care are mostly absent.
If technology is truly meant to serve us, then putting care in the mix feels non-negotiable.
To do this, we must stop treating emotion as the enemy of objectivity. As we ride the limitless curve of technological change, everyone is occupied with what tomorrow holds. But leading futurists will tell you that getting in touch with one’s emotions and desires best predicts our interaction with whatever the future holds. In Imaginable, Jane McGonigal describes it as getting one’s mind unstuck, which means practising hard empathy as a way of understanding human wants.
Data can have diminishing returns on understanding
The question isn’t whether data helps us make sense. Of course, it does. The real question is whether our sensing tools fit the environments we’re trying to understand.
If understanding is your goal, data works better when the problem statement is narrow, and the environment is simple and controlled.
As the environment becomes more complex, the link between data and understanding starts to complicate. Data gives you some grounding, but much of the understanding comes from locus, experience, and trial and error. Such understanding takes time, and kicks in non-linearly. Do we have this patience?
In the essay ‘The End of Understanding’, Stanford University lecturer and science journalist Grace Huckins says, “Never has it made sense to ask whether science is about developing new technologies and interventions or about understanding the universe—for centuries, those two goals have been one and the same. Now that big data and AI have dissociated those two objectives, we have the responsibility to decide which matters most. Data has given us permission not to understand the world around us.”
Social science is its own realm
As we face the future, it is imperative to shore up social capacities, so we are resilient enough to tackle the unknown unknowns when they arrive. The social sector has always been the best site for this investment. The very recent, once-in-100-years pandemic showed us how civil society was the first responder, and thick networks of community and care took us past the initial months where science was on the backfoot.
What is the role, then, of philanthropy in building the social sector up?
Anecdotally, social change leaders will tell you there is a progress plateau happening in development, and navigating the polycrisis requires a deeper contention with systemic challenges, power dynamics, identity, and incentives, which datavism wholly ignores.
More initiative is necessary to bring social science and impact measurement together, in a way that foregrounds care, dignity, and joy.
Donors need to know the result of their donations, and nonprofits want to understand the effects of their programmes. So, in that way, monitoring and evaluation is integral to field effort. While frameworks to understand and track processes in complex adaptive systems exist, they are cumbersome and require high expertise. In fact, that is the most popular critique offered by datavists. But instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, can one modify what is considered rigorous and who is considered an expert?
Can we collectively explore how field and forum can be combined? Emotions such as pride, honour, disgust, and vengeance need a place in our way of making meaning when it comes to field-based work. More initiative is necessary to bring social science and impact measurement together, in a way that foregrounds care, dignity, and joy.
From datavism to abundance
If we make our ways of seeing and understanding more abundant, it might free capital to flow more easily in all directions, instead of being pushed out through the narrow funnel of data and ‘impact’ alone.
Source: India Development Review
It’s important to end by saying that the intention of this article is not to knock the hard work of all the people who collect, analyse, and present important data; we do it too. The idea is to firmly recognise the limitations of data and de-centre it when we talk of people, places, and species that exist beyond its totalising logic. The idea is to know that, in this field, there are always more questions than answers.
By Natasha Joshi is chief strategy officer at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.
Artificial intelligence is hailed as both a catalyst for a future utopia and a harbinger of societal collapse. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle.
The use case for AI in the business world is clear—optimise profits, expand the customer base, and increase efficiency. For governments, the path is more complex, fraught with questions around regulation, potential harm, and equitable access. But for philanthropy, the conversation seems to be dichotomous, with one side seeing AI as a powerful catalyst for social programmes, while the other side feels something radioactive has leached into the water.
As a grantmaker, I see ‘AI-enabled’ more and more in proposals from non-profits. Peer foundations are also exploring generative AI to streamline their operations. This is not only understandable but, in many cases, necessary. The drive to improve how we generate livelihoods, alleviate poverty, or advance gender equity is at the core of our work.However, I believe this focus on operational efficiency, while important, risks obscuring a more fundamental question we must ask: Has the arrival of AI created entirely new forms of vulnerability? Are there situations emerging that demand new problem statements and a new vision for our work?The purpose of philanthropy has always been to address the vulnerabilities and marginalisation that market models, and even governments, have failed to correct. If that remains our purpose, then our inquiry into AI cannot stop at its utility as a tool. We must also examine how it is reshaping the landscape of human vulnerability itself.
The vulnerability I am most concerned with is psychological and intellectual. In ‘Examining the Harms of AI Chatbots’, a written testimony from Dr Mitchell J Prinstein, Chief of Psychology, American Psychological Association, Dr Prinstein states the following:
The conversation surrounding AI often is dominated by discussions of code, processing power, and economic disruption. However, to view AI as a purely technological issue is to miss its most fundamental characteristic: AI is a tool built by humans, to be integrated into human systems, with profound and direct effects on human cognition, behavior, emotion, and interaction.
The 23-page testimony, supported by research citations, explains in detail how children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to developing social-emotional maladaptation as a result of exposure to unregulated chatbots. Recent reporting by Reuters exposed an internal Meta memo which plainly stated, ‘It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.’
Psychological harms are not limited to children and adolescents. Many adults are using chatbots to cope with loneliness, and while short term results seem to be positive, longitudinal work indicates that over time, interacting with chatbots can exacerbate the feeling of loneliness and isolation. The Collective Intelligence Project, tracking Human-AI relationships across 70 countries, says its data reveals ‘an emotional underground economy whereby people are regularly outsourcing their vulnerability to algorithms,’ to the extent that in 2025, the most popular use of AI is for emotional support and therapy (just a year ago, in 2024, it was for predominantly being used to generate ideas).
It is crucial to note that when it comes to this kind of vulnerability, the traditional lens we use in the development sector, that of income, gender, or geography does not seem to be relevant. We are seeing troubling accounts of individuals from all walks of life getting influenced by leading, and at times hallucinating, chatbots. The consequences range from delusions and unhealthy relational patterns to, in the most tragic cases, death, suicide, and even murder.
While these accounts are troubling, it’s fair to ask how widespread this harm truly is. Compared to the number of people using AI, and the benefits they are deriving from it, how alarming is this harm?
The answer is that most people, including children, are likely to ride this societal shift well. Adults have always thought the next generation is not ok, invariably the generation turns out ok, and grows up to lament the fates of their own children.
The point is that AI, while benefiting many, stands to hurt some, and it is that some philanthropy has always rooted for. Charities, foundations, aid organisations and non-profits exist to advocate for people who are suffering or ‘at risk’. Yet, when it comes to AI, we’re not entirely clear who to account for, how to define harm, and how to protect.
The gift of hindsight also tells us that transformative technologies of the past—for example, plastics, DDT, processed foods, etc—create negative externalities that increase with the passage of time. Plastic is a good example of what happens when we let something proliferate unthinkingly based only on its upside. Plastic continues to be one of the most useful materials for human living, yet its historic free rein has led to a situation where we now live with waste all around and inside us.
The past has so many lessons; with all our human intelligence, is it not desirable to address what we can predict as likely harms of Artificial Intelligence? If markets and governments are unable to prioritise this at the moment, can philanthropy play a bigger role here?
We are in an arms race, but it’s a lopsided one. The forces pushing AI innovation forward are exponentially better resourced than those trying to understand its consequences. Research is a slow, deliberate process; technological development is accelerating non-linearly.
Three areas for philanthropy
Philanthropy must fund the critical work that can keep pace, and we can do this in the following ways.
First, direct significant funding toward participatory and interdisciplinary research, surveys, and field programmes. There is a need to build a body of work that helps us see a bit into the future and avoid making the obvious mistakes. For examples, we have supported the Humans In The Loop project—a cross-sectoral initiative that is using storytelling as a tool to examine unintended consequences of AI integration into social programmes.
Second, create space for founders and implementers on the front lines to iterate, learn, and share their findings freely, including failures and cautions. Many non-profits are already incorporating Safety by Design, which focuses on the ways technology companies can minimise online threats by anticipating, detecting and eliminating online harms before they occur. Through existing work, we know that technology development and safety do not have to be either/or.
Third, traditional philanthropy needs to stop thinking of AI as ‘tech’. Most of the capital available to nonprofits for AI-related work is coming from big tech companies, where the expectation is to run lighting pilots and deploy at scale. What the sector actually needs is core development funders to put up patient capital so as to allow non-profit teams to test, reflect, and consider the results of AI integration properly before taking it to scale.
Technology is rarely ever just a tool. It mediates social processes, engenders culture, and produces novel longings. For philanthropy to remain true to its purpose, we must look at the question of AI through a wider aperture.
This article is part of a series exploring the intersection of philanthropy and technology, published in partnership with Luminate, which also supports Alliance’s ongoing monthly column on the same subject: Philanthropy Wired.
By Tanya Kak (Climate & Environment Portfolio Lead, RNP)
On a field visit in Pune, India, I heard one refrain repeatedly: ‘It’s hot but we’re used to it’. I had made this trip with Prayas Energy and Health Group, one of several partners we support at the Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies (RNP), and who work with street vendors, construction workers, and informal settlement residents to understand the impact of heat stress on the most marginalised communities. But what does it mean to be ‘used to heat’?
It means familiarity with midnight temperatures of 40°C trapped under tin roofs; fans circulating stale air; and water rationed—not just by scarcity but by the lack of access to toilets. It also means deciding whether to skip work to rest or eating dinner at night. In these contexts, heat is not just environmental, it is structural, social, and deeply tied to livelihoods.
Not a seasonal blip
Over the past few years, rising temperatures have been making headlines and we have seen the increase of heat action plans as a policy response. Yet experiences on the ground reflect a different reality—that of heat as a systemic risk instead of an episodic event. This is about asking whose bodies bear the brunt of rising temperatures, who is afforded rest and relief, and who is forced to trade safety for survival. Heat justice as a lens has been fundamentally absent. At RNP, we are curious about how heat is lived, not just measured. We want to move the conversation beyond weather stations and action plans, to how people cope, what they notice, and what they normalise. Naming heat as a hazard invites rest and care—luxuries that few daily‑wage earners can currently afford.
Driven to learn, RNP supported 16 partners deploying different approaches to heat stress in early 2024. After 12 months, we brought these partners together in a learning circle we called a ‘heat huddle’ where we explored what it takes to build public imagination around heat as a systemic risk, especially when people must act as if it isn’t to protect their incomes and routines. We also discussed how to design adaptation measures when infrastructure gaps, like toilets and shade, are seen as peripheral to resilience and urban planning.
These dialogues included macro questions, such as how cities can actively prioritise care, dignity, and recovery as they develop, rather than simply avoiding harm, and micro questions including whether low‑cost innovations like cool roofs, truly perform in messy, real‑world conditions where monsoons, maintenance, and community ownership matter.
A field visit to an informal settlement in Pune, India. Tinned shelters, cooling fans, and water are used as coping mechanisms for the rising heat.
Insights on the ground
Taking heed of these questions, and exploring low-cost technologies that help measure and adapt to heat stress in low- and middle-income settings, we came to four core insights:
1. Heat is treated as an event but lived as a daily condition.
Resilience without structural support can disproportionately shift the burden onto communities and often becomes a choice between survival (livelihoods) and discomfort (physical and mental health risks).
One of our partners, Dasra, highlighted, ‘Women in low‑income housing consistently described feeling trapped in poorly ventilated homes that act like heat chambers, especially during power cuts…We’ve come to realise that resilience must also include daily survival strategies, not just long‑term adaptation.”
Heat isn’t just a forecasted anomaly or a seasonal inconvenience with a clear start and end date. In informal settlements and rural villages alike, it lingers in sleepless nights, vendors closing by noon, and families choosing between a cooler or a meal. Globally, 1.1 billion people lack sufficient cooling, leaving one in seven at high risk of heat‑related illness. In India, nearly 75 percent of the labour force (some 380 million people) is routinely exposed to heat stress, costing the economy 2.5-4.5 percent of GDP annually, equivalent to $150–250 billion by 2030.
2. Heat doesn’t affect everyone equally.
It compounds structural inequities tied to gender, income, and informality.
As a grantee reflected, ‘for informal women workers, dignity of work and living wages are closely linked to climate justice.’ But the risks don’t end at work. Many return to cramped, poorly ventilated homes where women and girls often sleep inside for safety, even when it means enduring oppressive heat indoors. In these settings, ‘cooling’ must mean more than lowering temperature; it must address safety, rest, and dignity.
3. The policy-practice gap is wide and growing.
It comprises a divide between how heat is experienced and how it is governed.
Sustainable Futures Collaborative said, ‘state mobilisation around heat is limited to periods of declared heatwaves… Their focus is on managing impacts, not reducing systemic risk’. Despite advances in heat action plans in India, the threshold-based model of response (e.g. triggering actions only when a temperature crosses a benchmark) misses the chronic and cumulative nature of heat exposure in informal settings. It doesn’t account for indoor heat, power cuts, water scarcity, or the reality that many workers are making micro-adaptations such as starting work earlier, adjusting clothing to more breathable materials such as the traditional gamcha (a thin cotton towel) and taking unscheduled rest, all without institutional support.
4. Communities already hold the seeds of resilience.
In a low-income neighbourhood in Chennai, a cool roof pilot by our partner Rocky Mountain Institute India, harnessed reflective paint. This paint was expected to decrease in efficacy over time but 18 months later, the roofs remained intact—not because of external enforcement, but because residents took pride in maintaining them.
When communities are engaged early and see tangible benefits, they become stewards, not just recipients. Across contexts, we’ve seen similar patterns in the work of our partners, from youth mapping local risks and self-help groups, to informal workers advocating for safer environments.
According to another partner, Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (SEEDS), ‘Resilience is not something we bring in from the outside. It already lives within the people we work with. Our job is to recognise it, nurture it, and help it grow.’On the basis of these insights, you can see that addressing extreme heat requires more than standalone interventions—it demands a systems lens. To apply this, I offer a heat justice compass through which we can begin to move philanthropic action around heat as a system.
Heat as a system
Drawing from the practitioners attending the heat huddle, the below circular framework illustrates four interconnected domains of action— policy engagement, market and innovation, science and data systems, and community mobilisation—with each operating on two levels. Firstly, the immediate and short-term level with requirements for survival, adaptation and building community trust; and secondly, the longer-term level for resilience, institutional reshaping, and addressing underlying structural barriers.
Diagram 1: Heat Justice Compass: Driving Equitable Responses for a Warming World
These four core domains are surrounded by cross-cutting lenses that serve as design principles for more thoughtful, equitable heat action:
Equity: Are the most affected communities centered?
Agency: Do people have the power to shape, adapt, and sustain interventions?
Adaptive Capacity: Can systems evolve with shifting climate, social, and political conditions?
Scale: Can solutions grow without losing meaning or access?
By working across these pillars, funders and practitioners can design interventions that are both grounded in local realities and capable of shifting broader systems. In the huddle we hosted, the following illustrative examples can be mapped for immediate and systemic action:
Community mobilisation
Immediate: Establish shaded rest zones and activate peer networks for heat alerts and care.
Immediate: Update heatwave thresholds to reflect lived realities (including indoor temperatures); set up low-cost monitoring measures to increase the accuracy of data and find ways to integrate hyper local data from communities into heat action plans.
Systemic: Embed equity in national/state heat action plans; incentivise cross-sector coordination (urban, health, labour); Focus on risk mitigation and compensation measures in the form of devising better and more effectively targeted social protection schemes.
Science and data systems
Immediate: Pilots that build better and localised data measurement mechanisms that can track local nighttime and daytime temperatures more accurately, record hospital admissions, map hotspots, and collect disaggregated data (e.g. by gender, income).
Systemic: Develop open-access dashboards; fund longitudinal research on heat-health impacts across populations.
Market and innovation
Immediate: Pilot low-tech cooling solutions (cool roofs, solar fans); test heat insurance for informal workers.
What does it mean for philanthropies to apply this decision-making framework? The table below helps map out considerations for the example of cool roofs.
Table 1: Applying the heat justice compass using cool roofs as an example.
Interventions to last
Philanthropy can play a catalytic role in addressing heat stress and climate justice but only if it embraces the complexity of heat as a systemic issue. This means shifting from event-based to ecosystem-based support by funding heat resilience year-round, and doing so across sectors like health, housing, livelihoods, and urban planning.
It also requires investing in measurement that centres communities, with data on indoor temperatures, informal adaptations, and local health impacts informing more equitable policy. Equally important, is supporting coalitions that elevate intersectional solutions, such as cross-sector alliances that advance inclusive governance. Finally, long-term impact depends on backing local leadership, ensuring that interventions are rooted in community ownership and are built to last.
Moving from fragmented response to shared resilience means seeing heat not just as rising temperature, but as a deepening survival and livelihoods crisis. It reveals whose lives are protected, and whose are left exposed. For philanthropy then, the challenge isn’t just to fund and scale the most technocratic solution, it’s to fuel the systems of care, resistance, and adaptation that communities are already building.
If heat is a system, it’s time to ask: what systems are we willing to reimagine?
More actors—from grantmaking to service delivery—are exploring the use of AI. However, the excitement around scale and efficiency often overshadows a critical question: What does it mean to bring machine-generated abstraction into systems built on trust, context, and relationship?
In systems of social change, we grapple with an enduring tension: connection versus abstraction. Connection is slow, human, and relational. It thrives on trust, listening, and collaboration. Abstraction, on the other hand, simplifies complexity into patterns, insights, and models. It is fast, scalable, and efficient.
Both serve a purpose, but they pull in opposite directions. And now, with the rise of AI tools like large language models (LLMs), this tension has reached new heights. LLMs thrive on abstraction; they reduce human interaction into data points, surface patterns, and generate outputs.
While LLMs are not intelligent in the sense of reasoning or self-awareness, they can serve as tools that reframe, rephrase, and reorganise a person’s ideas in ways that feel expressive. This can enable creativity and reflection, but let’s be clear: It’s not agency. The tool reshapes inputs but does not make meaning.
In market-based systems, where efficiency is paramount, this might work. But in social systems, where relationships, context, and trust are everything, abstraction risks losing what makes systems real and resilient.
This essay is a case for vigilant embrace. It asks how we can keep tools in service to relationship, not the other way round. It draws from our country’s experience of the self-help group (SHG) movement and its microfinance offshoots, tests it against the new frontier of LLMs in the social sector, and distills a few design rules for keeping the work human in an age of speed.
Connection as infrastructure
Decades ago, India’s SHG movement reframed finance as a relationship first, and a product second. Groups formed through affinity; members saved together; rules emerged from context; repayment schedules matched rhythms of life and livelihood; and trust was the collateral. Over time, SHG–bank linkage became a way to bring formal finance into places where formal institutions had no legitimacy of their own. It only worked because process mattered.
As Aloysius Prakash Fernandez (long‑time leader in the SHG movement with MYRADA and a key architect of its practice) has argued, SHGs built economies of connection. The time it took to form an SHG was not friction to be eliminated, but rather the formation and cadence of months of meetings, savings discipline, conflict resolution, and learning to keep books and hold each other accountable. That slow work created legitimacy and resilience so that when crisis struck, the relationship fabric held.
Then came the turn. As microfinance commercialised, much of the field shifted from SHG thinking to microfinance (MFI) thinking—from affinity to acquisition, from place to product, from presence to process compliance. Loans became standardised, repayment cycles rigid, and growth a KPI. Speed, greed, and standardisation (to borrow Aloysius’s pithy phrasing) took what was relational and made it transactional.
The results were predictable. Repayment rates looked spectacular—until they didn’t. In many places, risks were accumulating: multiple lending without visibility on household cash flows, incentives that pushed volume over suitability, and the slow erosion of trust with lenders treating people as portfolios rather than participants. Products scaled, but belonging did not. The social infrastructure that had once underwritten financial inclusion was being displaced by numbers that looked like progress.
It is tempting to narrate this simply as a story of ‘bad actors’, but that misses the deeper point. Even well‑meaning institutions slide here because their structures privilege the measurable: gross loan portfolio, on‑time repayment, and cost to serve. The things that make SHGs work—mutuality, ownership, repair—resist instrumentation, and become, quite literally, less valuable.
If this sounds familiar to those working at the intersection of LLMs and social systems, it’s because we’re watching the same film again.
The question, then, is this: Where, if at all, do LLMs belong in the work of social change? And what can we learn from the SHG/MFI shift?
LLMs and the mechanistic view of wisdom
There are now many LLM-based tools designed to abstract and synthesise insights from human interactions, promising to amplify collective wisdom. In social change systems, where resources are stretched and problems are vast, this promise is tempting and does have some strengths.
It organises and systematises human insights into building blocks.
It surfaces diverse perspectives, tracing inputs back to their sources to ensure inclusion and accountability.
It accelerates decisions, offering actionable outputs at scale.
But these strengths are also its greatest weaknesses because they abstract the human process of turning messy, situated conversations into neat patterns. This comes at a cost.
Loud voices and flattened complexity: They risk over-representing frequent or louder perspectives while erasing nuance, dissent, and marginal views.
Loss of relational insight: Wisdom doesn’t arise from patterns alone. It comes from the trust, tension, and emotional connection born of human interaction.
Hollow consensus: Outputs that bypass relational work may appear actionable, but they lack the trust and shared ownership that give decisions their power.
The result? Systems that look efficient but feel hollow because tools, frameworks, and processes sever the relational ties that make systems real.
Recent empirical evidence seems to confirm what we sense intuitively about these limits. When researchers systematically tested LLM reasoning capabilities through controlled puzzles, they discovered something profound: As problems grow more complex, these models don’t just struggle but collapse entirely. Even more telling, when complexity increases, they begin to reduce their effort, as if giving up. They find simple solutions but then overthink them, exploring wrong paths.
Perhaps this is a window into the fundamental nature of these systems. They excel at pattern matching within familiar territories but cannot genuinely reason through novel complexity. And social change? It lives entirely in that space of the new and the complex, where contexts shift, where culture matters, where every community brings unprecedented challenges. If these models collapse when moving discs between pegs, how can we trust them with the infinitely more complex work of moving hearts, minds, and systems?
Apply the narrow versus wide lens
To navigate this challenge, the tension between connection and abstraction must be examined through another dimension: narrow versus wide. While connection and abstraction often feel like irreconcilable opposites, the narrow–wide lens helps bridge this gap by revealing how different kinds of tools can play meaningful roles in social change.
Narrow tools are specific and targeted, solving well-bounded problems.
Wide tools are generalised and scalable, seeking to address large systems.
Combining this in a 2×2 framework gives us four distinct spaces where LLMs can, or cannot, play a meaningful role.
1. Narrow connection (Relational amplifiers)
What it is: Tools that deepen human relationships by enhancing context-specific, targeted work.
Example: A frontline caseworker uses an LLM to synthesise notes across multiple user visits in order to personalise their follow-ups. The LLM helps amplify memory and insight, but the relationship remains human.
Why it works: These tools augment human connection by surfacing insights without replacing relational work. They stay rooted in the specific, bounded context of their application.
Key use case: Tools for case management in social services. For instance, LLMs help social workers tailor interventions to individual users based on their unique needs and histories.
Key question: Does this tool augment connection, or does it replace it?
2. Wide connection (Relational ecosystems)
What it is: Tools that map and visualise relationships across broader ecosystems, enabling collaboration without eroding the human work of trust-building.
Example: Stakeholder mapping tools that reveal community networks and power dynamics.
Why it works: Wide connection tools respect the complexity of human systems, helping actors navigate and strengthen relationships without reducing them to transactions.
Key use case: Network mapping for advocacy coalitions. LLMs can surface insights about overlapping efforts, potential collaborators, or areas of conflict, but the work of building those connections remains human.
Key question: Does this tool illuminate relationships, or does it flatten them into transactions?
3. Narrow abstraction (Efficiency tools)
What it is: Tools that automate repetitive, bounded tasks, freeing up time for relational or contextual work.
Example: A grant officer uses an LLM to scan 100 applications for missing documentation or budget inconsistencies and flags files for review, but leaves decisions to humans.
Why it works: Narrow abstraction tools stay within well-defined parameters, ensuring that the abstraction doesn’t undermine human judgement or erode trust.
Key use case: Administrative automation in nonprofits. AI can handle routine data entry or flag missing information in grant proposals, allowing staff to focus on strategic decisions and relationships.
Key question: Has the process of abstraction removed necessary details that deserve human consideration?
4. Wide abstraction (Context flatteners)
What it is: Broad, generalised tools that prioritise scale and efficiency, but risk erasing context and relationships.
Example: A philanthropic CRM tool employs LLMs to rank grantees on ‘impact potential’ using prior grant reports that reward well-written or funder-aligned language, not those doing contextually important work.
Why it fails: Wide abstraction tools produce outputs that are disconnected from the lived realities of the people and systems they aim to serve. They often impose generic solutions that lack local resonance or trust.
Key risk: Policy recommendations generated by LLMs that ignore cultural nuance, power dynamics, or local histories.
Key question: Does this tool flatten complexity, producing solutions no one truly owns?
Wide abstraction tools fail social systems because social systems are built on trust, context, and relationships. Change doesn’t emerge from patterns or averages; it emerges from the slow, messy, human work of showing up, listening, and building together.
This requires moral discernment, cultural fluency, and the ability to hold space for uncertainty. Even the most sophisticated tools are not capable of these things. A tool cannot sense the difference between a pause of resistance and a pause of reflection. It cannot understand silence or the weight behind a hesitant request.
LLMs can play a role in social change, but must stay narrow, supportive, and grounded in connection. They canamplify relationships (narrow connection), reveal patterns in systems (wide connection), or automate tasks that don’t require human judgement (narrow abstraction). But they cannot replace the relational processes that make systems real.
Designing for a human age
The promise of LLMs is seductive. It offers speed, efficiency, and a sense of control—qualities we crave in complex, uncertain systems. But if we think of connection as the foundational infrastructure and abstraction as a tool, how do we build (and fund) accordingly?
Four clusters of practice follow from the analysis:
1. Placement and scope
Keep it narrow (bounded contexts) when automating.
Hold it wide and human when mapping relationships.
Avoid wide abstraction in relational domains (welfare, justice, health, community development). If you must use it, treat outputs as hints, never decisions.
Assume drift; design for it.
2. Process and ownership
Process matters. If a ‘consensus’ tool removes dissent and dialogue, it is producing hollow agreement.
Ownership signals reality. If a decision is not of the group but about it, expect distance and eventual resistance.
Messiness test. Did we stay in the mess to listen, disagree, compromise? If not, the outcome may travel poorly. Consensus that bypasses repair will not hold.
3. Measurement and accountability
Measure what you can while protecting what you can’t. Build explicit guard rails so that unmeasurable goods (trust, belonging, repair) are not crowded out.
Use AI where failure is acceptable. Drafting, summarising, data hygiene: yes. Decisions about dignity, safety, or entitlements: no.
Allow override without justification. People closest to the context must be free to resist machine outputs.
Capture moments of failure. Document not just technical bugs, but also when people forget how to act without the tool.
4. Funding and institutional practice
Finance the foundational layers. Budget for convening, accompaniment, group formation, and follow‑through, and not just transactions.
Reward stewardship, not throughput. Celebrate organisations that prune, pause, and repair, not just those that scale.
Create collision spaces. Funders should host containers for connection—open‑ended gatherings where practitioners make meaning together, not just report up.
Reframe accountability. Shift from counting outputs to honouring conditions: psychological safety, trust density, and role clarity across the network.
The work we do in the sector is the work of belonging, and it does not scale by flattening. It scales like a forest: root by root, mycelium by mycelium, canopy by canopy, alive and adaptive, held together by relationships we cannot always see and must never forget.
On a private reserve, Rohini Nilekani comes safely face to face with elephants and rhinos. Can we find ways to coexist in India too, adapting to animals as they have to us?
It was a bunker made of reinforced concrete and steel. It was half underground, and camouflaged with mud, leaves and grass. Just beyond this innocuous-looking mound was a waterbody about the size of a large swimming pool.
Ahead of it, we could see an African tusker making his way to the pond.
“Hurry, the animals are already here. We are late,” said our guide, as he opened a metal door to reveal steps leading down into a dark chamber.
We emerged, curious and a bit nervous, from our safari jeep. One by one, we entered this man-made cave. It was surprisingly roomy inside, with a modern toilet to one side.
Our guide slid open steel windows all around the room, each 2 ft tall and at eye level. There were no grills or meshes.
Then the evening show started.
The elephant reached the water, gauged the scene and slowly started drinking. He was soon joined by others, attracted to the best water source in the vicinity. This was their evening routine.
Before our wonderstruck eyes, white rhinos began to edge in. Four mothers with four calves of varying ages eyed each other and the tuskers. From afar, zebras and an eland were watching too, waiting their turn.
This was a unique African safari experience for us. We were on a private conservancy in Zimbabwe, spread over 150,000 hectares, far from the tourist rush in Masai Mara. Here, the owners have successfully created a haven for thousands of creatures.
The conservancy sits at the edge of a large national park. Just beyond the private estate, on its other edge, the bush has been cut down for sugarcane farms that stretch to the horizon. The pressure on the land is growing, even in Africa, which has a similar population of 1.5 billion but almost three times the land mass of India.
Africa has long followed a strategy of private-owner-led conservation, prompting as many bouquets as brickbats from the world’s environmentalists. It is true that ownership of these conservancies is rarely with indigenous peoples. It is also true that only elites can afford such wildlife tourism.
In India, such a strategy is neither possible nor desirable. Our conservation is led by the state and its forest departments. I argue that we will need the participation of all landowners in the country to restore and heal our lands, whether on plantations and farms or in urban corporate campuses. Luckily, we have the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which enables long-time forest dwellers to assert individual and community rights over the forest. They are closely watched over by state forest departments, which often encourage voluntary relocation outside the core areas.
Where the law has been implemented, civil society organisations are strengthening the capacity of the people to regenerate the forest while increasing their livelihood opportunities. They keep meticulous records of flora and fauna, so that the impact of this progressive legislation can be monitored.
Amid growing human-animal conflict, India’s commitment to increase its forest cover has never been so critical. We must recreate a new culture of co-existence, for we need the biodiversity to secure our own futures. We must redevelop a shared wilderness, where humans can adapt better to animals, as they have adapted to us.
Meanwhile, back to Africa, as we sat in the sunken hide, trying our best to be quiet, the animals came closer and closer.
Tusks and horns were literally within reach. The animals could sense us, but they had seen humans here before. They peered at us intently, discounted any threat and continued their usual activities. Waves of gratitude and awe washed over us. It is truly the experience of a lifetime to safely come face to face with the giant head of a rhino or a bull elephant.
We watched, fascinated. There was a clear hierarchy. Some elephants were more equal than others and nudged away juniors to access the sweetest spots at the freshwater inlet. Sometimes, the rhinos were able to displace the elephants, maybe from an ancient sharing culture, or because long and sharp horns can be an effective deterrent to conflict.
By and large, despite the occasional head butts and trunk nudges, trumpets and snorts, all animals big and small were able to quench their thirst. The endless sky, fiery from the setting sun, created perfect backdrops, as did clear reflections in the pool. One by one, the animals began to move away.
Will we ever have such an experience in India, which can boast of similar biodiversity as the African continent? Which has the bears and tigers that Africa does not? Which has millions of people eager to experience the wild, and better protect our biodiversity? The debate on conservation is so polarised that it would be hard to get a consensus on such an idea.
We will never forget that encounter. My little grandson wants to be a conservationist when he grows up. I think those two precious hours in the company of magnificent, gentle creatures further cemented his dream.
As a parting gift, a young elephant looked straight at us, scooped up mud from the bottom of the pool with his trunk, and squirted it squarely at us through the window. Before we could duck, our clothes and cameras were sprinkled with wet soil. In the spirit of the season, we received it as a blessing from Ganesha.
Justice has often been philanthropy’s stepchild. In numerous donor forums I’ve attended, we’ve eagerly rallied around education, health, and livelihoods. However—when the conversation turns to justice, ensuring people can access their rights, challenge injustice, or navigate the legal system—the energy shifts. Justice is perceived as peripheral, abstract, or difficult to measure. Many funders treat it as the government’s job or the lawyer’s domain. As a result, initiatives that empower people to seek justice or reform broken systems receive only a tiny sliver of philanthropic support.Yet over the past few years, my perspective has been upended by the partners I’ve met working on access to justice across India. Through interviews and field visits, including those for a film on justicethat we recently produced, I’ve seen that justice is not abstract at all. It’s deeply human, intensely local, and full of possibility.
Across our conversations, we heard this repeatedly: justice doesn’t always begin in a courtroom. It begins when someone feels safe enough to speak. A community paralegal helping a villager resolve a land dispute. A former inmate is mentoring others inside prison. A survivor navigating the police station without fear.
At organisations working on reintegration and rehabilitation, justice often means supporting people in rebuilding their lives after incarceration. With flexible support, some partners have been able to offer socio-legal counselling, vocational training, and basic necessities. Others have built trust-based leadership programs that help young people move from the margins into positions of voice and responsibility. These are concrete, person-centred acts of justice.
In other cases, early patient funding helped organisations survive and scale when few others were willing to take the risk. That support enabled them to formalise their teams, build institutional systems, and communicate the broader narrative of their work. Crucially, the flexibility to plan a few years ahead allowed them to take bigger bets by investing in people, tools, or platforms that wouldn’t have been feasible under restricted project grants.
So why hasn’t philanthropy embraced this space more fully? A few blind spots keep recurring. First, the “tangibility bias”: funders like measurable outputs like vaccines delivered and schools built. Justice work is relational. It may take years before a policy shifts, a case sets precedent, or an ecosystem changes. But that doesn’t mean impact isn’t happening.
Second, many funders worry that justice work is adversarial or political. But the reality is that most of our partners work with, and not against, state institutions. We’ve seen collaborations with NITI Aayog, state and national legal aid authorities, courts, and correctional institutions. These are solutions, not confrontations.
Lastly, most funding structures don’t fit justice work. Short-term, output-driven grants don’t support the long game of legal empowerment or systemic reform. The most effective partners spoke about how they often had to start by showing up, listening, and building trust. Change didn’t happen in quarters. It happened in relationships.
When funding aligned with the nature of the work, things changed. Many partners credited long-term, unrestricted funding with giving them breathing space, not only to operate effectively, but to think expansively. They used that space to invest in leadership, respond to community needs in real time, and take risks they otherwise couldn’t afford to take.
Flexible support also allowed organisations to do the unglamorous but vital work of capacity-building: from hiring experienced staff, to building internal systems, to developing learning tools. Instead of chasing compliance, they could focus on what mattered by deepening their fieldwork, building networks, and responding to unexpected opportunities.
Organisations that combined legal literacy with cultural and emotional work, such as storytelling, expressive arts, or peer-led theatre, often spoke about the importance of being able to integrate these elements without having to argue for their “impact” in narrow terms. Being trusted to pursue what worked, even when it looked unconventional, helped the work land more deeply and durably.
So what would it look like to fund justice differently?
Commit for the long haul. Fund justice like you would fund a promising health system intervention. Offer multi-year, flexible support. Treat experimentation and adaptation as part of the process and not red flags.
Trust, then track. Start from a place of belief, then co-create learning approaches that suit the work. Let partners define what success looks like. Don’t ask for outcomes the work isn’t built to deliver.
Think systems, not silos. Justice isn’t a standalone sector. It intersects with gender, education, livelihoods, and governance. Fund the connective tissue: the organisations translating legal rights into lived realities.
Celebrate stories, not just numbers. A woman starting her own paralegal network. A district officer shifting how bail is granted. A reintegration program reducing recidivism. These are real outcomes, even if they’re not on a logframe.
The partners I’ve learned from are not naïve. They know change takes time. But they’ve also shown that with the right kind of support, it is absolutely possible. They’ve built models, passed policies, won cases, and healed lives.
What they seek is not charity. It’s a partnership. Not pity. But patience.
So here’s the question again: What if we funded justice differently?
We would move it from the margins to the centre. We would fund what matters, not just what’s easy to measure. And we would finally stand beside the people who are already doing the quiet, necessary work of building a more just India.
…
Gautam John is CEO of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.
The author is part of a philanthropy that supports access to justice initiatives. The views expressed here are based on learning reports (2021–2025) and interviews with partners working on Access to Justice in India)
Natural fibres have served India well – but climate extremes demand innovation in what we wear, especially for those who can’t escape the sun.
The monsoon arrived early this year, bringing relief across the country. It may be hard to forget the record-high summer temperatures, though, when parts of Delhi felt like 54 degrees Celsius and Ooty had its warmest day in the past 73 years. In Kashmir, too, it has been the hottest June in five decades, with average temperatures three degrees above normal. Heat records are being shattered every year.
Much has been written about climate change, global warming and how India will be one of the worst affected by heat waves. We know how heat adversely impacts human health, causing not only mild symptoms such as exhaustion and dizziness but also death.
India is not alone. Europe and the US are experiencing extreme heat across large swathes of land, with the added danger of deadly wildfires. Heat claims more than 1,75,000 lives in Europe annually. In India, while thousands suffer or die, government data is unreliable. An analysis from Down to Earth estimates that a single five-day heat wave leads to 30,000 excess deaths in summer. This is way above official figures, though state governments are trying to better classify deaths from heat exposure.
In the West, despite the rising heat, summers are still about getting fit, unpacking the bikinis and shorts, and heading outdoors. In India, skimpy wear does not take over the season. Linen kurtas and cotton dhotis do. Natural fibres, khadi, light colours, and thin fabrics become ubiquitous, from the high street to the fashion ramp. And of course, there is the most popular gamcha or thin cotton towel.
Yet, it is worth asking a serious question: What should human beings wear in the face of rising heat? Will traditional clothing suffice? Is cotton really the fabric of choice?
In dry climates, it might well be. Cotton has always been celebrated for its breathability, accessibility and affordability in India. India is the world’s second-largest producer of cotton after China, and fine handspun cotton always had pride of place in its textile history.
Can cotton retain its reputation when things get both hotter and more humid? A “wet bulb” temperature of 35°C, when high heat combines with high humidity, creates a deadly combination for human beings. The body’s natural cooling mechanisms fail, making exposure life-threatening.
Cotton and other natural fibers do absorb sweat, but only up to a point. When ambient humidity is high, they dry slowly, leaving the fabric sticking to the body, increasing trapped heat and the risk of skin infections. They also do not provide protection against harmful ultraviolet rays, which are linked to cancer.
Humid heat is increasing across India, especially in the Indo-Gangetic plain, which shelters half a billion people. When half the population works outdoors, or indoors with poor insulation, what to wear is a question not just for frustrated teenagers but for every worker and citizen. At home, in the workplace, or in public spaces, people will have to think carefully about protective clothing.
In a country almost romantically attached to its natural fibres, especially khadi and cotton, it might be hard to face a startling reality — manmade fibres are better for adapting to heat stress caused by climate change. Recently, in Varanasi, Blinkit delivery partners went on strike to demand, among other things, cotton uniforms for the summer. Perhaps they should have asked for more sophisticated materials.
There has been a stunning revolution in material science and biomimicry-inspired textiles in the past few years. Athletes and urban cyclists and joggers were the earliest adopters of synthetic fibres designed to wick away sweat. But the need is far greater for farmers, construction workers and street vendors with high occupational exposure. How can we rethink the future of clothing?
Elsewhere, innovation has been driven by governments. The US set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to fund and direct discovery across a wide range of technology areas. As part of that mission, Professor Yi Cui and his team at Stanford University developed a textile that is transparent to infrared wavelengths and radiates heat away from the body. Already marketed in China, he claims it is not too expensive to take to a mass market, and would be critical for farmers around the world as part of a climate adaptation strategy.
Other biomimetic fibres are being tested, some inspired by polar bear hairs with high porosity and aligned pores, for superior thermal insulation. New phase change materials (PCMs) integrated into fabrics can absorb excess heat and release it when things cool down. The list of climate-smart wearable technologies is growing longer.
India will have to develop its own innovation engine to suit our needs. On July 1, the Union cabinet approved the Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Scheme with an outlay of Rs 1 lakh crore, which will support the development or acquisition of technologies of high strategic importance. Some of these funds should be directed to make wearable cooling technologies affordable and available to all citizens at the earliest.
Many states and cities are creating and implementing heat action plans. So far, none are investigating strategies to help people access smarter fabrics. The RDI scheme might be the right nudge for fresh thinking. This is one opportunity for both sarkaar and bazaar to be accountable to the samaaj, to thwart an unimaginable human crisis if the modelling on warming in India proves accurate.
Khadi was deeply associated with India’s independence movement. It will always remain precious. But the past may not always inform the future. Swadeshi new fibres might better dress up the mission for a healthier, more resilient Bharat.
The writer is chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and author of Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar: A Citizen-first Approach.
Biodiversity markets are deepening, with a growing demand for high-quality carbon credits with biodiversity safeguards
As India’s geopolitical future sways with the swings of the global political pendulum, it is worth reflecting on the constant in the chaos, a North Star among spinning constellations. India’s biodiversity can be that sanctuary, that bank which helps us remain aatmanirbhar (self- reliant). Natural wealth is immune to trade and tariff wars, a trump card in climate diplomacy. It is a sacred vault which can future-proof our ambitions to be an abundant society by 2047.
India is one of very few countries with an unbroken culture of 5,000 years that is animated with the understanding that we are part of nature; that it is our privilege and duty to nurture and enrich all life on earth. That sacrality may be dimming in the face of a young population and polity demanding rapid, modern economic development. So, we must weave anew the stories, craft again the culture, the rituals, and behaviours that restore ecological belonging. Biodiversity is no longer a nice-to-have natural heritage. It could be a differentiator in the global arena, as scarcity mindsets take over with the climate crisis. If we act now, if we protect now, societal gains and economic rewards will accrue over time.
Biodiversity markets are deepening, with a growing demand for high-quality carbon credits with biodiversity safeguards. There is a strong pushback from environmentalists. Yet, if done right, it could allow first mile communities to be rewarded for conservation practices, to improve their lives and livelihoods.
The European Space Agency has launched a mission to map global biomass, penetrating dense forests to assess stored carbon. The Global Biodiversity Standard may push biodiversity monitoring further. This, in turn, will fuel the demand for verified ecosystem services provided by natural environments. The time is ripe to enhance our national, natural biodiversity.
India’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) commits us to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 sinks through additional forest cover by 2030. This is both a moral obligation and a strategic imperative for us. In 2023 alone, the Earth lost 3.7 million hectares of tropical forest, which accounted for 6% of global CO2 emissions. By one estimate, in just one year, the climate crisis has led to population weighted GDP loss of 6.3%, disproportionately affecting Southeast Asia. If we do not take this seriously, however, our economic growth can stall, with cascading impacts on well-being. All economic activity stands on the foundation of ecological security. We have been and will remain a biomass-based society for a long time to come. Whether or not we participate in biodiversity markets, it is in our self-interest to regenerate this land.
Luckily, despite more than three decades of fast-tracked development, inevitably swallowing up natural capital, India retains high biodiversity. The Forest Rights Act recognises the critical role of indigenous communities in conservation. Centuries of stewardship ensured that only four mammals — the Asiatic cheetah, the Javan rhinoceros, Sumatran rhino, and the banteng — have become extinct in India, though many are now endangered.
India is still blessed with vast floral and faunal species. We boast 13% of global bird species, and part of the world’s largest mangrove forest. Though nearly half our land is under cultivation, there is significant co-existence with wildlife; 300 species were documented just in the agricultural lands of the Ganga basin. Outside our forests, pastoral lands, tea and coffee plantations and even urban parks hold untold biodiversity.
Protect our plants, and we protect critical water sources that are an insurance against disrupted monsoon patterns. Forests slow down water, and they do it for free. The cost of man-made infrastructure for the same service has been prohibitive and repetitive — a Sisyphean task. Protect our animals, and we protect pharmaceutical innovation and the health care of our citizens. The drugs of the future are waiting to be discovered in our biota.
Much has been newly understood about zoopharmacognosy — how animals use plants as natural medicine. Most primates, big cats and even domesticated cattle and dogs still have the nutritional wisdom to seek out worm-destroying shrubs and grasses. We can learn much from the animal world about protecting human health.
Biodiversity research also offers remediation against new pollutants. University of Wuhan researchers found that a sponge made of cotton and squid could absorb 99.9% of microplastics in water. Indian universities must urgently ramp up such research, leveraging the opportunity from fleeing global talent.
If forests are a storehouse for genetic resources, new materials, and biomimicry-based innovations, trees also create microclimates that mitigate the impact of extreme heat; 2024 was the hottest year on record. Churu, Rajasthan recorded a maximum of 50.5°C. At those temperatures, people can die. We need shady cover more than ever.
There is a price to be paid for inattention. Bees, essential for pollinating half of all food crops, are declining worldwide. Honeybee deaths have hit record highs, including in Punjab. Commercial beekeepers in the US have lost 60% of their colonies, valued conservatively at $139 million this year.
We are entangled with nature even as we drive species extinction. For today’s generations, we need to spell out that entanglement. Can we go beyond GDP to better account for our natural capital?
Recently, the Indian Institute of Forest Management, in collaboration with the National Tiger Conservation Authority, conducted an economic valuation of India’s tiger reserves, using Stanford University’s open source InVest methodology. The study estimated that each of the 10 tiger reserves monitored generated about $1.2 billion to $4.0 billion in ecosystem services every year. Imagine what we will uncover about the inherent value of other ecological assets, by using indigenously refined models.
When we do, it will be easier to make better development trade-offs. A highway through a forest? A mega dam across a life generating river? Let’s consider smarter alternatives.
Measuring biodiversity is only one way to enhance public appreciation of the ecological legacy we borrow from future generations. If we as shareholders are inspired to become trustees of India’s natural capital, it will become a kamadhenu — a gift that keeps on giving.
Rohini Nilekani, chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, is the author of Samaaj, Sarkaar Bazaar – A citizen first approach. The views expressed are personal.
In 2025, India had the largest population of young people of any country in the world. Within a couple of decades, it will have the largest cohort of people age 60+. This will not be just a demographic transition; it will also mark a seismic cultural shift — and India will need to find ways to manage the coming change.
My mother-in-law, Durga Nilekani, turned 100 years old this January. She is a peaceful centenarian, living in the moment, never complaining, ever smiling despite any physical discomfort she may be experiencing. As someone who turned 65 not long ago, I often wonder if I will be so equanimous if I live as long as her. Will I be at peace with my life at that age, or will I expect more as I get older?
Calm or restless, we are both part of India’s developing story. In 2025, India had the largest population of young people of any country in the world. Within a couple of decades, it will have the largest cohort of people age 60+. This will not be just a demographic transition; it will also mark a seismic cultural shift — and India will need to find ways to manage the coming change.
There is no mystery about how this has come about. India has experienced the same trends as many growing economies, with a decline in fertility rates and infant mortality, and better access to nutrition and health care. Those factors have contributed to a doubling of India’s life expectancy since Independence in 1947. The average lifespan is now 67.2 years.
Nor is India alone in anticipating the coming shift. In the coming decades, humanity will have to deal with issues of an aging global population for the first time. The United Nations estimates that there are more than 700,000 centenarians in the world today. Many countries are already facing the challenges of a greying citizenry, notably Japan, Germany, Italy, and even tiny countries like Monaco and Latvia. Their leaders are taking steps to support older adults, ensure their countries have the proper infrastructure and services, and prepare for the economic impacts that come with aging workforces.
The marketplace and scientific spaces have also begun to focus on prolonging health spans. Research on longevity has accelerated, especially in the West, where one Silicon Valley firm reportedly declared death to be a bug, not a feature of life! The Methuselah Foundation in the United States, a “biomedical charity,” wants 90 to become the new 50 by 2030. If these and other fanciful projects fail, many hope they will at least yield advances on dementia and other age-related disorders.
All that said, India’s approach to its aging population will necessarily be unique. First and foremost, because of the scale of the oncoming shift. Its older adult population will double by 2047 and overtake that of China a couple of decades after.
There are other factors at work as well: Unlike more prosperous countries, India’s older adults are poorer than the general population. Only 14 percent can use the Internet, and less than 5 percent reported being part of a social organization.1 They are more likely to be female, have much less education and live more in rural areas. More than one in three seniors in India still do not have the luxury of retiring, and many continue to do unpaid work, often in agriculture and allied activities. India is also experiencing a rapid shift away from multi-generational households and toward nuclear families, and an estimated 80 million older people will have to live alone or with an older spouse in just 20 years.2
Yet, data do not tell the whole story, or the only story.
In one survey, younger generations associated aging with grey hair, nursing homes, and wheelchairs, while older adults added freedom from responsibility, travel, and the joy of grandchildren.3 Clearly, how old you feel can be quite different from how old you are.
There are also strong socio-cultural traditions about aging that could determine how older adults cope with their advancing years. In India, age has long been associated with wisdom, enough that most families still consult seniors on big decisions like new jobs or marriages. Cultural messaging strongly cultivates a reverence towards older people, and millions of Indians touch the feet of family seniors at festivals and rituals, a sign of respect that can also symbolize conferring the blessings from the old to the young.
Equally, aging is widely accepted as a natural phenomenon with a spiritual opportunity. Among Hindus, for example, Vanprastha is a stage of life after the householder phase, when one is expected to gradually and gently withdraw from the material world. Vanprastha literally means “the way of the forest.” It is a time for prayer and meditation, for practicing detachment and oneness with the natural world, and I have personally witnessed dozens of relatives cheerfully adopt such a lifestyle change. When the time came to leave this world, they seemed to have been the more at peace, thanks to their practice.
My own paternal grandmother, whom everyone called Atya, chose to live the last 20 years of her life in a single room in the small temple town of Alandi. Even though her sons were doing very well in life, she cheerfully chose frugality. Visiting her to sit in an open courtyard, enjoying her delicious cooking, and hearing her spellbinding stories of her saint-Gods was always the highlight of my young life. She remains an enduring inspiration on how to “go gentle into that good night” despite what the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote.
But times are changing fast, as are attitudes. Today’s elders want to feel young, to have social engagement, and give freely of their time and talent. They want to have fun, but they also want to be useful in society. One of India’s many non-profits working on longevity, Grey Shades, showcases intrepid seniors who are giving back gracefully — like army veteran and psychiatrist Colonel Dr. Rajinder Singh, who at the age of 91 is setting up a third Mental Wellbeing Centre to address addiction in young people in Punjab.
Not all seniors get the same opportunities to be productive and socially relevant. Nor should they feel pressured to be. There is a real danger that emerging societal norms will create a new anxious generation of elders, who not only feel pressure to look and feel young at any age, but face financial challenges as governments push up their retirement age and pension plans.
How can we reimagine a future in which older adults are respected, cared for, and given opportunities to contribute?
Here’s where society, the state, and markets need to do much more. While India does have several good non-profits working with older citizens, there is room for many more to support the 300 million — and counting — older adults. While the state has many initiatives to assist senior citizens in health care and pensions, there are too many delivery gaps. While the markets have begun to offer some services targeted at seniors, $50 billion in potential economic activity remains largely untapped.4
As a start, we need much more private philanthropic capital to come into the sector, to underwrite innovation, to provide patient funding, and to create the new narrative on aging that India and the world needs. At RNP, we always try to peek into the future, to see where new societal issues will need the risk capital that philanthropy uniquely provides. For example, my team helped set up India’s first domestic endowment for water and sanitation. Similarly, we started our work with young men and boys long before it became the global talking point it is today. In climate, RNP has focused on adaptation, for which communities at the first mile must innovate to build their resilience in the face of so much uncertainty. Post-pandemic, we realized the urgency of working on mental health. Now, we are keenly exploring opportunities in longevity and aging in India.
Whatever we decide, it is clear that this area needs much more attention from philanthropists the world over. After all, many philanthropists themselves are elder adults. Time should not empty out before the pocket does.
India matters in the world. How it shapes its policies, its public infrastructure, and its society to give more agency, dignity, and choice to senior citizens can become a beacon for other nations as the entire globe adapts to a rapidly aging population.
1 Dalberg meta-analysis of available India data from following sources: (1) LASI India Report, 2020; (2) Government of India, Population Census, 2011; (3) Asian Development Bank, Aging Well in Asia, 2024 (4) Oxfam, Digital Divide: India Inequality Report, 2022; (5) Agewell Foundation Survey, 2019 (5) National Sample Survey Office, Household Consumption Expenditure Survey, 2022-23; (6) Ideas for India, Determining how many Indians are poor today, 2024.
2 IBID
3 Internal research by Silver Talkies, https://silvertalkies.com/
