Type: Article

HT | India’s Pastoralists Deserve a New Tale to Tell

Pastoralists are environmental stewards of the lands their livestock grazes on, not just extractors of value

All in all, it’s been a good year for a sector that has remained largely invisible. After decades of neglect, the issues facing pastoralist communities and grasslands have finally come into sharper global focus — 2026 has been declared the International Year for Rangelands and Pastoralism, with the goal of improving land governance, encouraging investment in the ecosystems that make pastoralism productive, and strengthening market linkages. For India’s nearly 60 pastoral castes and ethnic groups, this is a real morale boost.

The just-concluded United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17) in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, followed up with commitments, including a $1.3 billion finance package for land restoration and drought resilience, and a $1.2 billion Rangelands Flagship Initiative for pastoralist livelihoods. As part of this, India’s environment minister recently launched a guide to the country’s grasslands and other open natural ecosystems.

This encouraging news took me back to a field trip with my team to understand what is happening on the ground to the country’s grasslands, and to the lives and livelihoods of the pastoralists who depend on them.

We were driving through Pune district, the new highway cutting through harvest-ready fields with ripened bajra swaying gently in the breeze.

We soon came upon a herd of goats and sheep, loosely corralled around makeshift tents put up by Dhangar pastoralists. They were on an increasingly uncertain, unmapped journey from Baramati, where their families are anchored, to the Konkan coast — or wherever shelter, fodder and water could be found. Here, they had camped on a friendly farmer’s land, in exchange for the rich fertiliser their animals would leave behind before the group moved on. A few women tended to the animals; the men cooked on an open fire. We settled down under the open sky with the Kokre family, and soon shared a hot cup of tea boiled with freshly drawn sheep milk.

Our hosts told us many stories, some hopeful, some heartrending — echoing tales we’d heard from herders on the Himalayan slopes and in the deserts of Jaisalmer and Kutch. The good news: Meat and milk still fetched decent prices. The sad news: It was ever harder to find greener pastures to live life on the move. There were the old threats of predators and shrinking commons, and the newer threat of solar and windmill plants fracturing grazing corridors. “Every night, we worry about where we will set up safe camp,” said Sampath Kokre. “It is hardest for the women.”

Hidden from the gaze of urbanites, there are anywhere between 10 and 12 million pastoralists in India. For the first time, pastoralist livestock was counted separately as part of the five-yearly livestock census, so better data will soon emerge. Found across 24 states and Union Territories, pastoralists are often denied access to grazing lands and water bodies, treated with disrespect, and struggle to be recognised as sustainable, highly productive contributors to a climate-resilient economy. There has long been an assumption that pastoralism would dwindle as settled agriculture grew. Luckily, that hasn’t happened — testimony to the resilience of these communities, and to the fact that, as a production system, pastoralism makes both ecological and economic sense. It is sustainable and profitable, which is why pastoralists have adapted to shifting political, market, climatic and regulatory conditions.

Our hosts told us many stories, some hopeful, some heartrending — echoing tales we’d heard from herders on the Himalayan slopes and in the deserts of Jaisalmer and Kutch. The good news: Meat and milk still fetched decent prices. The sad news: It was ever harder to find greener pastures to live life on the move. There were the old threats of predators and shrinking commons, and the newer threat of solar and windmill plants fracturing grazing corridors. “Every night, we worry about where we will set up safe camp,” said Sampath Kokre. “It is hardest for the women.”

Hidden from the gaze of urbanites, there are anywhere between 10 and 12 million pastoralists in India. For the first time, pastoralist livestock was counted separately as part of the five-yearly livestock census, so better data will soon emerge. Found across 24 states and Union Territories, pastoralists are often denied access to grazing lands and water bodies, treated with disrespect, and struggle to be recognised as sustainable, highly productive contributors to a climate-resilient economy. There has long been an assumption that pastoralism would dwindle as settled agriculture grew. Luckily, that hasn’t happened — testimony to the resilience of these communities, and to the fact that, as a production system, pastoralism makes both ecological and economic sense. It is sustainable and profitable, which is why pastoralists have adapted to shifting political, market, climatic and regulatory conditions.

Not many people realise that these nomadic communities manage 30% of India’s livestock, generating an annual turnover of about $11 billion. With more than 500 million animals, India has the largest livestock population of any country. Pastoralist herds include cattle, buffaloes, camels, yaks, sheep, goats, ducks, pigs, and donkeys. In drylands such as the Thar desert and high-altitude ecosystems such as Ladakh, where settled agriculture cannot succeed, they convert water and soil into meat, milk, wool, hide, and manure. Pastoralism contributes 10-12% to India’s dairy and 70% to its meat economy. The next time you feast on biryani or enjoy a milkshake, think of where the milk and mutton might have come from.

Then, there are the other animal products. India is the world’s second-largest wool producer, producing 35 million kg a year, 95% of it from pastoralist herds. Sheep’s wool is excellent for acoustic and thermal insulation, and sought after worldwide for its biodegradable, sustainable properties — Mercedes-Benz, for instance, blends sheep’s wool with polymers for seat upholstery and sound/thermal insulation. Deccan wool has properties similar to styrofoam and could replace environmentally harmful packaging materials. Wool is also high in phosphorus, and a substantial share of India’s agriculture depends on organic fertiliser from pastoralist livestock dung.

Yet, the animals need grazing lands. Sixteen million hectares of grassland cover just 5% of India — an area roughly the size of Bangladesh. Once dismissed as wasteland, grasslands are slowly being understood for the many ecosystem services they provide, including the sequestration of carbon at a significant scale. These open natural ecosystems (ONEs) harbour migratory and endemic bird species such as the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard, and are home to iconic animals such as the blackbuck, snow leopard and rhino, along with smaller creatures like the jungle cat and numerous reptiles and insects.

It is now widely acknowledged that pastoralism and grazing sustain the ecological functioning of grassland ecosystems — maintaining grass diversity, recycling nutrients and keeping invasive species at bay. Pastoralists are environmental stewards of the lands their livestock grazes on, not just extractors of value.

Will the developments of this year deepen our understanding of — and respect for — the vital role rangelands and pastoralism play in sustaining biodiversity, storing carbon, and bringing food and fabric to our homes? If so, the Dhangars, like their counterparts, will have a different story to tell.

First Published in The Hindustan Times 

SSIR | Our Vanishing Developmental Commons

Written by Tanya Kak

When I was a child, like many children, the street was where I learned how to live in the world. Playing was not just playing. We gathered every evening, first to decide what to play, then making our way through intense debates about how: the rules to follow, the boundary conditions to honor, the alliances that would dictate team formation, and heated discussions over strategies to win. In that one hour, we practiced negotiating, disagreeing, and finding a middle ground. We learned how power shifted, all while retaining our sense of play and wonder. In this shifting social drama, everyone was simultaneously an actor, an audience, a rule-maker, and a student.

When was the last time you saw children playing on the streets? When was the last time this was how you learned?

Today, for children and adults alike, learning can often begin somewhere very different: in search bars, recommendation feeds, and AI-generated summaries. But while conversations about artificial intelligence increasingly revolve around productivity and efficiency, what is lost when the environments that once cultivated social and embodied learning get replaced by systems optimized for speed, convenience, and certainty? Who do we become when our theaters of social learning are outsourced, and when imagination is supplied on demand instead of cultivated through practice? How do these new technological changes reshape the conditions through which people learn, connect, and participate in the world? How do they make meaning of the various social developments happening around them? Are there capacities and skills that must stay stubbornly human even when AI can automate them and do them more efficiently?

Finally: What might this mean for a social sector whose work depends upon precisely these capacities?

For much of human history, what can be called the “developmental commons” were the streets, forests, playgrounds, libraries, and classrooms, shared social spaces where attention was exercised, imagination was stretched, relationships were formed, and, most importantly, knowledge was situated within lived experience. Today, as digital platforms are becoming some of the primary environments in which young people (and many others) learn to relate to themselves and others, we need to explore how the environments in which we spend our time shape the capacities we develop. A growing body of research shows that cognition does not occur solely within the brain, but emerges through interactions with bodies, physical environments, movement, objects, and other people. More than just receiving information, learning is also about the conditions in which knowledge is encountered and made meaningful.

So: What kind of world of learning are we creating?

1. A frictionless world has a cost.

In conservation and environment-related work, restoring the connection between humans and nature is central to a people- and planet-friendly society. Much depends on encountering the living world directly, exploring the wild, and holding its many contradictions and uncertainties. Sometimes this means rigorous scientific observations; other times, using anecdotal insights to bridge the gap between knowledge and practice. In both cases, it means experiencing friction as a feature through real-world engagement.

Can technology deepen connection with nature without becoming a substitute for it, or do we lose our sense of play and wonder when learning becomes frictionless?

Nature is part of the cognitive environment through which learning happens, not outside of it. And this insight has important implications for how we think about technology in the social sector. A community practitioner reviewing an AI-generated summary may gain access to information, but a practitioner spending time in a village, listening to stories and observing relationships, develops contextual judgement and holds local nuance that grounds that information. In many cases, the process through which knowledge is acquired is inseparable from the quality of the knowledge itself.

The challenge, therefore, is how technology can be designed and deployed in ways that strengthen, rather than displace, embodied forms of learning and engagement. Even when technology can create efficiencies and quick wins, sometimes choosing not to use it can help retain productive friction and be the more helpful choice.

For example, the Nature Conservation Foundation programs connecting people to birds have expanded from field-based learning and printed resources to include online courses, digital platforms, and tools that make bird identification more accessible to the public. These efforts have broadened participation significantly, but NCF remains guided by a simple principle: The value of technology lies in its ability to draw people back into a relationship with the natural world. There are innovations that have been able to do this successfully: Tools like Merlin, an AI-powered bird identification app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, demonstrate a different possibility for technology. But the key is that rather than replacing the experience of being outdoors, Merlin helps people identify birds they see or hear in real time, turning a moment of curiosity into a deeper encounter with the natural world.

2. AI slop is an attention problem before it is an information problem.

We are entering an era where information can be generated faster than it can be verified or meaningfully interpreted. This information abundance obviously magnifies challenges around misinformation, but also around how our attention can be used as a currency. And while the distortion of facts is an important challenge, we also need to look at which facts are being made visible to begin with.

Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf argues that the shift toward digitally mediated reading environments may be reshaping cognitive processes associated with what she calls “deep reading,” typically associated with the capacity for reflection, for cultivating empathy and critical analysis, and for encouraging inference and imaginative engagement. As information arrives in rapid, broken streams, attention itself becomes fragmented. The consequence is a diminished capacity to stay with complexity long enough for understanding to emerge.

We see the consequences of this shift emerging in different forms. Organizations working on gender equity are dealing with the growing influence of the manosphere, a loose ecosystem of influencers and online communities that rigidly frame masculinity and often promote hostile ideas about it. Generative AI and recommendation systems can accelerate the spread of such narratives, creating feedback loops in which misinformation and polarization travel faster than nuance and dialogue.

A different but equally significant concern is invisibility. Large language models learn from what is documented, digitized, and visible online, focusing on places that receive extensive media coverage, have well-documented institutional histories, and digital footprints. Information on smaller cities, local citizen movements, oral histories, and everyday governance realities often remain underrepresented. This representation inequality makes entire places, communities, and forms of knowledge invisible and absent from the systems through which people learn and make sense of the world.

This is particularly relevant for the social sector. What happens to public trust when attention, not accuracy or representation, becomes the primary currency of the digital age?

3. Social change depends on situational intelligence.

We also need to talk about recovering judgment: Once information is visible, the harder task is deciding what it means, where it belongs, and how it should shape action.

AI’s power is its ability to identify patterns across enormous volumes of information. But social change sometimes requires the opposite move. For example, a conservation practitioner deciding how to restore a watershed must understand the particular history of that landscape, the relationships between communities, the local political economy, and forms of ecological knowledge that may never appear in a dataset. Beyond commonalities, it is equally important to stay with the differences.

To this end, Tech4good Community anchors a conservation coalition program that is working with several NGOs to build shared infrastructure for ecological intelligence. They highlight that while interest in AI, analytics, and digital tools is growing rapidly across the social sector, the work they have done with many grassroots conservation organizations demonstrates that organizations today are not just demanding better technology but using that technology in a place-based and locally intelligent manner.

Generalized intelligence needs to be made useful through situational and grounded judgement, with the ability to interpret signals within specific social, ecological, and cultural realities, and to understand when a recommendation should be adapted or ignored. Most importantly, it is important to recognize what is absent from the data as much as what is present.

Learning Capacity to Be Human

This is the paradox of the moment: As intelligence becomes increasingly available on demand, the capacities that may matter are deeply human, not computational. In that sense, the vanishing developmental commons is a story about the environment and experiences we choose to lean into as a society. AI will become more capable. But can we remain intentional about preserving conditions through which people learn to pay attention, make sense of complexity, remain open to wonder, and build coherence between different ways of knowing?

For philanthropy, this may require thinking beyond technology adoption and toward capacity preservation. Supporting institutions, spaces, and practices that cultivate civic trust and value the process as much as the outcome. Perhaps choosing to preserve this inner theater could be one of the most important acts of stewardship we could undertake at this time.

HT | The Birds and the Beeps: Clicks, Chirps and Calls are Boosting Conservation Efforts

As we learn to listen more closely, the field of bioacoustics is throwing up new ways to prevent conflict and protect ecosystems, writes Rohini Nilekani.

Have you heard recordings of the curious, otherworldly sounds of whales?

I was fortunate to hear for myself the click-clicking of sperm whales, as a pod with two youngsters swam alongside us in the open Caribbean Sea. Tears overwhelmed my snorkel mask. I felt humbled and grateful for these gentle giants of the ocean, gliding peacefully beside us humans, despite so many threats from our species.

As the world wakes to the urgency of saving the 90-plus cetacean species roaming global waters, understanding how they communicate becomes critical to preventing harm, especially from marine vessels. This is where the emerging field of bioacoustics comes in.

The K Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University’s Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the only one of its kind in the world. Recently, Lea Bouffaut, a researcher there, co-authored a study showing that undersea fibreoptic cables can be repurposed as never before, to listen in to marine life using distributed acoustic sensing (DAS).

The shipping industry must listen in too.

More than 20,000 whales are killed each year by ship collision alone. If crew were alerted on time, they could simply slow down enough to avoid a fatal accident.

Many such examples were cited when Lea and Yang Center director Holger Klinck visited Delhi for a meet on the need for a bioacoustics centre in India.

At the meet, spearheaded by Robin Vijayan and his team at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Tirupati, the room held representatives from academia, government, industry and philanthropy. A day-long discussion highlighted ways in which this field could aid wildlife conservation in India.

CALL AND EFFECT

Though it originated a century ago, not too much is known about conservation bioacoustics.

It is the interdisciplinary study of sounds in nature, to understand and eventually protect species and ecosystems. Since the 1920s, when simple recorders were used to collect and analyse insect and bird calls, improvements in sensors and now AI have given the sector a boost. Today, it finds widening application in environmental sciences and in medicine.

Bioacoustics is used in cardiac surgery, targeted drug delivery and tissue engineering. In the environmental sciences, it is helping researchers “listen” to plants. Among their findings: stressed root systems may emit detectable ultrasonic clicks.

The science has for a while now been used to eavesdrop on birds. The Merlin and eBird apps developed at Cornell are used globally as field guides. Real-time sound identification, introduced in 2021, allows users to turn to these platforms to identify birds in real time, based on their call or song. eBird has famously become the world’s largest citizen-science data project. Anybody with a smartphone can use these apps to discover the joys of birdwatching, while feeding into a diverse people’s conservation movement.

In just one year, 2025, Merlin users recorded 1.36 billion bird sounds. These will feed into the third State of India’s Birds report, due out next year, which will again inform the country of the plight of its 1,350 species (and counting). Recently, a sound recording of the critically endangered Jerdon’s courser, last seen in India in 2008 and feared extinct, created a massive buzz in the birder community.

SOUND INVESTMENT

There is much more that bioacoustics can be used for in India. It could help us understand animal behaviour, prevent human-animal conflict and enhance our biodiversity.

The government of India has internationally acknowledged commitments on the protection of the environment, including the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls for halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030.

To conserve, we must monitor. So far, we are heavily dependent on imaging. If we added bioacoustics, we would gain new levels of data and precision, and find a cost-effective complement to the camera traps set up across forests and protected areas.

Newly developed Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs) could map coral reefs and dense forests where humans cannot go. The technology is moving so fast, we could realistically map soundscapes across ecospheres.

CAMPA (the national Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority) has unused funds that could be used to create new protocols for bioacoustics deployment in India. Sophisticated sensors could help track how wildlife returns, for instance, to areas where invasive species are being removed at scale. Environmental impact assessments could factor in acoustic data too.

Biodiversity is India’s strategic advantage and we should do all we can to push it.

Most importantly, bioacoustics is a key component of early warning systems to prevent human-wildlife conflict, which is rising across India. Understanding where elephants are trumpeting, tigers roaring and wild pigs snorting could enable early action to prevent human injury and death, and prevent crop loss, which is estimated at more than ₹10,000 crore annually just in Maharashtra. Indian airports, meanwhile, recorded 6,337 bird-hit incidents over the past five years. Bioacoustics could help analyse and broadcast natural communication signals to keep birds from an aircraft’s path.

India could make the journey more affordable by building its own manufacturing capacity, perhaps with help from the government’s Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF). We have the technical capability to harvest and analyse the data that would emerge, using the latest AI tools. We have the academic backbone in the environmental sciences and the societal muscle to support the deployment of bioacoustics across critical use cases.

The time is right to listen anew to the heartbeat of our country’s flora and fauna. If we succeed, we can marvel not just at the music of songbirds and whales, but the crosstalk of trees and plants. As our ancestors put it: Vriksho rakshati rakshitah. Nature protects those who protect it.

(Rohini Nilekani is chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and author of Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar: A Citizen-First Approach)

First Published in The Hindustan Times 

LiveMint | Polar bears, climate change and responsible travel in the Arctic

SUMMARY

In Svalbard, the northernmost human habitation and the fastest-warming place in the world, observing polar bears provides lessons in why it’s important to safeguard the Earth’s last wild places

I almost abandoned my Arctic adventure before it even started. Friends and family heaved a sigh of relief. Many thought my decision to swerve off to Svalbard, one of the northernmost permanently inhabited places on the planet, instead of attending a conference in Oslo, was unwise. At my age (I am only 67!), careening off alone in winter on a snowmobile, looking for the most dangerous land mammal… crazy-or so they thought.

That’s not why I nearly did not go. lsfjord Radio Hotel in Spitsbergen (the old name for Svalbard), where I had planned to stay after I flew into the Arctic Circle from Oslo, was inaccessible. It had lost all its snow in the third week of April, long before it should have. There are very few roads in Svalbard for vehicles. Snowmobiles and dogsleds are the usual mode of transport but they need ice, which has been melting faster over the past few years, making parts of this archipelago unreachable. Most tourists tour the islands on cruise boats in the summer months.

Climate change has impacted the polar regions the most. In just two decades, the glaciers of Slavbard have lost about 5% of their mass, largely, it turns out, due to warmer oceans rather than rising temperatures. At roughly 310 cubic km, this is enough meltwater to raise global sea levels by roughly 0.75-0.8mm on its own.

Not so far in the future, this sea rise will adversely affect every part of the planet.

My guide asked if I was willing to go towards the open Arctic Ocean instead. The east of Svalbard is colder and wilder, with no Gulf Stream to bring warm relief. There was plenty of ice there, with massive glaciers flanking sheets of sea ice and a tad better chance of catching polar bears. There would be no comfortable hotel-we would camp out on the top of Domen Mountain. Gently, he explained that the toilet would be two walls of ice, two holes in the ground and two Styrofoam seats, 50m from the tents.

I remained undeterred though my imagination spun wildly with all that could go wrong. Packing for Arctic temperatures, which fall to minus 20 degrees Celsius with wind chill, was itself an adventure. My survival suit would keep me dry and afloat even if I slipped into an icy hole.

As I boarded the flight from Oslo to Svalbard, after a more than usually tight hug from the husband, a general anxiety crept over me. I had felt the same two months before, on my trip to the Third Pole in the Himalayas. This was a natural fight or flight response that has safeguarded humans for millennia. Too many urbanites and digital citizens have lost fear of the untamed wild. This trepidation was my protector, and should be held with respect. So I kept my fear close to me, and stayed close to my fear.

The Arctic landing was white and smooth. At a latitude of 73 degrees, it did not feel as cold as it should have on the tarmac. “It’s been a devastating year, way too warm,” said the woman who greeted us at the airport. “Most houses here are built on stilts because of the permafrost underneath. But it is melting early and unevenly, putting our homes at risk.” It was a repeat of my recent experience in Ladakh, where unprecedented rain is making traditional mud roofs cave in. In that high-altitude desert, where snow leopards roam and blue sheep graze, there is unscientific tree planting, changing age-old weather systems.

We had a stopover at the old coal mining town of Longyearbyen, the largest settlement in this Norwegian protectorate. People don’t need special visas or permits to come to Svalbard, though some new constraints are coming in, and this little town has people of more than a hundred nationalities, most of whom know each other. There is zero crime.

On a drive that afternoon along the Advent Bay, we spotted a huge walrus, flopped unmoving on the stony shore, no doubt stuffed with clams, blissfully unafraid of curious humans. Here and there, snowy reindeer nibbled peacefully at new shoots of grass, evoking memories of Christmas.

On the cragged hillocks abutting the shore, the first little auks had already arrived for the breeding season from the north-east of Iceland. Chasing these laughing, flying black-and-white birds were Arctic foxes, like Pomeranians dressed up with bushier tails. Winter-hungry, they darted swiftly among the rocks, hoping to surprise a bird. Snow buntings, Svalbard’s only songbirds, hopped around carefully, while gulls sailed boldly overhead, and eider ducks bobbed on the calm grey water. So much life thrives where humans struggle to survive.

The dinner menu offered reindeer, seal, salmon, and whale steak. Licensed hunting is allowed here. I ordered cabbage.

Day blended into night without darkening skies in this season of perpetual daylight, and soon it was time for the real adventure to the east. Getting dressed in five layers to snowmobiles in sub-zero temperatures took almost an hour the first time. Imagine what the first hunters to settle on Svalbard must have experienced, well before modern insulated clothing.

Off we went to seek the polar bear. The stop-and-go, 8-hour journey riding pillion on a snowmobile was simply exhilarating. All around us was a continent of snow, fjords and glaciers glistening in the sun, giant clouds stooping to confuse the horizon and lifting to reveal clear skies. A white wonderland dotted with the irregular browns of jagged mountains that couldn’t hold the ice. How could any life possibly survive here in this intoxicating barrenness?

“It is unlikely you will see polar bears in the two days you are here, said my guide Piet, regretfully shaking his head as my snowmobile driver Chris nodded. “Please don’t raise your expectations. Just enjoy whatever is.” Not 2 hours after landing, we had already seen so much. My heart was nearly full. So I nodded obediently, all the while praying for more.

Soon enough, we spotted some seals, sunning next to their holes. They raise their heads rhythmically and comically every few seconds to look around, ready to escape into the deep cold waters below if a polar bear were to come by for a meal. Seals need to come up for air and must always keep several open holes, free of ice, for their survival.

We then reached a ragged bird cliff, where hundreds of northern fulmars had come up from the south for the breeding season, their warm cacophony shattering the frozen silence.

We drove down the Hayesbreen glacier, which is part of the second largest glacial system in the archipelago. We stood below layered walls of ice, formed over thousands of years, clicking cameras shifting the solid silence.

Climbing on to a plateau overlooking valleys and ranges blanketed in shades of white, we stopped for a picnic lunch. Astride a snowmobile in minus 10 degrees Celsius, boiling water poured into a packet of freeze-dried beans and squash had never tasted better. The mind expanded with the belly to devour the dazzling view, infinitely fulfilled.

We finally reached the East Coast, driving dizzily fast across the frozen ice reaching the Arctic Ocean. A few startling bumps made me grateful for my yoga training as I leaned in and away from edgy slopes. Stopping to gape in wonder, we did a quick scan for polar bears.

Just then, Piet called out, “There’s something out there in the distance. One big, two small.” Could it be the mother and cubs they had seen earlier? Our binoculars disappointingly revealed three dark shapes. We needed yellowish white.

Let’s go check anyway, we decided. Piet took a last look at the ice behind as we started moving.

“I think it’s a bear,” he whispered. A magnificent male appeared as a dot on the horizon, pale yellow fur moving closer and closer across the ice. You think you know how big your first polar bear will appear, but they are even bigger-1,500 kg of muscle and blubber, nonchalantly cruising at 6km an hour.

We stayed with this animal at a safe distance for hours. We watched him dig furiously around an abandoned hut, and leave disappointed. When we checked later, the bear had pulled out a whale bone the size of a door, probably 200 years old, from the whaling era.

We decided to turn back to check out our earlier sighting. Just then, Chris shouted, “Good God, there is another bear!”

Sure enough, another powerful male in all his white glory, shuffled across the ice towards us in perfect golden light, gracing us with his incredible beauty.

Except that he was heading towards our makeshift camp. Keeping in mind laws that forbid humans to go closer than 500m to a bear, our guides expertly drove around the relentless bear, creating a barrier between his path and our safety. He seemed to understand. After a bit of head bobbing, the bear took another route.

For a moment, we stood still, mesmerised by the shifting light. Christiane Ritter, one of the first women to winter in the archipelago, describes it best in her never out of print 1938 book, A Woman in the Polar Night: “I divine the ultimate salvation before which all human reasoning dissolves into nothing.”

The sun swung low in the sky, though it would not set in this season. Reluctant as a child called back for dinner from the playground, I found myself outside the tiny tented camp, a wisp of smoke billowing out of the makeshift kitchen. Welcome home, said the East Camp team, bringing tears to my eyes. How many audacious hunters, trappers and travellers over the past 300 years, might have longed for such words when they had to set down for a rest in this forbidding land.

The crew prepared delicious hot lentils for supper, which we consumed sitting on the floor around a furnace. Soon, a stretcher was unfolded and a sleeping bag spread over. “Sweet dreams,” said Chris. “Cover your eyes. Do not step out without calling out; someone will be up watching out for bears.”

We were to set off back for Longyearbyen after another day on the coast, but the weather had other plans for us. A snowstorm set in as we were sleeping, the winds howling and the loose tent flaps tapping an uneven beat. The furnace gave up at some point, and I was grateful for the miracle of modern sleeping bags.

We hastily packed up everything after breakfast. Our camp team would dismantle the tents and the toilet after us to leave no trace behind.

The snowfall in the light, bright morning felt warm to my face. Until we got on to the snowmobiles, that is. Cold drafts whipped past my helmet and neck warmer, despite the wall of Chris in front of me. The storm enveloped us in mists that reduced visibility to zero. Hoping to outrace the weather, guided by GPS, we sped at 60kmph over glaciers older than human memory. I ignored my panic and simply surrendered to the void. Such white-outs were what I would imagine during my meditation sessions. Now that visualisation would become memory.

A couple of hours later, we were suddenly out in open fields of snow, the sky glittering and the mountains shimmering with a light perhaps found nowhere else on the planet. We stopped at lofty sculptural ice forms carved from broken glaciers, halted to gasp at frozen waterfalls, played “Spot the ptarmigan”, as the stunning black-and-white birds merged into the snow patched mountains.

Small huts dotted the landscape, made just from Siberian driftwood. Nothing decomposes in the Arctic, everything is preserved. These huts were used until recently by those with Spitsbergen Mania, as the madness that draws humans here is called. Precious stories are still shared of the many ships and men lost to this brutal environment. They seem to deter no one.

FAR-REACHING IMPACT

What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. The ice melt I witnessed is a major driver of global sea-level rise and other climate shifts that affect many parts of the globe, including India. Earlier, research was focused on atmospheric surface temperatures as the main contributor to the glacial melt. Yet recent evidence suggests that warming sea waters accelerate the melting of polar ice sheets much faster than scientists expected. As these hidden processes, which happen at the underside of the glaciers, have been underestimated in past reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global sea levels are now projected to rise faster and more unpredictably. Low-lying cities on India’s 11,000km coastline housing around 360 million people, could be inundated decades earlier than anticipated.

Take Mumbai, for example. By 2100, the local sea waters may rise as much as 50-100 cm. Without adaptation measures, this will wreak havoc on India’s most important commercial hub. What is of equal significance is that Arctic-driven changes in atmospheric circulation are affecting weather patterns. A recent Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology study links declining Arctic Sea ice with a westward shift and intensification of the Indian monsoon, boosting late-season rainfall over western India, and leaving central parts of the country with dry spells. Less ice in June and July in Svalbard means stronger rainfall in Mumbai or tidal flooding in Surat in September and October.

These polar disruptions will cause other structural risks in India. More than 50% of our arable land depends on rainfall, and predictable monsoon patterns.

Unseasonal drought followed by unexpected deluges can destroy crop yields. Warming seas also affect fishing and marine livelihoods. Staple fish like the Indian sardine and mackerel are moving deeper into the ocean or moving northwards in the Arabian Sea to flee warming waters. The temperature rise also affects the biological clock of many species, resulting in egg decay before hatching. Aquaculture and shrimp farming is critical for India’s seafood export revenues. Rising sea levels bring saltwater into marine estuaries, destroying the fragile ecosystem, bringing disease and die-offs.

As part of its adaptation strategy against polar ice and permafrost melt, India conducts year-round research to build predictive models for agriculture and water resilience planning at its Himadri Station within the leased facility at the international research settlement in Svalbard. Food security has been a major focus for India, and decades of progress could be reversed with the climate risks posed by the ice sheet melt far away in the Arctic.

THE LAST SURPRISE

On the final evening in Longyearbyen, I had a request: Could we see beluga whales from the bay? “Not at this time of the year,” said Piet, though I could see the small cruise boats already lined up for the summer. “But I will take a look, for you,” he said. In a minute, he uttered his first curse: “Holy s***, there’s a white beauty right there!”

And so, the belugas graced us with their hypnotic sea dance, domes cresting and sinking in the grey-blue waters against an iridescent sky.

The plankton they feed on were building up in the bay, and soon hundreds of belugas would provide unending pleasure to the thousands of tourists to arrive to shores where barely 3,000 people live.

How much tourism is too much? Back in Oslo, after unloading my winterwear and my fear, I read that the Norwegian government has recently limited the number of ships and passengers, with special rules to protect the flora and fauna of the fragile archipelago. The great north has suddenly emerged as a destination of choice for wealthy travellers. There is worry that overtourism will engulf the ecosystem.

That made me examine my own motivation and privilege. Should everyone with the means go wherever they can on the planet? In her later years, Ritter said, “A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone. Then you will come to realise what’s important in life and what isn’t.”

Would she say that today? Probably not. Stronger policies, laws and resolve might be needed to secure our planet’s bio resources. In my defence, I can say this for certain: my short, wild adventure of a lifetime has made me ever more committed to the conservation of our biodiversity, and to carry the stories so that more people can fall in love and rise in awe at the magnificence of our planetary home.

Insuring food for the future: The Global Seed Vault

The very first stop we made in Svalbard, even before checking into the hotel in Longyearbyen, was the Global Seed Vault, cut deep into a mountain of ice and black rock. Launched in February 2008 by the Norwegian government and managed in partnership with Crop Trust and Nordic Genetic Resource Center, it is the world’s largest secure seed storage, holding over 1.3 million seed accessions-each a unique genetic fingerprint of a crop variety-with room for millions more.

To think that the future of human food may rest within its vaults filled me with awe and gratitude. Its fac;ade rising like the prows of the cruise ships dotting the coastline, the Global Seed Vault is made of black steel that will turn red over the years, like the changing landscapes of the Arctic itself.

Spitsbergen Island in Svalbard was chosen for its low tectonic activity and permafrost. There is no small irony in the fact that the very coal once mined locally is among the forces threatening that permafrost today. This makes the preservation of seeds all the more vital: plant breeders will need access to a vast range of genetic diversity to develop new varieties suited to a warming world of more droughts and more pests.

Duplicate seeds arrive from around the world as insurance. There are roughly 1,700 gene banks globally, but many deposit extra copies at here. When political crisis struck Syria and destroyed local stores, scientists were able to reclaim their seeds from the vault and begin again. No wonder it is also called the Doomsday Vault.

Three-fourths of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and five animal species. Maize, rice and wheat account for nearly half the calories consumed by humans. In the past, farmers grew tens of thousands of varieties of each crop.

Before India’s Green Revolution, 100,000-200,000 varieties of rice were in circulation-though accounting for regional synonyms, scholars believe 110,000 distinct varieties were cultivated. Today, only 6,000-7,000 survive. India’s own seed vault sits at Chang La in Ladakh.

In October 2024, ICRISAT-an agricultural research institute in Hyderabad-deposited 2,950 seeds of 56 species, including pearl millet, sorghum and 28 wild relatives of the peanut, nine of which were new to the vault. It was part of a deposit of 30,000 new samples from 23 institutions in 21 countries.

Even in their dormant state, seeds are not truly inert. Pathogenic microorganisms-microbes and fungi-travel with them, and their microbiome continues to interact with its environment despite the -18° Celsius temperature in the vault. Research is underway to understand the significance and risks of these organisms, which will be unleashed alongside the seeds when they are finally needed.

The exchange of seeds has long been central to community farming, but industrial agriculture shifted toward ownership and patenting. Norwegian law prohibits the storing of genetically modified seeds, but some environmentalists worry that the vault could serve the interests of global elites in a future crisis.

Yet farmers world over have joined the project with open hearts. In 2017, Peruvian farmers deposited their sacred potato seeds, singing and dancing as they said farewell to their “endangered children.” Art soon followed-and today, an abandoned coal mine hosts the Svalbard Seed Cultures Ark. Both art and seeds continue to come to these icy shores as messages of hope and trust.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE LIVEMINT 

IE | The Tadoba-Andhari model: Balancing rising tiger populations with human costs

It is tiger time in India. All over the country, across at least 25 of the 58 tiger reserves, millions of people across economic classes and geographies are on the move despite the summer heat. Piling into jeeps, fancy SUVs, or forest department buses, and armed with mobile phones, point and click cameras or dangerously long lenses, they must jostle for just the right angle while hushing little children and girding for the unexpected bumps in the jungle. All to catch a glimpse of arguably the world’s most striking predator, globally seen almost nowhere else in the wild. When safari goers finally spot a stripe, the mood of the entire vehicle changes. People get a recognisable “tiger face”, a mixture of awe, delight and smugness. Passersby just know, and experience FOMO in turn.

We were particularly lucky recently in the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR) in Maharashtra, when a two-day trip led us to 10 individual tigers, including the famous Junabai with her four young cubs.

It led me to understand that TATR is somewhat of an outlier among tourist-friendly tiger reserves. First and foremost, the terrible news. TATR witnesses lethal human-tiger conflict. There are about 10 tiger-related human deaths a year in TATR alone, and around 45 in its district of Chandrapur. Add to that the cattle deaths from wild animal attacks, and we can understand just how vulnerable local communities feel.

TATR has around 100 tigers. There have been no reported conflict deaths in the core zone of 625 square kilometres, from where entire villages have been voluntarily relocated over the past decades. Despite strict control over numbers, 1,17,000 tourists drove safely through the core in the past year alone.

Tiger numbers in Tadoba-Andhari keep growing, a metric of successful tiger conservation. However, that means that tigers must keep dispersing beyond the buffer zone, itself more than 1,000 square kilometres, with 95 inhabited villages and a population of 1.25 lakh. Yet, 2,63,000 tourists took their chances at wildlife sightings in the buffer last year.

Despite the conflict, there appears to be unusual stability in the tiger reserve. The Forest Department there routinely refines its management practices. It is very quick to release the compensation for both human and cattle deaths. More importantly, it has tried to ensure that locals have a solid stake in forests and tourism. All tiger reserves are mandated to do that by the NTCA, but much innovation has been initiated or imported into TATR.

Without local co-operation, no wildlife reserve can even operate. The farmers around the Nagarahole tiger reserve in Karnataka recently demonstrated their angst against tiger-related conflict by causing a shutdown of all tourism facilities for six months in the prime season. It did not solve the conflict problem. Yet it caused immense loss to the local tourist economy and the public exchequer, as some parks like Kabini are run by a government monopoly. Now, a new compromise is being crafted where all stakeholders can see some benefit.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel.

In TATR, as in many well-managed parks in Madhya Pradesh, a win-win has long been orchestrated. Thanks to earlier visionary bureaucrats, there has been genuine financial decentralisation. That process continues to be strengthened today. Many villagers, especially those relocated from the core areas, benefit from the booming tourism economy. At least half the households get direct employment from the forest department itself, with 400 locals as safari guides alone. It supports value-added forest produce collection with honey and amla sales. It invests in zero-waste management employing women workers. It conducts safety protocol training and school trips for thousands of children to appreciate nature and wildlife. Booking for safaris is easy online, regulated within the carrying capacity of the forest across 22 gates. A significant proportion of the ticket revenues of Rs 40 crore a year is redistributed locally to reduce wildlife conflict, improve livelihoods and increase awareness. Poaching is now negligible, as a tiger is worth more alive than dead.
TATR has ambitious plans to build strategic partnerships for moving the tourism focus beyond just tigers. The field director spoke of agrotourism, stargazing, cycling, boating, ayurvedic spas and butterfly parks. TATR has its own water bottling plant, again creating employment locally, and dispatches glass water bottles with every tourist to avoid single-use plastics.

The young guide who accompanied us agreed that the strategy was working reasonably well. While some villagers lament the more restricted access into the core forest for mahua and other minor forest produce, most accept the trade-off for more stable income, and better access to modern infrastructure – especially broadband.

Naturally, there remain many problems to solve. For example, like all reserves, TATR must rethink ubiquitous water hole projects. These add unnatural numbers to the prey base and the predator population, leading to the conflict nobody needs. We cannot take for granted villagers around these protected areas who have centuries of cultural practices, belief systems and lived experience that allow them to bear the burden of protecting our biodiversity.

Urbanites cannot live with spiders, let alone tigers. Yet, we drive defensively on our chaotic streets and highways, knowing deep within that we could still become a statistic like the 1,60,000 people who die in road accidents in India each year. We know we need vehicles, but we must better manage people-traffic movement to achieve maximum mobility with minimum fatalities. Equally, India understands that we need our tigers and our biodiversity, even if we use only economic logic to show how it contributes billions of rupees of ecosystem services annually. We must aim for maximum natural capital regeneration with minimum loss of life. TATR shows one of many paths to co-existence with potentially dangerous wildlife that make all our lives worth living.

The writer is Chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and the author of ‘Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar – A Citizen First Approach’

The article was first published in The Indian Express 

HT | Claw and order: Rohini Nilekani writes on tracing snow leopards in Ladakh

It’s a search that must extend higher into the peaks, as lynxes, blue sheep and the Shaan or ghost of the mountains battle an unseasonably warm March.

Heated vests, gloves and socks. Trapper hat, puffer jacket and thermals.

I had packed for the harshest winter Ladakh might spring on me in March, which is typically one of the coldest months of the year — and one of the best times to catch the ghost of the mountains, the Shaan or snow leopard, the main attraction in my journey to the top of the world.

As it turned out, I could have packed lighter. “In my lifetime, I have not seen a March as warm as this,” said 62-year-old Tsering Dolker, sitting in a sunny courtyard in the union territory’s capital city of Leh. “And yet, it is good to not wear heavy winter clothes,” she added with a smile, as she guided younger colleagues weaving a woollen rug.

Dolker now earns a living adding value to the wool in Ladakh instead, as entrepreneurs proudly reassert the weaves of the region. (Using, incidentally, the traditional backstrap loom, a mobile device used by nomadic communities that gets its name from the belt that attaches it to its user.)

Unlike Dolker, the snow leopards, wolves and blue sheep are moving in the opposite direction, higher up the mountains, as the weather becomes unseasonably warm.

There is less snow, and more rain, in this high-altitude desert region now, wreaking havoc on mud houses intelligently designed for a different and stable weather pattern. People and animals alike are dealing with landslides, floods and simultaneous water scarcity.

This Third Pole, home to thousands of glaciers, has the largest ice reserves outside the Arctic and Antarctic. It is warming at nearly twice the global average rate. No one can accurately predict what might come next. And the repercussions will be felt far beyond Ladakh.

SPOT CHECK

Climate is not the only change in the region. The sizeable presence of the army and police forces in this sensitive border area brings with it more roads and vehicles, more buildings and waste, and more demand for water and other resources. Add to that the post-pandemic tourism boom, driven by some of the new infrastructure links, and one now has urban noise that shatters the once-throbbing silence of this ancient land.

So it was with a deep feeling of gratitude for what remains that we made our way higher into the mountains, following the blue sheep and their predators. Along the way, our eyes fell on gleaming lilac and jade mountain slopes, capped by snowy white peaks. The unusual yet strangely familiar sight of stone-studded towers, undulating sheet rock and bizarre limestone formations rising above the Indus and Zanskar rivers roused an ancient sleeping memory in the bones. Perhaps that’s why they call it the Magic Land.

Most magical was the sight of our first snow leopard, silhouetted on the ridge of a hill in Rumbak Valley. Oblivious to our presence, his distance turned intimate by the giant lens of our camera, we watched the Shaan mark his territory, cast his gaze over the blue sheep grazing on precipitous slopes below, and silently disappear.

We were doubly lucky the following day, as we drove into Wari La to spend time with a family of Eurasian lynx, the rarest of rare wild cats (known to be even harder to spot than the snow leopard). We sighted a mother and two cubs, so well-camouflaged against the slopes that one had to refocus the eyes multiple times to identify the distinctive ears and light movement that gave away their presence. High above them, golden eagles soared and dived on the wind, while yellow-billed choughs and brilliantly tinted magpies hopped on the ground, looking for food.

TRAIL MIX

Ladakh is home to creatures found nowhere else in India, and preserving their habitats becomes increasingly crucial yet more difficult by the year.

One of the largest threats comes from feral dogs that wander freely across hills and human settlements. They hunt in packs, and transmit canine distemper to wild animals. Snow leopards are not immune to the disease, or to attacks. In just the three days I spent in Leh, a snow leopard assaulted by dogs died at the local government rescue centre.

Animal birth-control programmes have done little to control the feral-dog population. Amid bitter, polarised debate, and a Wildlife Protection Act penned in different circumstances, in 1972, India stands unresolved when it comes to the question of how to deal with unchecked population growth in certain species across the country.

Ladakh, for now, remains a land of culturally embedded co-existence. Even when wolves and snow leopards kill the sheep and goats on which so much of the region’s pastoral economy depends, there is typically no anger or grandstanding. Farmers hand the animal over to the forest department, unharmed, and claim compensation for the sheep killed, at half the market rate.

This is a land of harsh terrains and gentle people, still deeply influenced by the teachings of the Buddha, a senior police officer explained.

Reluctantly back in Bengaluru, I unpacked my unused winter gear, breathing in lungsful of air that held more oxygen but far more pollution too. A paradox quite like the one facing Ladakh, caught between the weft of ancient wisdom and the warp of modern ambition.

Like its famous blue sheep, the region now stands at a precipice. Which way will it choose to leap?

ET | Time to Unlock Silver Abundance

Synopsis: India is still seen as a young country, but its demographic advantage is nearing an end, with the share of working-age population set to decline after 2030 and the elderly population expected to rise sharply. By 2047, India will have around 300 million senior citizens, and within decades could have the world’s largest ageing population.

Do you believe India is a young country? If you quickly answered yes, you would be right. But not for long. The silver economy in India is misunderstood as merely healthcare and nursing homes. Yet it is an $8.7 billion market and growing.

India is at the end phase of its demographic dividend. From 2030 onwards, the ratio of the working age population to the dependent population will start to decline. In 2047, 300 million senior citizens will wave the national flag for India’s 100th anniversary! Twenty years later, we will have the largest population of older adults in the world. It is time to shift our mental model.

This past January in Davos, I was part of a panel discussion on longevity. My co-panellist enthusiastically drew us a vision where science would soon catch up with the ancient human desire for immortality. People would live for 150 years, and then up to 500 years. Like some jellyfish and newts, humans would then crack the code for DNA repair, and live almost indefinitely.

Death is a bug, not a feature, some longevity champions have declared. Being rather old myself, at 66 years, I expressed some concern whether the people around us, especially younger ones, would really like us to live that long. My mother-in-law, Durga Nilekani, passed away peacefully in February at the age of 101. We miss her dearly, but she would always say with a gentle smile, “100 is too much.”

Living longer feels less important than living better. Nevertheless, the race to eternal life might yield many medical miracles on the way for longer healthspans. Already, advances in diagnostics, pharma, genetics and immunotherapy are

delaying death due to disease. What more does the future hold?

How to age well

Recently, in Bengaluru, we convened a crosssector group of scientists, media professionals and social leaders to ask a simple but profound question: what does it take to age well in India? The consensus was clear: ageing is not a problem to be solved, but a societal invitation to reimagine our systems, narratives and institutions.

To do this, we must look at the interplay of Samaaj (Society), Sarkaar (State) and Bazaar (Market). While the state provides infrastructure and policy, and society provides care and connection, it is the market that has the untapped potential to reshape the narrative and possibilities for ageing in India.

Are our markets and media failing our elders? A study of 2,500 Indian advertisements found that older adults are either invisible or depicted as frail, dependent and technophobic nearly half the time. In our films and OTT platforms, they are rarely the complex, vibrant people they are in real life; they are cranky, bedridden, or superhuman.

This is more than just bad marketing; it is a dangerous reinforcement of internalised ageism. When we absorb the story that old age is synonymous with diminishment, we begin to live it. There is a massive economic opportunity to change this version. Can we have more 80-year-olds who love adventure, retired executives who mentor startups, or grandmothers as mental health counsellors?

One of the most startling insights from our Bengaluru meeting was the “40-to-1 mismatch”. For every job opportunity available to those who have stepped away from full-time careers, 40 people are still waiting. This may be a structural failure in our markets. Often, HR departments have younger gatekeepers who filter out older candidates based on outdated assumptions about energy or tech-savviness.

Forward-thinking organisations are beginning to see an “experience dividend”. They frame it as the highest “wisdom per rupee” investment. Older workers bring institutional memory, steadiness and a unique ability to mentor younger teams. At last, some innovation has arrived. Startups like Silver Talkies are creating vibrant social and economic hubs for elders, while platforms like The Elders or WisdomCircle connect retired professionals with companies looking for niche expertise. Even large-scale industries are experimenting with “phased retirement” or advisory roles that keep the “wisdom” in the building while providing the flexibility older professionals desire.

Seniors as consumers

The silver economy in India is misunderstood as merely healthcare and nursing homes. Yet it is an $8.7 billion market and growing. For example, Antara Senior Living reimagines residential spaces as active, socially connected communities. Khyaal offers holistic care, from digital literacy to financial security, tailored for Indian seniors.

These for-profit innovations are essential because they treat older adults as consumers with agency, not recipients of charity. When brands and storytellers see the 225 million people above the age of 55 as a constituency worth speaking to, change will accelerate.

Maybe there is too much of a data gap. Our healthcare system is currently oriented toward sickness—we measure what is broken, not what is thriving. The Bharat Study (Biomarkers for Healthy Ageing) at IISc is a vital step toward establishing India-specific baselines for wellness. We need to understand why Indians age the way they do, factoring in our unique genetics, diet and environment.

Maybe then the market can move from the current fragmented specialist care towards a more integrated model that brings back the “family physician” empowered with 21st century tech.

We cannot talk about growing old in India without speaking about women. Women’s ageing is distinct, marked by physiological and social inflection points like menopause, widowhood and caregiving burdens.

In India, elders contribute $68 billion to the GDP and provide 16 million hours of caregiving annually. Much of this labour is performed by women, yet remains invisible in our economic data. A gender-sensitive approach to ageing is not just a social priority but an economic one.

We are in the early stages of a field in formation. India’s youth bulge will soon become a longevity imperative.

If we get ahead of the curve, we can unlock a new social abundance. Older adults can be happy and productive with a lower environmental footprint.

India’s preparation for the inevitable must start now, in our boardrooms, our media houses and our hearts. In many ways, our society could not fully benefit from the demographic dividend we enjoyed for years! Too many young people were left waiting at the door. We cannot let them down twice.

First Published in The Economic Times 

SSIR | Does Everything in the Social Sector Need to Scale?

by Tanya Kak

For at least two decades, one question has structured much of how philanthropy and the social innovation ecosystem think about change: Can it scale? The question appears in grant applications, accelerator programs, and strategy documents. It makes sense: If a solution works for one community, surely the ethical imperative is to help many more? In a world of vast unmet needs, scale promises efficiency, reach, and speed.

Yet something curious has happened as this logic has spread. Increasingly, promising ideas, organizations, and forms of collective action are all filtered through the same lens, held to the same standard. If it cannot scale, why would it be worth investing in?

This assumption has reshaped the architecture of civil society. It has influenced what kinds of organizations get funded, what kinds of knowledge are valued, and even how social problems themselves are defined. But as geopolitical instability grows, inequality deepens, and social systems fracture in new ways—as the world, in short, ceases to behave like a scalable system—it is time to ask the uncomfortable question: Must all social innovation be designed to scale? Where does “scale thinking” make sense, and where must we re-imagine our way of thinking about progress and innovation?

When Scale Is the Only Default Logic

Scale has become such a powerful organizing idea in philanthropy and development because, at its core, scale thinking is built around growth: the idea that a successful system is one that can reach far more people without a proportional increase in resources. In this framing, the most valuable solutions are those that can expand rapidly while maintaining efficiency. Measurement therefore becomes inseparable from design. If growth is the goal, the ability to demonstrate growth, through metrics such as users reached, households served, hectares restored, or units delivered, becomes central to how value is assessed.

This orientation toward scale has deep roots in development practice. Over the past three decades, governments and development institutions have increasingly searched for replicable models that can be transferred across geographies. Microfinance is one of the most cited examples. What began as locally embedded lending groups evolved into large-scale financial systems serving millions of clients worldwide, supported by standardized metrics such as repayment rates and borrower numbers.

These proof points have guided many of the trends that we now see around scale thinking in the social sector. If an intervention works in one place, the next question quickly becomes whether it can be replicated elsewhere at scale.

Yet researchers studying social innovation suggest that impact spreads through multiple pathways. They distinguish between scaling out (replication across sites), scaling up (influencing policies and institutions), and scaling deep (shifting relationships, cultural norms, and local practices). Other scholars describe scaling wide, where ideas spread through decentralized networks rather than a single expanding organization.

Each pathway has its own role to play. However, operational demands of scale thinking require one to think about some of the building blocks consistently: replicability, standardization, and measurable outputs. The implication is often that complex social processes may need to be simplified into stable models that can travel across contexts, often referred to as “datafication of civil society” by sociologists.

In practice, this can shape which kinds of solutions are prioritized, which organizations receive support, and how social problems themselves come to be defined.

Community organizing, collective stewardship, and cultural shifts rarely translate into easily tracked metrics. For example, take the case of watershed restoration. Building check dams and recharge structures can scale quickly across districts and produce impressive numbers, such as hectares treated and structures built. But whether those gains last often depends on something less visible: local agreements about groundwater use, crop choices in dry years, or who decides when a borewell goes deeper. These decisions are negotiated through trust, local institutions, and leadership within communities. Often harder to count, but they often determine whether resilience endures.

The question, then, is what do we stand to lose if scale thinking becomes the predominant lens of looking at social change? When scalability matters, what kinds of change can it meaningfully carry? What might progress look like if impact were judged not only by how far a solution travels, but also by how well it strengthens the systems around it: the communities, ecosystems, and institutions that allow change to endure?

A World That No Longer Behaves Like a Scalable System

The limits of scale thinking are becoming clearer as the world itself becomes less predictable. Climate volatility, geopolitical fragmentation, and economic shocks are producing systems that behave less like stable machines and more like living ecosystems. In such conditions, solutions designed once and replicated everywhere can quickly reach their limits. What communities need is the capacity to adapt: to learn, reorganize, and respond as circumstances change.

Societies rarely transform through replication alone. Change more often emerges from ecosystems of actors, relationships, and institutions that learn, negotiate, and adapt within specific places. When innovation begins with the realities of people and landscapes, rather than with the assumption that solutions must scale, different possibilities come into view.

For philanthropy, the task may not be to simply support what works at scale, but to cultivate the conditions in which many forms of change can take root. One way to think about this is through navigation. In uncertain waters, ships matter. But ships alone cannot chart the course. They rely on lighthouses that illuminate shifting terrain and bridges that connect otherwise isolated efforts. Civil society increasingly needs this kind of infrastructure: institutions that help actors see the landscape clearly and work together across it. Yet philanthropy still tends to fund the ships (the organizations delivering visible programs) while the quieter systems that help the fleet navigate together remain underbuilt.

What Philanthropy Can Do Differently

  1. Fund the bridges. Philanthropy can invest more deliberately in social infrastructure: convening platforms, shared governance systems, and knowledge networks that allow many actors to collaborate. The Ecological Restoration Alliance, for instance, brings together restoration practitioners, scientists, and community organizations to develop shared protocols and learning systems across landscapes. Rather than scaling a single organization, the alliance strengthens the field’s ability to act collectively.
  2. Back technology that communities steward. Digital platforms can scale while still centering community agency. The local disaster mapping effort in Indonesia, which builds on participatory disaster-mapping approaches pioneered by platforms like PetaBencana, enables citizens to report hazards in real time and contribute to open disaster maps used by communities and governments. The technology works precisely because it is co-designed with users and embedded in local response systems rather than imposed from above.
  3. Invest in the commons. Shared resources such as open data systems, restoration protocols, training networks, and collaborative tools often act as the soil from which innovation grows. One example is CoRE Stack, developed by the Commons Tech Foundation, which provides open, modular digital infrastructure designed specifically for community-led organizations. Rather than building proprietary platforms, CoRE Stack focuses on shared digital public goods, identity systems, registries, consent layers, and governance protocols that many actors can adapt for their own contexts. Funding such commons-based infrastructure enables diverse organizations to collaborate and innovate without each having to build their own technology from scratch.
  4. Build the missing middle. Between grassroots organizations and large global institutions sits a fragile but critical layer of intermediaries: regional networks, knowledge hubs, and field-building organizations that translate ideas across contexts. These actors mentor emerging groups, document learning, and maintain collaboration across ecosystems of practice. For example, the Consortium for Agroecological Transformation exemplifies this approach by supporting networks of farmers, researchers, and grassroots organizations to transition agricultural landscapes toward agroecology.

Looking Beyond Scale

Scale thinking has its place. Some challenges, such as mass vaccination campaigns, disaster early-warning systems, or digital infrastructure for financial inclusion, depend on solutions that can move rapidly across vast populations.

But many of the transformations we now seek from restoring degraded landscapes to rebuilding social trust do not travel in quite the same way. They are shaped slowly on the ground: through experiments that falter before they succeed, through neighbors learning how to respond together in moments of stress, and through local civil society organizations that stay present long after the urgency of a crisis fades. Over time, these everyday negotiations over water, livelihoods, risk, and responsibility begin to form something more durable. Because when crises arrive, systems rarely rise to the occasion overnight; they rise to the level of readiness that has quietly been built in ordinary times, through relationships, trust, and shared norms.

In a world defined by complexity and uncertainty, the task ahead may lie as much in cultivating these enabling conditions as in expanding solutions themselves—strengthening the lighthouses and bridges that help the whole fleet find its way.

First Published in the SSIR 

Alliance Mag | Saving citizenship

Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar: Three Hindi words and a simple theory to stabilise our civic equilibrium

Inevitably perhaps, the world is churning. As this special feature makes clear, fears around declining democracy, failing institutions, and accelerating climate risk abound, and at first glance there are no easy answers. That said, after three decades working in the philanthropic sector, I believe there are pathways forward.

For those unfamiliar with philanthropic work, it is grounded in the Indian context, and my focus has long been on developing a unified theory that describes interactions between three pillars of contemporary humanity. Taken from the Hindi, these pillars are,
Samaaj (Society), Sarkaar (State), and Bazaar (Markets), and I propose that healthy democracies need a strong, active samaaj, or civil society, to balance and guide the sarkaar and bazaar towards collective action and public good.

In this sense, I believe that samaaj has always been our foundation, and states and markets were created to help society scale more effectively and equitably. Importantly, this model depends on states and markets remaining accountable to society, and this is where I
see our contemporary equilibrium failing.

The role of citizens

Reflecting on this, and attempting to rectify the pattern in practice, is something I have since dedicated my time to. Through various philanthropic portfolios, including Access to Justice, Gender, Climate and Environment, we try to empower moral leadership to take on complex challenges, and we partner with both governments and corporations to ensure holistic engagement.

As a result, we’ve seen that when philanthropy supports good ideas, individuals, and institutions with trust and patience, it inspires citizens to exercise their civic muscle for societal missions— and we find these align the incentives of samaaj, sarkaar, and bazaar most fully.

Such stories in our sector are, however, increasingly rare, and as a foundation we’ve begin to see the seminal role of society routinely undermined by all-too-powerful states and markets. We, the people, seem to be market consumers or subjects of the state first, and citizens second, and I find this deeply troubling.

For me, this is the primary reason for the decline of civic institutions we are witnessing, because good governance is something that cannot be consumed, but must be co-created. To that end, just as healthy markets are not a given and must be regulated, so I believe citizenship is not an inborn virtue, but must be cultivated, and that is the task ahead.

Restoring the balance

Philanthropy can play a supporting but bold role to restore this balance. To do this effectively, it must be aware of its own distorting power and be prepared to take the role of scaffolding, not architect.

By doing so, it can help imagine the institutions needed to manage new problems; enable leadership building at every region, age, and level; and can quietly support citizen-owned voluntary movements in adaptation against disasters and economic disruption. It
can help restore the primacy of ‘Samaaj’.

Looking to the future, in my country, India, the social sector faces increasingly strict government regulation while a generation of enlightened social leaders, continue to age. Philanthropy is expanding, yes, but not at the rate needed to drive innovation at scale, yet new philanthropists free from the burdens of legacy can bring much-needed transformation.

Here, new wealth is already exploring solutions in areas including energy transition, AI for education and agriculture, urban design, and more, and importantly, Indian philanthropy is also looking outward, globally, to exchange emerging ideas in a world where power may be shifting from the axes of the past century. This gives me hope, and this hope becomes my new religion. Perhaps it is the only religion that can unite rather than divide humanity and spark the energy needed to dispel inertia. In times like these, hope can be the societal fuel to lift us past the headwinds to come.

The future is unwritten.

First Published in The Allaince Magazine 

IE | Rohini Nilekani writes: Indian philanthropy can step in to mitigate climate disasters’ effects

Whether in education, healthcare, skill building, agriculture or any other sector, there are severe climate adjacencies that will have to be addressed urgently. Philanthropy can provide both the high-risk capital and the patient capital needed to rethink the future.

Can you recall when you last sent a cheque to organisations for disaster relief? If this question were put up 20 years ago, many readers might have responded positively. Unfortunately, since then, we have been witnessing “disaster fatigue” in the country. This is not surprising, yet it is alarming. Just when disasters have become concurrent and continuous throughout the year, people are withdrawing their generosity.

At my philanthropic foundation, we recently released a report, commissioned with Dalberg, titled ‘Resilience — Moving beyond surviving climate disasters to supporting communities to thrive’. We hope it will help shift the mental model in India towards anticipatory action and funding. Climate change has arrived  in all our lives, affecting vulnerable communities in particular.

In 2023, 85 per cent of districts experienced floods, droughts, or cyclones. From the Himalayas to the coastline, every region is at risk. Extreme weather events, including severe heat, occurred on 86 per cent of days that year. If the trend lines and modelling we have showcased are any indication, we must be prepared for much worse. The economic toll of these events is severe. The nationwide annual losses were $12 billion, and for poor households, it can be up to 85 per cent of their annual income from just one disaster. We argue in the report that there is no choice left but to build better community-level resilience. India has made remarkable progress in saving lives during cyclones and floods. But that is no longer enough. People want to thrive, not just survive.

To build resilience, we need to reimagine development, such as rethinking dam design, and building trust and capacity at a local level to enable the needed response in the samaaj before and after a disaster strikes. Sarkaar at the local level has to be financially empowered; the bazaar can step in meaningfully. Global evidence shows such investments are sound. Every $1 invested in risk reduction and adaptation can save up to $15 in post-disaster response and recovery.

There is much innovation on the ground waiting to be scaled. SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) has pioneered a heat insurance scheme that triggers automatic payouts when extreme heat beyond 40°C persists for two consecutive days. It operates in three states with 50,000 women members. The Council on Energy, Environment and Water has created a climate and heat risk atlas for the country and works closely with governments to build implementable action plans. ASAR and Equinoct have helped communities in Ernakulam, Kerala document tidal flooding that impacts lakhs of people. SEEDS (Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society) has innovated an AI-enabled e-disaster wallet that allows communities to authenticate their potential asset losses before an event, so that government and philanthropy aid can flow more seamlessly post any event.
Whether in education, healthcare, skill building, agriculture or any other sector, there are climate adjacencies that will have to be addressed urgently. Philanthropy can provide both the high-risk capital and the patient capital needed to rethink the future.

So far, we have responded to disasters with a top-down, standardised approach. Governments work for communities, not enough with them. This must change —  people can be agents of their own resilience.

This is the right time to shift to a nationwide effort to build community resilience and strengthen physical, financial, human, social, and natural capital at the ground level. Most of all, we need to reignite the empathy we all showed ourselves capable of during the pandemic. If we do, there is great hope that India will be ready for the future shock.

The writer is chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, and author of Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar: A citizen-first approach.

First Published in The Indian Express