Rohini and Nandan Nilekani Citizenship: India Net worth: $3 billion Year they joined the pledge: 2017
Areas of giving: Education, climate & environment, gender, mental health
Nandan Nilekani is cofounder and chairman of Indian IT services giant Infosys. His wife Rohini, a former journalist, runs her own philanthropic operation separate from Nandan’s. They both support their EkStep foundation, a platform dedicated to improving literacy and numeracy.
On responsibility: “Sooner rather than later I realized that wealth comes with both responsibility and opportunity. The responsibility of wealth. ….coming from a country like India, is to help make your society better,” says Rohini.
On failure: “Like every other philanthropist we learned by doing, we failed, and we learned from our failure, or at least tried to. …I wish we would look at failure seriously in the Giving Pledge, too. That we get to a safe space to share that ‘I tried this, it didn’t work, and I learned something.’ And to admit that we can fail and we do fail. How do you learn from it? How do you share it?”
What concerns her now: “I look at what is happening in society, which new problems are happening, especially with young people, what’s happening with mental health, especially of young people, especially in the digital age. How do we equip civil society organizations for operating in the digital age?”
The festival, Mannotsava, was co-hosted by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, and the National Centre for Biological Sciences.
Bengaluru: A 23-year-old college student opened up about her pain of loneliness while dealing with depression. Rahul Dravid spoke about the “incredible lows” in his cricketing journey and how they shaped his career. Mannotsava, India’s first National Mental Health Festival held in Bengaluru on 26 and 27 October, saw regular people and celebrities, counsellors and psychiatrists, scientists and professors talk about mental health.
“Such spaces make me feel like I am not alone and that my illness doesn’t define who I am,” the student said.
But Mannotsava was more than just a safe space. With more than 105 speakers, stalls, workshops, and panel discussions, it aimed to bridge the gap between science and society, wellness and illness. It was co-hosted by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS).
Professor of psychiatry and former head of NIMHANS Dr Prabha S Chandra and visiting scientist at the Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health Nachiket Mor were among the speakers who destigmatise varied diseases and disorders like ADHD, depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide. It was a marked departure from the usual hushed conversations in society around mental health issues.
“By the time those who need help reach spaces like NIMHANS, it might be too late already. We need more open conversations about mental health so that those coping with stress, living in poverty, and facing traumatic experiences can ask for support without any judgement. These are the ones who are at most risk,” said Dr Chandra.
For many, the event was the first step toward seeking help, breaking isolation, and building a supportive community.
“Following the pandemic, mental health has emerged as a topic that needs a lot more discussion. But we don’t have many public platforms that bring together experts, civil society, researchers, and artists for such a dialogue. Mannotsava endeavours to be such a platform,” said Rohini Nilekani, Chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, while inaugurating the festival on Saturday.
By the end of the day, the college student had a list of suggestions from experts on how to battle loneliness in a big city like Bengaluru. There was one that her introverted self liked the best: “Go to a local park that hosts collective reading sessions. Bring your own book, read. There’s no need to interact with anyone else.”
Women’s mental health
Young women are not expected to protest. They are encouraged to be nurturing, calm, and available to everyone at all times. So when journalist and author Amrita Tripathi asked the audience whether they had been called hysterical or different when they revealed their anxiety or depression, all the women raised their hands—girls, mothers, and senior citizens.
Tripathi was moderating a session on ‘Spotlighting Women’s Mental Health’.
“I have seen many young married women between the ages of 23 and 25 come into my clinic with extreme amounts of stress. They are completely being removed from their familiar areas and relocated into a new environment. And the myth is that they are not expected to protest or be sad or even be anxious,” said Dr Chandra in conversation with psychiatrist Dr Divya Nallur.
Young women are at a higher risk of developing mental health issues in comparison to men of similar age. The panellists agreed that a combination of social, biological, and psychological factors push women toward such danger zones.
“We have always been taught to think about others’ emotions at the cost of our own. We are made to feel guilty if we don’t do that. These social pressures coupled with patriarchy create a public bath for mental illness to be nurtured in women,” said Dr Nallur.
When women eventually reach out for help – often well after the onset of symptoms – they are frequently met with ‘medical gaslighting’ in hospitals.
“They are dismissed with a much-used phrase – it is all in your head. Such lack of support from all ends at a vulnerable time exacerbates their mental illness,” she added.
A mother in the audience, caring for her autistic child, asked how she could find support for her mental health when immediate medical resources aren’t accessible.
One suggestion from the panellists was to seek comfort in other women who are facing a similar ordeal. “Find solidarity in other women around you. Female friends, colleagues, and family members. There is nothing better than looking out for each other,” said Dr Nallur.
Prevention and early intervention
Across multiple panel discussions held during the two-day festival, psychiatrists called for early intervention and support mechanisms in homes, schools and workplaces.
“At least 70 per cent of the mental health disease burden can be reduced with public health interventions in these important venues,” said Nachiket Mor, during a panel discussion titled ‘Prevention is better than cure’.
Detailing some basic preventive measures, Mor said workplaces should not put their employees in high-stress environments where they don’t thrive.
“We are increasingly seeing situations where employers will recruit somebody, then throw them in the deep end and say sink or swim. That may not be the best way to produce a high-performance organisation,” said Mor, who assists with the design of national and regional health systems.
He also criticised how schools are immediately enrolling children into coaching programmes while they are still in the early phases of schooling.
“Often such schools wonder why their students are turning up with mental illnesses by the end of the course. It’s because they were not provided with enough play and artwork for their brains to adjust to all the dimensions of childhood,” Mor added.
Outside the auditorium, visitors painted their feelings on a big white canvas. Some drew flowers, others drew smiley face emojis. Some signed their name, along with phone numbers, asking people struggling with mental health issues to reach out in case they needed to talk.
One person left a note for those who had attempted to die by suicide. “Mustering the courage to fight is a brave and bold step. I hope you smile in every step of your life,” read the note.
Ahead of the inaugural National Mental Health Festival this weekend, philanthropist Rohini Nilekani and NIMHANS director Dr Pratima Murthy on the event which includes a conversation with cricketing icon Rahul Dravid on mental health advocacy, as well as interactive workshops on topics like ADHD, dementia, and creative therapies
When you look around, it’s clear that mental health is one of the most neglected areas in society and even in philanthropy,” says philanthropist-author Rohini Nilekani. Watching people suffer during the pandemic and realising that we didn’t have enough resources to deploy when they were most needed made me feel that Indian philanthropy needs to step up. We need to support more research, and drive more innovation in the mental health sector.”
This realisation prompted Nilekani to take mental health seriously. Rather than applying the same philanthropic methods she had used previously, she sought expertise and reached out to two of the city’s leading health and science institutions, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), for guidance.
“We asked – ‘How can we help?’ – Fortunately, they were already working on a significant long-term research project that needed sustained funding. It focused on five key mental health conditions and was exactly the kind of strategic investment I was looking for,” she adds. From that collaboration, the idea for something unconventional emerged: a National Mental Health Festival. This weekend, the inaugural edition of Mannotsava will be held in the city. It is India’s first national mental health festival, aiming to break the barriers of stigma and ignite much-needed conversations about mental health. The event offers a blend of expert talks, workshops, and artistic engagements, bringing together healthcare professionals, researchers, advocates, artists, and the public.
Highlights include a keynote conversation between Nilekani and cricketing icon Rahul Dravid on mental health advocacy, as well as interactive workshops on topics like ADHD, dementia, and creative therapies such as clowning and music therapy. Public engagement stalls and thematic installations will invite attendees to explore mental health in relation to technology, climate change, and LGBTQIA+ issues.
As Nilekani explains, the festival seeks to create a sense of community, where people feel empowered to seek help or offer support: “For me, it’s very simple. Coming from a community-focused perspective, I believe that people need to learn more, become more aware of mental health issues, and understand that they are not alone. People who are suffering aren’t isolated – there are many of us who are with them.”
I believe that people need to learn more, become more aware of mental health issues, and understand that they are not alone – Rohini Nilekani, Philanthropist
Dr Pratima Murthy, Director of NIMHANS, adds, “Mental health is important for everyone, and lately, we’ve been seeing rising suicide rates globally, and within India. With an ageing population, we’re also witnessing an increase in psychiatric disorders and cognitive issues like dementia among the elderly. It’s important that science doesn’t remain confined within the scientific community. We need to take the science out into the public to help people better understand mental disorders, reduce stigma, and promote acceptance.” She continues, “People with mental disorders, just like everyone else, need to care for their mental health. Mental illness is not simply the absence of mental health; maintaining mental well-being is crucial. Knowing where to turn for help is equally important.”
“We need to take the science out into the public to help people understand mental disorders, reduce stigma, and promote acceptance.” – Dr Pratima Murthy, Director – NIMHANS
One of Mannotsava’s defining features is its inclusion of art, cinema, and other forms of creative expression to engage attendees with mental health topics. Nilekani firmly believes in the power of art and culture to foster understanding. “Art and culture are absolutely critical when addressing most societal issues, including mental health. Artists, through various cultural mediums, help human beings understand the world around them. There are things that often go unseen, unheard, or unexplained – things that trouble people but have no voice, or issues that are difficult to discuss. Very often, art and culture – whether through plays, paintings, or films – can help familiarise society with these concepts in ways that other forms of communication cannot,” she says.
Dr Murthy agrees that creative portrayals of mental illness can play a crucial role in shaping public perception. “They can either perpetuate stigma, as we saw in older films, or they can foster sensitivity, as we see today. Art can highlight the fact that people with mental disorders can be incredibly creative, and we must avoid stigmatising them as dysfunctional members of society,” she explains.
Mannotsava, will be held on Oct 26 & 27, 10 am onwards at NIMHANS Convention Centre, Hosur Road: For more information, visit: www.nationalmentalhealthfestival.com.
The festival, a collaboration between RNPF, NIMHANS and NCBS, will explore multiple facets of mental health October 26 and 27
“For too long, mental health has been pushed into dark corners of society. It’s about time sunlight filtered through,” says Rohini Nilekani, the Chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies (RNPF), which is co-hosting Mannotsava, a mental health festival. The event seeks to put the spotlight on multiple aspects of mental health and create “a public safe space where everybody knows we are not alone in this, and we are not our illness,” as Nilekani puts it.
A collaboration between RNPF, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), the two-day festival will be held in Bengaluru this weekend to re-frame the narrative around mental health from a disease-only conversation to one about how we can realise our full potential. Some of the speakers include Jahnavi Phalkey (Science Gallery Bengaluru), Prof L.S. Shashidhara (National Centre for Biological Sciences), Dr. Shyam Bhat (LiveLoveLaugh Foundation), Vikram Bhat (Bangalore International Centre), Jwala Narayanan (Cognitive Neurology Clinic), India, Kavya Murthy (Foundation for Arts and Health India) and Rahul Dravid (cricketer and former coach, Indian National Cricket Team), among many others.
The event lineup is diverse, ranging from talks about dementia, suicide prevention, digital mental health, and the impact of music and physical activity on the mind to an art exhibit that dives into the historical, social and cultural complexities of tobacco use in the country, a photographic exhibition showcasing the journeys of sex trafficking survivors and a book stall featuring titles that promote well-being. “We are tackling some very important core themes like addiction, chronic illness and dementia…All these are being anchored by NIMHANS faculty,” elaborates Natasha Joshi, Associate Director, Portfolio, RNP. “But we’re also looking at things around well-being and flourishing, grounded in clinical practice science, to give that diversity and balance,” she adds.
Germination of idea The foundation for this festival was laid several years ago, stretching back to 2016. “Initially, this started as a research, a pure science kind of approach,” says Dr. Pratima Murthy, Director, NIMHANS. “We were looking at understanding mental disorders, not just in-depth, individual mental disorders, but what is called cross-diagnostics because we do know that there are shared etiologies and vulnerabilities,” she says. According to her, while categorical approaches to disease have been somewhat limited, today “we have tools to understand mental disorders, not just in terms of their clinical manifestations, but also from the genetic point of view, the imaging point of view.”
The idea, she says, was to look at similarities and differences between disorders which are more commonly prevalent, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, addictions, dementia and obsessive-compulsive disorders. “The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) funded the initial set of studies, and we worked with NCBS to look at these four or five disorders in great detail,” says Dr. Murthy. This, in turn, led to a study in which cohorts of family members — one of whom was affected by a mental condition and one who was not — were closely studied “to try and understand complex questions around these disorders,” she says.
In July 2023, the Rohini Nilekani Centre for Brain and Mind (CBM) was launched at NCBS to support this research so that the subjects could be followed for a much longer period. “I think this is an example of how institutions looking at very basic problems are joining hands with those doing medical research to try and create an interface from which knowledge can arise,” says Prof. Raghu Padinjat, NCBS. “This can then be applied to solutions that can be used in society.
Science and Society This intersection between science and society is especially of interest to RNP. Hence, they expanded the mandate of CBM also to include a public festival, says Nilekani. “It is very different when you’re in a clinical sort of setting and when you’re in a public festival setting with all this expertise in the open domain.” Joshi also explains why the festival needed to be a more inclusive event. “In conversations with the team at NIMHANS, we decided that lived experience was a very important part of all of the work that they’re doing. They were very keen to build that bridge between lived experience and research,” she says. “Ultimately, scientific research has to interact with practitioners.” By May this year, it was formally decided to open it up to the public, and a call for proposals went out in July. “We got about 277 applications,” says Joshi. “We looked at emerging themes from these proposals and shortlisted 40 different sessions led by community members, including medical experts, researchers, NGOs, and artists.”
First of its kind Mannotsava, which will be preceded by an invite-only, one-day neuroscience research symposium at NCBS on October 25, is the country’s first such event. “I’m very excited about this and hope it will be a continuing feature,” says Nilekani, who believes that a forum like this, which brings together various facets of mental well-being, could become “a bridge between the science and issues that society faces.”
She says she is thrilled that philanthropy for mental health is garnering traction in the country. Often, too often, the mental health narrative has been dominated by the Western world, in her opinion. “We need a global south perspective… research, data, everything coming out of here, especially India. So that’s another aspect that makes us proud here: we are doing this domestic cutting-edge research that will benefit our people in the long run.”
The importance of having an open dialogue about mental health issues in a country where roughly one in seven suffer from some mental disorder is not lost on the organisers — not just to reduce the stigma around mental disorders that persists but also to understand how to flourish as human beings, build resilience and raise awareness about empathetic care and support. After all, all of us, simply from the fact that we have a brain and mind, are susceptible to mental health issues, believes Dr. Murthy. “Even just day-to-day situations can lead to mental distress,” she says. “The world is full of challenges, and being able to talk about them also means learning how to be resilient.”
When and where Mannotsava will be held at the NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bengaluru, on October 26 and 27, 10 a.m. onwards. To know more, log into https://www.nationalmentalhealthfestival.com/
In this segment, we spotlight The CSR Universe’s interview with Natasha Joshi (Associate Director, RNP), who shares her thoughts on the role played by philanthropies in supporting initiatives that strengthen the capacity for listening, foster mutual understanding through dialogic methods, and drive meaningful, high-impact outcomes for everyone.
In an era where systemic change is crucial for sustainable development, a collaborative project between NALSAR University and Kshetra Foundation aims to build community capacity to address conflict resolution and foster self-governance. This initiative, formalized through a 5-year Memorandum of Understanding, seeks to empower local communities by equipping them with skills for conflict transformation and collaborative problem-solving. It focuses on empowering paralegal volunteers, anganwadi teachers, self-help groups (SHGs), and community leaders through NALSAR’s academic support and Kshetra’s expertise in the Dialogic Method. The method, known for its effectiveness in fostering dialogue and empathy, aims to create a ripple effect of positive change within communities. The project is being supported by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.
In this interview with TheCSRUniverse, leaders from all three organisations- Kshetra Foundation, NALSAR University and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies share their insights and expectations from the project. We get to know about the strengths of each organisation and how they are collaborating to bring their collective vision to the ground.
Ms. Natasha Joshi, Associate Director of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies
Q. What motivated Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies to support this collaborative project between NALSAR and Kshetra Foundation- what were the stand-out factors that led you to choose this initiative among others?
A.Kshetra’s dialogic method is aimed at fostering in society a deeper capacity for listening, building understandings and arriving at high value outcomes for all. Colleges and universities are a wonderful place to anchor such work given young people have in them a built-in capacity for change and learning. As young citizens, and studying law at that, these students can usher a future in which conflict is constructively engaged with and dialogue becomes the natural process for resolving disagreements.
Q. What are the key areas of focus for Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and how does this project align with the broader strategic goals of the organisation?
A.Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies supports organisations working on wicked social problems. From addressing the climate crisis, to looking at changing gender norms, RNP strives to address root causes keeping problems in place. Complex problems need to be engaged with creatively, and empathetically, and both these capacities are a foundational part of what the dialogic method trains one in.
Q. Your organisation has entered into long term collaborations with other academic and research institutions as well (e.g. NIMHANS, NCBS, etc). Why do you think it is relevant to have academic collaborations to solve persistent social issues?
A.Academic institutions are locations of deep expertise yet a lot of times, the expertise remains trapped within the institutions. By partnering with civil society organisations – like Kshetra – colleges and institutions can build a two-way bridge between the work they do and the continuously evolving needs of society. Institutes of higher education are also home to many young minds and students are great investments for the future.
Q. What advice do you have for other philanthropic organizations that wish to invest towards solving pressing issues of the society? Also, how can policymakers ensure better support for collaborative efforts between academia, civil society, and government?
A.We are hopeful that many more funders will come forward to support horizontal offerings like Kshetra’s dialogic method. While organisational development and capacity building – as learning to dialogue for instance – may not show immediate, tangible results, programs targeting culture, mindset, and capacities play a vital role in keeping the broader social ecosystem healthy. Needless to say, the potential for this work is best realised through an enabling policy environment.
Synopsis The Sci560: Science in the City exhibition in Bengaluru, delayed by the pandemic, has opened with backing from philanthropist Rohini Nilekani. Organized by Science Gallery Bengaluru, notable scientists, and research institutions, the event aims to highlight Bengaluru’s connection with science and innovation, emphasizing the need for private philanthropy in supporting R&D and combating misinformation.
It almost became one of those dreams that died in the pandemic. After science historian Jahnavi Phalkey moved to Bengaluru in 2018 to set up Science Gallery Bengaluru, she, along with professor Mukund Thattai of National Centre for Biological Sciences and Rajesh Gopakumar, director of International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, hit upon organising a mega science festival in the city, similar to those in New York and Europe. The idea immediately found a backer in philanthropist Rohini Nilekani. Work began but then, Covid-19 struck.
In 2023, Nilekani revived the idea, rallying the director of every major scientific institution in Bengaluru to participate. The result is Sci560: Science in the City, a unique, monthslong exhibition at Science Gallery Bengaluru inviting the visitor to immerse in and mull over the city’s long-standing, layered, cross institutional connections with science, research and innovation. On the eve of the opening, Nilekani and Phalkey spoke to Indulekha Aravind about the significance of the exhibition, the need for private philanthropy to “step up to the plate” for R&D and whether institutions like Science Gallery can play a role in combating misinformation. Edited excerpts:
One of the issues that plague research in India is the fact that public funding of R&D as a share of GDP lags many other countries. What role do you see for private philanthropy in addressing this?
Rohini Nilekani: Of course, the state needs to do more, but India also has many other things to prioritise so it’s always a tossup for the state where to put its money. But private philanthropy has no such constraints. There are so many wealthy people in India today. I feel there are many more who want to and who should give much more and one of the areas to give to is of course scientific research. We are going to have so many problems: we’ll be the oldest country in the world, we are going to be among the top 10 countries most affected by climate change. All of this is going to require serious innovation and inter-disciplinary work, which will take money, resources, talent and time. Private philanthropy can definitely step up to the plate—we’ve already seen excellent examples of it in Bengaluru.
What is the significance of Sci560?
RN: I came to Bengaluru exactly 40 years ago, in 1984. Like you, I was a journalist, and I was getting to know the city. I realised just how many marvellous institutions it has, which are funded by the state and supported by private philanthropy. Bengaluru in the past has been, in the present is and I hope in the future will continue to be the science and technology city of India. Over the years, I had been wanting to do something that would open the rarefied halls of our scientific institutions to the public. It was only when Jahnavi Phalkey-led Science Gallery came to life that my long-standing dream was able to come to fruition. Last year, we had a meeting with the heads of all the institutions to brainstorm how to bring the culture of science strongly into the public arena and we came up with the idea for this. All the institutions agreed to loan artefacts to represent their work and engage with people. I’m very happy to be able to support this and hope that lakhs of people come.
One of the pillars of Science Gallery Bengaluru (one of only seven in the world) is the idea of a museum as a public space. What have you observed so far about fulfilling that thesis?
Jahnavi Phalkey: We’re still quite young, it’s been close to seven months since we opened our doors. We’ve reduced two barriers to entry: one, no tickets; second, everything we produce in-house is in Kannada and in English. In a sense, it’s becoming the kind of public institution we want it to be but it’s supposed to be a twoway bridge between the research institution and the public at large. At this moment, opening the second way is the next step. The major chunk of that is getting the six public labs open, and we have got funding for the food and theory labs. In this phase, questions from the public domain are shared with researchers as well. We call it science with society. That will complete the circle. We’re here to create a sense of relevance and belonging for the public because at the end of the day, the bulk of the research that happens in India is funded by the state, which is taxpayer money. What is my money enabling is the minimum question a taxpayer in some way should be asking.
We are living in the time of fake news and misinformation. Do you see a role for the gallery in contesting that and cultivating a scientific temperament?
JP: The leitmotif of any such institution in the long term is to serve the task of public education so in that sense yes, this institution is meant to contribute to public debate, public opinion and public education.
(But) this is a very different time we are in right now, where there is very little room to take up a confrontation because in my personal opinion, that’s going to be counterproductive and confrontations polarise, even if you come from a place of factually correct information and truth. So the job that such institutions have is to create room for asking questions, for the young to come and find out what it means to ask good questions, and develop a sense of discernment and judgement.
What are the exhibits you’re looking forward to? RN: I know I’m looking forward to the “bheja fry” exhibit–which is supposed to be to understand how certain areas of the brain code time to understand causality.
JP: I’m always excited about live experiments we can host and we’ll have at least two. That changes how you think about exhibits. All science, when it starts out, is open-ended but we learn it in school as close-ended facts though that’s not how a lab works. The other I’m equally excited about is the HT2 aircraft from Indian Institute of Science (IISc). For me, for this exhibition it’s the most important exhibit. Our curatorial note starts by saying Bengaluru is today India’s most recognised, military-industrial-academic complex and our exhibition is one way to explore why that may be the case. The aircraft embodies this because it was designed at the IISc, produced by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (earlier Hindustan Aircraft) and used by Indian Air Force. So you have the military-industrial-academic complex embodied in that one single object. It reflects the very rich, layered story of the city.
DevX is a video-cast run by Viva Development Strategies, where the host, Varadarajan Rajagopalan, is in conversation with Natasha Joshi, Associate Director – RNPF.
Transcript:
0:00:04.7 Varadarajan: Welcome to another episode of DevX and I’m super, super excited about this episode that we are going to shoot with and about Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. The principles of the philanthropy have been making big news with 100 crore donation to NIMHANS, 300 plus crore to IIT. But what a lot of people don’t know is that they give that kind of grants anyway throughout the year to a whole bunch of NGOs. So we are here to learn about that. What informs they’re giving, who do they like to support? What’s the kind of work that they like to do? And to take us through all this, we have today, Natasha Joshi, absolutely bonafide young leader and part of the senior leadership team at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. Welcome, welcome Natasha, tell us a little bit about how you got here and, yeah, about you.
0:00:57.7 Natasha: Yeah, yeah, sure. Thanks. So my journey actually in the development sector is about 15, 17 years old. I studied…
0:01:06.2 Varadarajan Rajagopalan: Doesn’t look like it, but okay.
0:01:09.4 Natasha: I conceal my gray hair very well. I did my bachelor’s in economics and psychology and I thought I’d go into banking and things like that. But then I sort of accidentally started working with the Ministry of Education in Singapore and that got me really interested in the social sector, the education sector so I went ahead, I did my masters in education, policy and psychology and then I sort of came to India and started my career working with various organizations in the education sector. So I actually spent maybe about a little over a decade working in public education. And then I got really interested in the work that Rohini does, in particular, because her areas of work are very interesting. I’ll tell you a little bit about it. What’s really interesting about her areas of work is that they’re very foundational when it comes to society and civilization.
0:01:55.1 Natasha: So I’ve been at RNP now for a couple of years. We continue to be what the way I call, we are sort of like a boutique philanthropy. We are not an enormous team on the programs aside, we are still a small-ish kind of team, but we have about 120 partners that we engage with through grants and other sort of relationships. I think my journey at RNP itself has been a huge sort of learning curve, and the way I have started to understand the core root causes and core challenges that the civil society these days continues to face learning through all the members of my team but also learning from Rohini has been really useful.
0:02:30.4 Varadarajan: And tell me why you are here on DevX. What made you say yes? What made you take the time?
0:02:36.1 Natasha: Well, the thing is, one of the, let’s say, values that we really try to uphold is that of responsiveness. So as an organization, you’ll find very rarely will you not get any response from RNP whether you write into our contact ID, whether you write into any one of us, because we believe that that is our role in the entire ecosystem. Our role is to engage, to participate in conversations, to learn very actively and listen to others, of course, I think it’s wonderful the kind of work that you’re trying to do, right? You are trying to build something interesting. You’re trying to add the create value for a sector that continues to sort of need much more capacity. Every conversation is a learning process as well. So I think I take away as much as I bring to it. And that’s what brings me here.
0:06:57.7 Varadarajan: Tell me how this, thinking of Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar how it also percolates to the causes that you work in, the thematic areas, what you choose as your areas of focus from your work point of view. And even those are very interesting. You have very interesting also, I would say very creatively title areas of work. So you have citizenship, you have Laayak, which is so interesting around gender equity, mental health, justice, and conservation. Help us understand that a little bit. Make it a little real. So what is citizenship about?
0:07:28.5 Natasha: So a lot of these areas kind of are essentially societal areas, right? So when you say civic engagement and active citizenship, so a big part of our thinking is that it’s rooted in that same idea that every person should have agency, every person should be able to determine their fate to some extent you should have access to goods and services, but also you should have voice in the society that you inhabit, right? So how do you create an environment where citizens can have the ability to activate themselves, where they can engage in local problem solving, where they can be authors of their own lives within the kind of country and within the neighborhood that they live in. So that’s one area.
0:08:07.9 Varadarajan: Can you make that a little real with a couple of examples?
0:08:11.5 Natasha: Yeah. So I mean, I think our active citizenship portfolio, we at this moment, for instance, we are working with about 20 different organizations across India, and you will find a range of organizations. We partner with an organization called CIVIS which is based in Bombay. And CIVIS is like a digital first organization that’s using a platform technology to get citizens to give inputs to draft legislations. So a lot of citizens don’t even know that when the government is drafting legislations on various topics, most of them are supposed to be opened to the public for comment and for feedback.
0:09:03.1 Natasha: But a lot of citizens A, don’t know that, and B, they don’t necessarily know which legislation has been opened up. Where is the government soliciting feedback and then how to give this feedback. So CVIS saw this gap and said that, we could actually use technology as a way to bridge that gap, get more diverse groups of people to start inputting into the process of policy making because policy makers are seeking feedback. But if you don’t know this feedback is being sought, how do you give it? We have organizations like Jhatkaa which works in the campaign space, right? So they effectively said, we want citizens to have a voice and to be able to express their preferences on whether there should be a flyover here or not, or whether you should cut certain trees or not. Because these affects the lives of people who are living in that neighborhood, but there should be some platform that allows them to voice that concern and come up with constructive solutions as well.
0:09:41.4 Natasha: I think the idea is not simply to agitate the idea is to say that, how do I take ownership of the entire problem? So if we do have a connectivity issue in our neighborhood that is an issue, but if I don’t want to flyover, what is the alternative as well? And if you see, the through line, the through line will always be the individual or the citizen or a community as the unit of change and at the center of action, even if we have organizations, for example, like Haqdarshak that are essentially, they partner very strongly with state governments to make sure that schemes and entitlements for citizens are reaching the citizens.
0:10:14.8 Natasha: Their unit of action is actually a whole cadre of agents as they call them, who are essentially women from communities, they’re women, they’re picking up from self-help groups. It’s giving the women the means of livelihood, but it’s not just a means of livelihood, right? It’s essentially making those women important to people in their communities who are being able to then co-empower others in the community. So that’s the through line you will find, which is individuals, citizens at the center of the action as the unit of action. Empowerment really at the core of the work voice, agency. Like these themes you will find in all of the players that we sort of partner with. So we have four others. I could quickly sort of tell you a little bit about those.
0:10:40.5 Varadarajan: Please.
0:10:41.1 Natasha: So Laayak is it’s a very interesting portfolio. We just recently supported this chat show called BeAManYaar. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It’s on YouTube. Nikhil Taneja is hosting this show and he is in conversation with various, well-known men, including Vicky Kaushal and Naseeruddin Shah et cetera. And they are having this very lengthy and deep conversation on masculinity. Our work with Laayak is all about trying to understand the lives of boys and men, trying to understand the impact of patriarchy on their lives and really trying to see how can you involve and engage young men and boys in the movement for gender equity because they are going to be beneficiaries of gender equity as well, is what we believe in a more gender equitable society everybody wins, we have organizations in the live portfolio that are looking at like pop culture media because that really influences gender norms, especially for young people.
0:11:39.6 Natasha: But then we have organizations that are working very much at the kind of field level with schools and students. The Gender Lab is there which is also based in Bombay. They work with like adolescent boys on essentially gender sensitization programs. We have several others like that who are looking at the life cycle of boyhood and how do you basically create better intersections between women’s empowerment work, girls’ empowerment, and then boys and their lives. So that’s Laayak. We work in justice. So access to justice is an area that is extremely complicated. I would say it’s one of our most complex portfolios. There are multiple stakeholders when it comes to justice making, and there are a lot of barriers to entry also when it comes to intervening in the justice making process and justice delivery process. But one organization I wanna give a wonderful example of is PAAR, P-A-A-R and it’s the open prisons project. And PAAR essentially started out as a research project, which was trying to look at how do you take this idea of open prisons and really proliferate it across the country because in Rajasthan, there is an example of an open prison where essentially if you haven’t committed a very heinous crime, and which is most prisoners are in for like something relatively milder.
Is there a way for them to kind of be a part of what we call an open prison, which is a cordoned off physical space where the prisoners can actually leave the spot to go out, do a regular job, and then they just come back every evening and they live in that space with their families, with their children, so when you think of it, it’s really a wonderful example of restorative justice rather than retributive justice. They’re working with several prison systems across India. It is economically attractive because prisons are expensive to run and to sort of shut people up when there’s very little chance of them really reforming. And then there’s the process of having to rehabilitate them. So PAAR sort of gets around all of that with the open prison work. A lot of our partners you will find do work at the kind of action level. So that has concrete implementation. So there’s a lot of strategic and like narrative building and norm shifting work they also look at, that’s our work in Justice. Yeah.
0:13:30.7 Varadarajan In fact, there’s somebody else that I met who’s doing fabulous work in this called Mohit Raj Project Second Chance.
0:13:39.4 Natasha: Oh yeah, yeah. So they’re also our partner. They’re our partners.
0:13:42.9 Varadarajan: Oh, fabulous. Fabulous.
0:13:43.0 Natasha: So Mohit is part of our partner cohort for justice. It’s exactly the same idea that same through line, you will find that consistency where there is a lot of the idea dignity is at the center of this work. The way voice and action is at the center, the citizenship work, I think dignity is really at the center of our justice work and all our partners in justice. Then we have of course our conservation biodiversity portfolio, which is huge. We have several partners there working on at the level of regions. So there are Nilgiris-based partners. There are people working on the coastal areas. There are people working in eco-sensitive zones, the Himalayas, et cetera. You have people working at the level of species. There’s the elephants, there’s the tigers, different types of organizations focusing on habitat protection, on adaptation, how to help animals and humans coexist. Our longest relationship is, or almost one of the longest relationships has been with ATREE, which is of course one of the sort of apex research institutions when it comes to work around biodiversity conservation research.
0:14:40.8 Natasha: So we have a lot of work in that space, and that is one that Rohini very, very personally leads because she’s very passionate about that. So these are four of our main areas and mental health. We’ve just launched with a big grant in NIMHANS. So we are just starting to kind of get into mental health and starting to make sense of it. What I will say about all of these areas, right, justice, civic engagement, climate, gender, mental health, they’re all very intersectional. One is they’re all related to one another. They all talk to each other. They have implications on one another. So second is they’re deeply complex, like extremely complex areas to understand, to work in. Therefore, now I will just tie it back to that point of they don’t have endpoints. What is the endpoint on justice? Right? Because the very notion of what is right and…
0:15:23.4 Varadarajan: There is an endpoint yeah.
0:15:24.9 Natasha: Yeah. The very notion of what’s right and wrong, what’s fair and not keeps evolving. So therefore you just have to be responsive [chuckle] to that ecosystem. 0:15:31.6 Speaker 1: Correct. That’s very interesting work. It’s very deep, it’s very nuanced to really, really sink your teeth very deep into a particular area of focus that’s quite unique as a funding philosophy. Can you also tell us a little bit about what are the kind of NGOs that you partner with? Who do you look to partner with with this kind of philosophy and yeah, how do you go about that?
0:15:55.3 Natasha: We don’t have an open call for applications. We’ve now kind of built a community of partners, which is about 120 strong. And I think a lot of people come to us through word of mouth. So they’ve heard about us as a foundation through the partners that we work with or some of the outreach that we do when we talk about our work. So we definitely have an in incoming kind of process where you can reach out to us if you’re looking for support in any of the areas that we do support. We have a contact email address that you can write into with a query or you could directly write to one of us on email or LinkedIn. The idea is we respond to requests. So if you approach us, we will be able to do a kind of, is there a prima facie effect?
So one of course is do you work in any of our areas of work? Often we get requests which are not even from our areas of work, even though they’re on the website. So that’s a prima facie no, that this is not even an area for us. Then there are of course instances where we get a request. We might have already heard of the organization. That’s one. But if we haven’t heard of your work, then we’ll try to look at your website. We’ll try to just get a basic sense on the internet of what this organization’s all about. Also, your query letter, right? Like what do you have written to us with what is the body of the email that you’re wanting to talk about. And on the basis of that, we typically set up conversations where we say, let’s get to know you a little bit based on how the conversation goes. We then formally invite the organization to apply for a grant and that goes through our grant application process. We discuss it and if we think that we’d like to make a recommendation to the board and the principals, we take it up and that’s pretty much it.
0:17:30.7 Varadarajan: Interesting. It seems to me also because you work in such nuanced areas very, very deeply, it seems to me that you also support organizations that are all in to a particular course or in a particular area where the entire organization is working towards largely one thing. As opposed to an organization that says we do likelihood programs, we do programs in health, we do something else, we do something else, and hey, here’s what we can do in your space that seems to be the case. Is it right or off the mark?
0:18:01.2 Natasha: I would say that we have partners who are working at the nexus of issues for us. I don’t think it matters whether you are working very thematically, whether you’re working cross thematically, whether you’re working in urban, whether you’re working in rural. We don’t have filters like that. I think the question that we ask really is one, what has brought you to your own work, right? How have you arrived at this work, right? So what has been the journey of the founder, the member, the leader? Why have you come to this particular approach versus any other? So if you are working in a kind of integrated saturation way, then why that? Or if you are working very deeply at a thematic level, then why that? Then we also really want to understand whether you see the system within which you’re working, right?
0:18:43.2 Natasha: Like you may not be working at the systemic level, or you may not be taking on the entire system, but what is your articulation of the system within which you exist and do you have a sense of where you are located within that system? What is going to be your role in that particular ecosystem? What is your idea of progress, right? How do you learn and how do you test hypotheses? And in all of this, if there is clarity of thinking, then I think we are quite drawn to that. Like we are very drawn to people who are able to articulate the problem statement, the root cause analysis very clearly. We don’t necessarily want you to have an answer. Because I think if you have a very, if you’re very certain about what you’re doing, then there isn’t enough openness and curiosity about other approaches. So I think this is something we suss out in the conversation and once we feel like there is that sense of alignment and that culture of it as well, we then take it to the formal application stage. I don’t know if that answered your question.
0:19:33.9 Speaker 1: It does. And the analogy that jumped at me was it’s almost like dating and then you’re kind of figuring each other out and seeing are you the right fit and then before you commit to each other, you’re like, yeah.
0:19:47.6 Natasha: Yeah, we do a vibe check. Yeah, we do like lots of vibe checks. No, but it’s true. I think that you’ll see that like our whole team, I think we really kind of, we push ourselves to up our own emotional intelligence game, right? We recognize that this whole social space, it’s so deeply relational. You have to have a sense of the people that you’re going to be on this journey with. And the best way to understand people is really to talk to them. I don’t think there’s any shortcut.
0:20:10.5 Varadarajan: And that’s so difficult to do because most people and organizations in your space would say, Hey, how do we templatize this? What’s the form that we can create that kind of helps us do this? But you’re like, no, we have to talk.
0:20:23.3 Natasha: I’ll give you an example. One of the most recent approvals that we’ve done is for Sahjani Shiksha Kendra. This organization is a grassroots organization based in UP. The founder reached out to me in Hindi. I replied in Hindi. We went back and forth a few times. We did a call. I spoke to her and I understood her life story. This woman who’s gone through extraordinary difficulty, walked out of an abusive marriage, raised children on her own, has set up this institution, is now empowering other women who are at the receiving end of violence, but recognizes the role of boys and men. So I think she had such a powerful story. And I said, how we have an application process. But I said, look, why don’t you just tell this whole story on video again? So just send me like a two minute video about everything you said to me and then just send me the budget on Excel.
0:21:13.1 Natasha: And she did that. And we have gotten the approval on the basis of that saying that this is this person and she’s an incredible person. Also, because it’s a learning grant, we don’t need to visit the field for the full for our learning grants. We don’t actually have to go to the field. So just prima facie, like this is the prima facie thing that I and of course, it came through one of our partners. So there are certain checks and balances that we do have in place, which is that it’s a strongly referred person. They have sectoral credibility for sure. And that’s good enough.
0:21:40.1 Varadarajan: I love stories like this. I love stories like this. And I love it that you’re so inclusive in your process. And that also brings me to the next part that I wanted to understand from you. You spoke of learning grants. So you have a very interesting model as well. So you have learning grants, then you evolve into deeper unrestricted grants and you even go beyond grants. Tell us a little bit about that. How does this flow? What’s each section like and how does it flow?
0:22:06.7 Natasha: Sure. So we do have a category called learning grants. The purpose of the grant is twofold. One, it is for us to be able to give a sort of low diligence upfront grant and it’s small in size, but we can give it to organizations that we don’t know. We don’t really know you and we don’t know your work, but we’d like to understand it better. And like I said, there’s a prima facie check and you meet the various criteria. Then we give you this learning grant and then through the year, we understand and interact with you. And then many of the learning grants convert into multi-year grants. But this is not to say that we have to do a learning grant with everybody. There are many organizations who upfront, we do multi-year untied partnerships with because we’ve had a chance to really understand their work. They also have great reputation and credibility. Those are our core grants and all of those grants are essentially untied. So you can use the money for whatever your purposes are. You have to, of course, do the usual reporting utilization certificates, et cetera. So you have to do that stuff. What we do care about on the reporting side is not that you report to me about where you spend every piece of money, but what have you learned in the process? What are you able to tell us about this?
Has my understanding of, let’s say, justice making as a funder, has that increased or improved or enhanced as a result of my partnership with you? What are you able to explain to me that actually fine tunes my own understanding of what it really takes to sort of deliver justice in India as a whole? And then there is this idea of beyond grants. So we support all our partners with several capacity building initiatives, through lots of exposure learning circles that we set up. It could be something as simple as somebody is doing something really interesting in AI, and we will ask them to come and do like a session for all of our partners where we will pay the person. And our grantees just get to sort of learn about Generative AI. We also do paid sessions in the sense that there will be specialists and experts, whether on the communication side and the technology side, they will be willing to kind of work with a cohort of grantees for like, let’s say six weeks, eight weeks, three months.
0:24:06.5 Natasha: Many of our partner organizations have applied for fellowships or programs, or if they want to submit a paper to a conference, for instance, we have paid for that because our whole idea is that we have all of these things that we call other supports, which is that it’s hard to get money to do these other things, whether it is attending a conference. Sometimes we also support partner organizations in throwing their own events because we believe that that strengthens the ecosystem. And it is really all about trying to put wind in your sails and help you do your work a little bit better.
0:24:35.5 Varadarajan: I think those are some very, very interesting points on capacity building. There’s another area that I wanted to get a sense on, or let’s say beyond grants. See, there’s a huge challenge, Natasha, in our sector where fundraising itself is such an important task. It is existential to a nonprofit, but at the same time, there is a cost to fundraising. And that’s where most NGOs struggle very, very, very hard. So what’s your take on this? Do you support as part of your unrestricted grants, do you support fundraising? Do you help them with the cost for fundraising? What’s your take on this?
0:25:10.3 Natasha: Well, I mean, see, because our unrestricted grants are there for organizations to use as they feel is the most urgent need for themselves, they can actually use a portion of that money for fundraising, hiring a fundraising person if they want. Like I said, we have supported people by underwriting the cost of them attending programs at ILSS, for instance, which is also at the forefront of trying to better the fundraising. We have actively also tried to connect our partner organizations with other donors.
0:25:40.3 Varadarajan: So that’s interesting to understand as a funder, but Natasha, I also know you are an advisor to nonprofits in that capacity and wearing that hat. Any tips, any advice to nonprofits out there beyond your grantee network on how to navigate the whole fundraising challenge in this space better?
0:25:58.2 Natasha: I think that there are certain untapped spaces. So one is of course retail giving, right? Retail fundraising, nobody wants to do it. It seems very painful. It seems very low ROI. I know of certain organizations that have at least used the retail channel to do stock gaps, small amounts, and it really depends on your operating budget. But if your operating budget isn’t very big, if you’re a slightly early stage NGO, you can get a little bit of oxygen from retail. There are also platforms now that are trying to, of course, aggregate a lot of the retail funding and you could partner with them. I think one of the things that really burns people out is this feeling of failure on fundraising, right? The truth is you are going to have lots of doors slammed in your face, and if you
take every piece of rejection as personal failure, if you think that I was not able to raise this money, I wasn’t able to tell the story better, I wasn’t able to show my impact, you’ll burn out at some point.
0:26:50.6 Natasha: But if you just sort of be a little bit more stoic and just stay true to the process, the tide will turn. Something will turn in your favor at some point. That’s a little bit kind of woo woo, but I really do feel like I have worked with a few founders, and I think sometimes they really just need that reassurance that you are not doing anything wrong. You just have to do it for a little bit longer and it’ll happen. And I have seen this happen. I have seen the money come in eventually, just because they have stayed the course. Finally. Yeah, of course. I mean, everyone is talking about communications. How are you telling your story? So I think that’s a really important piece for sure. It isn’t about doing X number of Instagram posts or doing Y number of videos or newsletters. I think it is really spending a lot of time asking yourself, what is my story? I think story discovery is the actual gap, not storytelling. Once you discover what your story is, you can tell it. There are ways to tell it, but I think people aren’t necessarily hitting upon what their real story is. So spend a little bit of time in story discovery, which happens through pausing, reflecting, thinking, listening. What is the feedback I’m getting from the people around me?
0:27:48.8 Speaker 1: So two takeaways I would take from that. One is storytelling, story discovery, and then story articulation. Two parts to that. And the second is what I term perhaps a sales approach to storytelling, and I mean that in a very good way. So the way a salesperson in the private sector would look at it, just keep at it. There is a process, trust the process, follow it, and it’ll happen.
0:28:12.7 Natasha: Exactly.
0:28:18.4 Speaker 1: When it’ll rain, it’ll pour. Then I think one more thing that this is something I believe. I think we don’t spend enough time in understanding the work. We’ve done fundraising for non-profits in the past earlier. I think a lot of the time it’s more about saying how many, how many, how many. Not really understanding the donor, the nuance in terms of what they want to fund, and if you can and should align with that, because otherwise it’s a few time effort, and that’s one door slammed, and you don’t know why.
0:28:43.5 Natasha: And I’m gonna go ahead and say this from the best of my intentions with the hope that this helps nonprofits that are listening. I have been in many many conversations where I’ve come onto a call and I’ve had to listen to a monologue for 45 minutes before I have been asked, is this what you’re looking at? So I’m not gonna sort of cut you short. But the truth is that you say all of that, which is myself, my work, my team, my thing. Then I’m like, well, you know the thing is I run a strategic pause, or it’ll be like, actually, we don’t really work with women. It’s really important to get a quick sort of introduction first and then ask the donor, where are you at? Because sometimes yeah, we might just be on a strategic pause. So it’s a little bit bad also that somebody said this, right? That the best fundraising strategy is listening. But if you can get the donor to talk, if you get the other side to start talking, you will be able to steer that meeting in a much better way than if you do most of the talking.
0:29:45.6 Varadarajan: I’m so glad to hear that. Genuinely, it’s a bit of personal validation ’cause that’s the guiding principle with which we started DevX, right? We started it thinking, can we demystify this? Can it be one hour with a donor where they talk about what they really wanna do and if you wanna work with this organization, hey, what are the ways in which you can increase your odds of doing that? So that’s why we are doing this. I’m so happy to hear somebody else say it as well. So, another thing that I wanna get, you’re an unrestricted funder, and there’s a lot of things that I’m diving into because you’re a rare breed. One of the things that’s a really big challenge in the social sector is really pay, what people are paid. It’s a little sad that somewhere as a sector itself, we tend to propagate the belief that, hey, if you’re working here, there’s a personal price you have to pay for pursuing your passion. So as part of your unrestricted funding, have any organizations, for example, use that to correct the salaries of their resources or to hire the right talent? Has that ever happened?
0:30:52.1 Natasha: I may not have sort of concrete examples because it’s not something we check for necessarily, but I’m fairly certain that that would’ve happened. People should not be working for free no matter what they’re doing. I fundamentally believe people come into the social sector because of genuine passion, interest, desire to contribute. Do we believe that we have to match corporate salaries? I personally don’t believe that because I think that it’s one thing to say that you need to have respectable pay. It’s another thing to start benchmarking against an industry that has a completely different metric and a different organization structure. I have seen salaries sort of getting a little bit better in certain types of non-profits, in certain types of intermediary organizations. But yes, grassroots organizations still operate on extremely lean budgets. A lot of people don’t get paid as much. So I think pay is complicated. I agree that people should be compensated reasonably. I just think that there isn’t a very clear benchmark for the social sector as to what that means. I think a really interesting metric for organizations, I think also on the for-profit-side, but definitely in the not-for-profit side is retention. There are organizations, we have some partner organizations. We know where people are like, I have been with this organization for 10 years, 15 years, 8 years, and there is something a little bit beautiful about that.
0:32:19.2 Natasha: The people are wedded to the idea they’re happy with one another. They have a deep sense of community with each other, and they aren’t interested in hopping around and sort of looking for something that will pay them like 5% more because they’re actually really satisfied with the quality of the work. And they meet their sense of purpose there. I think that is really important. How do we keep that sense of purpose alive? I think sometimes I would not trade, you know, this peace of mind and this like authentic connection with the cause. I would not trade that away for better salary. Even in the social sector. You know, [laughter] sometimes.
0:32:49.3 Varadarajan: Yes, yes. That’s basically speaking to culture, right? And I think that’s something that our sector has, that private sector can learn from us, because there’s a far greater median of better culture in the social sector where people are…
0:33:02.4 Natasha: Interesting.
0:33:03.5 Varadarajan: Actually, they wake up with purpose. So Natasha, I’ve asked you a whole bunch of questions and you’ve given me some deeply insightful, amazingly articulated answers. I have a question or a question if I have to ask you, what is your most dreaded question as a funder? [laughter], what would that be? Do you have any question that keeps you awake at night?
0:33:27.9 Natasha: I think a lot keeps us awake at night, but the question that I personally have a lot of…
0:33:34.3 Speaker 1: Okay.
0:33:34.9 Natasha: Dread for as a funder is how do you measure your own impact? Because we have a certain lens on the work that we do. Why we do it, what brings us to this work? And we also have a certain way in which we engage our partners. We don’t necessarily have a log frame for it. We don’t have a metrics based sort of approach both to grant making as well as sense making. So I think the way we look at not just the impact of our partners, but actually more so our own impact, ’cause I think before you ask another person what they’re accountable to you, you also have to ask yourself, what am I gonna hold myself accountable to? So what is the role of funders? What is the role of philanthropy? Right? We’ve come up with a few things, but this is not an exhaustive list. We believe that as funders who have social capital, financial capital, we should be advocates for the causes that we support.
0:34:18.7 Natasha: We should be advocates for the fields that we support. We should actively strive to bring more capital and opportunities and do these fields of work that we are interested in. We should naturally platform the work of all of our partners in its rich and kind of abundant nature without reducing it. Because this is the articulation of what we are actually waking up and holding ourselves accountable to. It’s very hard to say, what is my metric, right? ‘Cause It’s not like, have I failed as a foundation if I didn’t manage to get grants for my own grantees from external funders? Naturally not. ‘Cause My job is not to fundraise on behalf of my grantees, but at the same time, how do I understand whether I’m being able to enable the entire ecosystem a lot better?
0:34:55.3 Natasha: So if for instance, we are working in the space of civic engagement, do we have a contour for what civic engagement as a space looks like? Who are the organizations working in this space? What are the headwinds and tailwinds for organizations trying to build anything in this space of civic engagement? What are organizations that are trying to enable justice making? What are the challenges they face? You know, what is the larger field of justice making? Who are all of the players? Who are all of the actors? And therefore what is required at the level of ecosystem building for this field? So because our loyalty is to these fields and to the thematic areas that we support, I think our interest in progress is also at the level of the field.
0:35:34.0 Natasha: If there are shifts that are happening and in gender, gender equity is something that we don’t see as the gender lab’s job or alone because all of us are striving towards a society that is more gender equal. And if I’m gonna hold gender lab accountable, I have to hold myself also accountable for how much gender equity I was able to bring about. But the idea that eventually something has to, some needle has to move at the larger thematic level and not so much at the level of each individual grantee. We have conviction that if we enable more and more actors to come in, participate, procreate, enter the field, strive towards this mountaintop, then something will move. And so again, our interest is in like how do we create an enabling and environment for more and more actors to join in and come together to try to solve that same problem? How do we enable collaboration a little bit better? How do we surface knowledge from this community of practice so that people aren’t replicating or reinventing? Those are the kind of metrics that we use and we have many sense making tools and methods, but it’s a little bit, yeah, it’s a little bit hard to kind of quantify.
0:36:35.1 Varadarajan: Okay. That very clearly keeps you up at night. I was not expecting such a long answer, but…
0:36:42.8 Natasha: Yeah.
0:36:44.2 Varadarajan: Wow. I think that the benchmark that you create for your, you’ve said for yourself is, oh, torturous.
0:36:48.1 Natasha: No, but you know I think you know can I be honest, I can tell you this, that if you tell…
0:36:54.5 Speaker 1: Yeah.
0:36:55.1 Natasha: And I can probably on this speak on the behalf of my team as well. If you tell any one of us that from tomorrow onwards, you are going to have to measure your every grantees, like, you’re gonna have to basically go to your conservation portfolio and ask them exactly how many, how much forest cover they have increased, I think that will torture us much more. I think we’ll be like, forget it, [laughter], we’re not gonna do that. [laughter] This other stuff, yes, keeps us up at night, but I really feel it feels a bit more real than going and asking somebody, you know what percentage of like gender norm have you shifted? I’m not so sure. I’m not saying anybody else is doing that. I’m not saying other funders are doing that either, but I’m just saying that this is the only way we know to make sense. So it’s not that torturous for us. [laughter]
0:37:36.0 Speaker 1: What’s the most hilarious part of your job? You obviously think a lot and then some about what you do. But tell me if there’s any part of your job that you find that has you in splits.
0:37:48.4 Natasha: Well I think that we have a great time as a team, but the splits part, I think we do, I think the, it is true that our team gets, we all laugh quite a bit about some of the kinds of queries we get on our contact ID. Once I remember somebody reached out to me wanting to talk about mental health and then they started telling me about past life regression and how they are helping women’s release the ghost of their ancestors from their properties [laughter], you know? So…
0:38:21.6 Speaker 1: Yeah.
0:38:21.9 Natasha: And like I said, because we are very responsive, we’ll sort of say, be like, yeah, sure, let’s have a conversation. What do you want? Like, what exactly is this? And you know, the thing is even on mental health, right? Like who am I to say that What works or doesn’t work? And ultimately if there is a cult that gives you some joy, you know, maybe that’s fine. So we get like really interesting solicitations, which sometimes we’ve had instances where we’ve gotten faults. Like there are some very, very, very lengthy emails, which is a very long and horrific story about somebody being kidnapped, and I’m writing from the inside of this vehicle, et cetera. So you get all kinds of emails into the contact email address, and I think that’s what sometimes makes us laugh.
0:38:57.1 Varadarajan: Natasha, this has been truly, truly amazing. As we kind of begin to wrap up and come to a close, really, really wanna thank you for taking the time, answering all my questions and really giving us an insider’s perspective into working in Nilekani Philanthropies. I’d like to know if you have any parting words for us, if you have any feedback, any advice, anything it would be greatly appreciated by the team and, I think very encouraging.
0:39:23.2 Natasha: I really definitely like the idea of using conversations as a way of building discourse. So if you are talking to donors and foundations, it’s nice to do a kind of long form genuine conversation about what they care about, where they’re coming from. Because like you said, I think a lot of people don’t necessarily engage especially principles and donors for all of the convictions they themselves have. And so I think it’s great. I mean, I’m very curious to see where this goes. It takes stamina to build things and I’m always on the side of people who wanna build things. So it’s [laughter] it’s always a pleasure.
0:40:00.8 Varadarajan: And I think there’s a statistic somewhere that says that most podcasts don’t go beyond episode three. And you are our fourth episode. So…
0:40:08.6 Natasha: Oh, am I?
0:40:09.1 Varadarajan: Yeah.
0:40:09.6 Natasha: I was like, this is like the ending.
0:40:10.5 Varadarajan: Thank you so much for that. [laughter]
0:40:13.5 Natasha: I mean, nothing after this [laughter]
0:40:14.9 Varadarajan: No, no, no. We’re not ending it. That’s definitely the opposite direction of where we wanna go.
0:40:20.7 Natasha: Oh, that’s nice.
0:40:21.6 Varadarajan: But thank you, thank you so much genuinely, and I will keep you posted.
बातचीत:प्रकृति के पास जाइए, फोन छोड़ परिवार संग खाना खाइए, बच्चे को पहला उपहार एक किताब दीजिए…
समाज, सरकार और बाजार… देश के इन तीन पहियों की मदद से ही राष्ट्र की प्रगति तय होती है। ऐसा मानना है भारत की सबसे दानवीर महिला रोहिणी निलेकणी का। एडलगिव हुरुन इंडिया 2022 के अनुसार 120 करोड़ रु. के दान के साथ 63 वर्षीय रोहिणी निलेकणी पिछले 3 साल से देश की सबसे बड़ी दानवीर महिला हैं। फिलैन्थ्रॉपिस्ट होने के साथ वे एक लेखक भी हैं। शिक्षा, पर्यावरण व लैंगिक समानता जैसे विषयों में रोहिणी काम कर चुकी हैं। फिलहाल रोहिणी निलेकणी फिलैन्थ्रॉपी फाउंडेशन की अध्यक्ष हैं। पढ़िए रोहिणी की दैनिक भास्कर के संचित श्रीवास्तव से खास बातचीत।
सामाजिक विषयों पर…
-सर्विस बिफोर सेल्फ… यह हमारे परिवार का मंत्र रहा है। मेरे दादाजी स्वतंत्रता सेनानी थे, चंपारन आंदोलन में उन्होंने गांधीजी के साथ काम किया था। मेरी फिलैन्थ्रॉपिक यात्रा की शुरुआत 1992 में हुई थी, जब मेरे एक दोस्त का सड़क दुर्घटना में निधन हो गया। उस हादसे ने मुझे झकझोर दिया था। उसके बाद ही हम कुछ दोस्तों ने मिलकर ‘नागरिक’ नाम से एक पहल शुरू की। यह सुरक्षित सड़कों के लिए एक सकारात्मक पहल थी। यहीं से मुझे प्रेरणा मिली। कुछ साल पहले मैं और मेरे पति (नंदन निलेकणी) ‘गिविंग प्लेज’ से जुड़ गए, जो बिल गेट्स, मेलिंदा गेट्स और वाॅरेन बुफे ने शुरू किया था। इसके तहत हमने अपनी लाइफटाइम में 50% वेल्थ डोनेट करने का फैसला लिया है।
मेंटल हेल्थ के विषय पर संवाद जरूरी…
-मेंटल हेल्थ का विषय काफी गंभीर है। हमारे देश में तकरीबन 20 करोड़ लाेगाें को मानसिक समस्या अनुभव होती हैं। इस समस्या से जूझने के लिए हमने इस साल दो संस्थान (निमहैंस और एनसीबीएस) के साथ मेंटल हेल्थ पर काम करना शुरू किया और 100 करोड़ रु. मेंटल हेल्थ के लिए डोनेट किए हैं।
निगेटिविटी से जीतने का फॉर्मूला…
-‘वॉक इन द वाइल्ड’ यह मेरा आइडिया है निगेटिविटी से जीतने का। जब मैं दुखी होती हूं, तो मैं तुरंत जंगल में चली जाती हूं। आप चाहें किसी भी शहर में रहें, जरूरी है प्रकृति के करीब रहना। जापान में निगेटिविटी से बचने की परम्परा है ‘शिनरिन योकू’…इसका मतलब कि जब आप प्रकृति के पास होते हैं तो आपकी पांचों इन्द्रियां प्रकृित से जुड़ जाती हैं व आपकाे तुरंत शांति मिलती है।
हर बच्चे के हाथ में एक किताब…
-हमने 2004 में प्रथम बुक्स नाम से एक एनजीओ शुरू किया था। उस समय हमने पाया कि बच्चे पढ़ रहे हैं लेकिन उनके पढ़ने के लिए पर्याप्त किताबें ही नहीं हैं। प्रथम बुक्स के स्टाेरीवीवर प्लेटफॉर्म के जरिए उन्हें किताबें पहुंचाई गई, अब तक यहां 10 करोड़ स्टाेरीज पढ़ी जा चुकी हैं। मैं तो हर पेरेंट को कहती हूं कि बच्चे को पहला गिफ्ट एक बुक ही दीजिए। मुझे याद है कि मेरा ग्रेंडसन जब 6 महीने का था तब उसे एक बुक पढ़ाई जा रही थी। जब उसकी मां उसके लिए किताब पढ़ती थी, तब किताब के आखिरी पन्ने तक आते-आते वो रोने लगता था कि उसे अब एक दूसरी किताब लाकर पढ़ाओ। यह ताकत होती है एक किताब की।
हेल्थ और जरूरी खानपान पर…
-आज के दौर में फैमिली डिनर जैसी परम्पराएं ही समाप्त हो रहीं हैं। हम सभी अपने स्मार्टफोन्स में बिजी होते जा रहे हैं। ऐसे में जरूरी है कि हम अपने स्मार्टफोन्स को किनारे रखकर परिवार के साथ फैमिली डिनर करना दोबारा शुरू करें। खानपान हमारे जीवन का महत्वपूर्ण हिस्सा है। यह समझना भी जरूरी है कि हमें फूड मिल कैसे रहा है। इसके पीछे कितना श्रम लगता है और हम फूड को किस तरह से कंज्यूम कर रहे हैं। एक दौर एेसा भी हुआ करता था जब हम दिन का पहला निवाला खाने से पहले प्रार्थना करते थे। यह दिखाता है कि हम खानपान को लेकर कितने जागरूक थे। हमें फूड को लेकर ग्रेटफुल होना चाहिए।
लैंगिक समानता के विषय पर…
-लैंगिक समानता की जब हम बात करते हैं, तो महिला सशक्तिकरण तो जरूरी है ही। लेकिन हमारी फिलैन्थ्रॉपी युवा लड़कों पर भी विशेष ध्यान देती है। क्योंकि युवा लड़कों की भी चुनौतियां होती हैं। उनके ऊपर भी समाजिक दबाव होता हे। युवा लड़कों के मानसिक दबाव अलग होते हैं। ऐसे में हमारा ध्यान यह है कि कैसे युवा लड़कों की मदद की जाए।
‘बचपन मनाओ और बच्चे बनो’…
-2014 में हमने ‘एकस्टेप फाउंडेशन’ की शुरुआत की थी। बच्चों को खेल-खेल में ही सीखने का मौका दीजिए। उनके साथ खुद भी बच्चे बन जाइए।
पर्यावरण चुनौतियों पर…
– रोज प्रकृति के लिए बस कोई एक प्रयास कीजिए। हमें पर्यावरण की चुनौतियां के बारे में मालूम है। लेकिन इसका पॉजिटिव पहलू यह है कि इतिहास में पहली बार 8 अरब लोग पर्यावरण के संरक्षक बन रहे हैं। हम सभी पर्यावरण चुनौतियों को लेकर अब जागरूक हो रहे हैं। सोचिए कि जब 8 अरब लोग मदर नेचर को बेहतर बनाने के बारे में सोचेंगे, तो पर्यावरण चुनौतियों पर हमें जीत कैसे नहीं मिलेगी?
चैरिटी और फिलैन्थ्रॉपी पर…
चैरिटी और फिलैन्थ्रॉपी में ज्यादा अंतर नहीं है। चैरिटी तब होती है, जब हम किसी समस्या का हल खोजने के लिए पैसे डोनेट करने का विचार बनाते हैं। चाहे वो किसी संस्थान के लिए डोनेशन हो, हॉस्पिटल को हो या फिर किसी घार्मिक संस्थान को ही क्यों न हो। पिछले 2-3 दशकों में फिलैन्थ्रॉपी शब्द काफी प्रचलित हुआ है। यह चैरिटी की तरह ही है, लेकिन यह ज्यादा स्ट्रेटजिक होता है। इसमें फिलैन्थ्रॉपिस्ट खुद ही अपनी संस्थान बनाते हैं और किसी जरूरी मकसद के लिए स्ट्रेटजी बनाकर काम करते हैं।
महामारी के दौरान आम भारतीयों ने सैकड़ों करोड़ रुपये खर्च किये। तो, ऐसी समझ है कि दान केवल मानव जाति के प्यार से आता है, जिसकी ज़रूरत हम सभी को है – दूसरे लोगों की पीड़ा को दूर करने के लिए। लेकिन आजकल परोपकार, कम से कम, अधिक रणनीतिक होने और असमानता के मूल कारणों को संबोधित करने की आकांक्षा रखता है। अच्छे परोपकार को यही करना चाहिए।
She believes wealth comes with great responsibility and is best deployed for the greater good. Rohini Nilekani practices what she preaches and is the most generous woman on the EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List 2022. She has been the most generous woman in India for the past three years and has doubled her donations yearly. Writer, author, and philanthropist, Rohini strongly believes that transparency in philanthropy and wealth generation is critical to democracies.
We understand that you invest in people as much in institution building and the projects they run. Could you tell us how you arrived at this and why funders must look beyond projects? It is mainly because of the way my journey began. I began as a social entrepreneur rather than a philanthropist. Of course, the energy and intent among both are the same – both want to participate in creating a better society. But when you have jumped into the fray and taken on a social mission and a programmatic approach, you realise how difficult it is. And that changes how you view the impact, and the question of measuring social change becomes more complex. This has helped me to see that human beings are critical elements in social change. Many of my learnings from the Akshara Foundation, co-founding Pratham books, and now EkStep has helped me keep people at the centre.
Their passion, commitment, integrity and intent were the most important things to nurture. Without that, even if you have the most sophisticated technology, the best process, and efficient management, you would still not get that social change to happen. Because it is the people that drive the change. We, as philanthropists, need to be sensitive to the needs of the leaders we support and be nurturing by supporting them in different ways – many times, beyond grants.
How difficult was it from a thought process to donate big sums of money when you started philanthropy?
The first significant sum of money I came into was when I sold shares of Infosys. Till then, it was a few lakhs, and I was happy to do small philanthropy. Suddenly, I got INR 100 crore from the sale of shares. It was a mountain of money, and I was already living a comfortable life. I could like to reiterate that it wasn’t a huge sacrifice. It was more of a strategy. So, I was very clear that all of it would go into my foundation. So, I started Arghyam (a foundation set up in 2001 for sustainable water and sanitation, which funds initiatives across India) to learn how to do philanthropy, and every bit of it went into Arghyam. And from there on, I was inspired to give more and better.
Another reason to give the entire sum was that I wanted my intent to be clear to myself first. It worked very well, and I had fun learning from this experience. Very empowering! I think we should not hesitate to give big from the beginning.
Having said that, Arghyam was easy as I gave it as a corpus, and it was a foundation that I set up. But when you start to give outside your gate, it gets more challenging. We see institutions are getting ready to absorb more capital, and my support for institutions is also stepping up.
Has anyone influenced you in the decision? My family, especially my grandfather – Babasaheb Soman, has greatly influenced me. He gave his whole life to the freedom movement, to Gandhiji’s Satyagraha. He even gave up his earnings, much to my grandmother’s disappointment. Now, that’s a real sacrifice. Always his legacy was shining for me in my life. And then, in a society where the wealthy have to demonstrate the responsibility of wealth, we were and remain sensitized and sensitive to that.
You have been quoted saying that Indians have to be bold about philanthropy. India is at a very exciting stage, and you’re seeing people willing to give more. Can we open our minds a bit more? Can we be ready to take more risks? As we look at the problems heading our way – the pandemic, climate change, and economic distress – if we keep being safe, we will only make incremental changes.
No business entrepreneur is ever content with marginal profits but strives to be a unicorn. Similarly, can we do everything it takes to become philanthropy unicorns? Can we look at ourselves and ask what kind of society or nation we want? We are wealthy, and we have everything we want. But is our wealth and material, wonderful life built on a flimsy foundation? If I have a wonderful car, but the public roads are horrible outside my gate, what is the point?
Can our philanthropy be bold enough to say that the foundation should become strong? What can I invest as a philanthropist to make that public infrastructure, the common public good, much more robust and the foundation much sturdy so that society benefits? And it’s also enlightened self-interest. It is seen that some issues like mental health and geriatric care do not find much acceptance. Do you think that giving back has to evolve and mature in India? Media and people like us have a role to play and perhaps need to tell our stories better. Most wealthy people are busy running their businesses and may not have time to think through all these problems. And not enough of them have foundation offices and the right talent who inform and nudge them with updates and ideas.
There is so much important, exciting and joyful work to be done in India beyond the obvious – that makes things better for everybody. The wealthy need to get a little more interested to look beyond the usual. Whether it’s our natural heritage, building up our ecology, the climate resilience in our cities, public housing, and our prison system. And we still need a thousand more institutions for the educational needs of 300 million youngsters.
India is the innovation hub of the world for social change. However, we need new thinking to handle the challenges of future livelihoods, the job market, and the knowledge economy. There is a lot of committed capital – all dressed up and waiting to find a home. This decade, 2030, is one of the most critical decades I can think of in human history. We must think much bigger, much bolder, and do much more. That space is just waiting to be taken up by bold philanthropy. But first, you have to open the doors of your heart and then open the doors of your pockets.
Rohini Nilekani, the chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies Foundation, which, earlier this week, had announced a grant of Rs 100 crore for Nimhans and NCBS ‘Centre for Brain and Mind’ (CBM), spoke to STOI on why mental health research needs a lot more funding in India and how governments cannot be the only ones taking responsibility. Excerpts:
How did you pick Nimhans-NCBS project for funding? The need to fund pure research demands a high-risk approach and that was very important to me because that’s what philanthropy is about. I’ve been looking to start my mental health portfolio and we’d been doing some research for a while as I wanted the investment to be strategic and we were looking for partnerships. Nimhans is a premier institute in this field and NCBS was doing some cutting-edge research on biological sciences. So, we thought they should be brought together. When we found out that they had already collaborated and that their project needed a lot more funding, we decided to provide the grant.
Your funding is for five years, what’s the project status at present? The project is at a key juncture now with the next few years being very critical. The team has been following this cohort of 1,500 families for five years and picked up 75 points of clinical data from each patient. They’ve been following them, but needed more funding. The urgency was also that India has many more endogamous relationships and there’s an opportunity to understand genetic transmission in this context. Hopefully, this will allow for a lot of findings that can throw light on diseases that are largely prevalent in India and also result in many more effective therapies.
How important is it for science projects, especially those funded by people like you, to be open source? Philanthropic capital is something that the government doesn’t tax. So, I feel that all that is supported through philanthropy – the knowledge that comes with it, the research, products and processes – should be open source and be put out in the public domain, so that others can benefit from it. That’s why we always encourage our partners to do so. In this case, the project was anyway going to be open to other academics according to DBT (department of biotechnology) norms and given that we don’t know where the next round of innovation will come from, it being open source was a very important factor for me.
You’ve largely focused on environment-related work, can we expect anything different now? This fiscal, my total contribution is Rs 168 crore to about 100 organisations. As for the future, I need to see what aligns with my interest. The science gallery, for instance, was important to me because it encourages citizen partnership. On mental health, especially, post-pandemic, I saw a greater urgency to invest. Future investments will be in strategic areas.
