With “Societal Platform”, the billionaire couple are combining their ideas, experience, and wealth to effect change.
Nandan Nilekani co-founded Infosys and architected Aadhaar, which now covers 1.26 billion Indian.s Rohini Nilekani isn’t just India’s most prolific woman philanthropist, but she’s also the sixth overall, While Nandan has mastered the art of building disruptive tech platforms, Rohini has built an ambitious and bold philanthropic portfolio. The two are partnering to pool their ideas, experience and wealth into creating “Societal Platform”.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with ET Now, about the Coronavirus pandemic and the changes it has brought in her work and in society at large.
The pandemic has brought many changes in our lives, some for better and others for worse. The negative repercussions are being felt by people of certain economic classes more than others, which will leave a big impact. This new reality is a sea change for many people and we have to do a lot to set things right now. In December last year, I don’t think any of us could have predicted what our world would be like in June, so uncertainty has become the new certainty. On the other hand many people, myself included, have learnt more about what we should prioritise in life and the dignity of labour. We’ve really have a chance to introspect now, instead of rushing about doing things.
Creating a More Resilient Society
It’s time to think about the big questions now. Over the last three decades, my work has been centred around the continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, Sarkaar. My contention is that we really need to work on the Samaaj side of things because the Samaaj is the foundation. It forms the basis of everything else, and the markets and the state are created to serve the Samaaj. Sometimes that gets confused and we behave like consumers or subjects of the state first. We need to reassert our citizenship now, and what better time than this? The pandemic has taught us about the importance of society, community, and our neighbours. This is where my work has been placed and this has been an opportunity for me to strengthen that work by supporting civil society more and doubling down on my philanthropy. As we have seen during this time, it’s the civil society sector that has been the first responders, while the markets – through no fault of their own – have been frozen and the state has been overwhelmed.
This is a good time for us to really position ourselves as citizens and consider what belongs to the citizen sector, what should belong to the state, and what belongs to markets. With regards to areas such as education, health, telecommunications, and natural resources, we now have the opportunity to reimagine the balance between Samaaj, Bazaar, Sarkaar. This is especially true in health and education, which as we can see are topics of intense debate right now.
We need to value the principle of subsidiarity, which is that things should be solved at the first, lowest, nearest possible level to the problem. In terms of the COVID-19 response, while we do need the State to be very strong and create the frameworks for all of us to act, I think it’s become increasingly clear that it’s the closest community, the closest health center, the closest administrative unit that has the flexibility and the resilience to respond in context. So there is definitely the argument for a balance between centralisation and decentralisation. We’ll decentralise as much as possible but we also need to keep some larger power and authority to be able to set frameworks and do good regulation so that people can respond in context.
We’re also seeing different ways to unleash the power of philanthropy. For example, CSR is a sort of blunt instrument because by law, companies must follow all the draft rules and do exactly what the government has specified. In a way that puts a kind of boundary or cage around philanthropy, which is why I always think of CSR as a tax by other means. Some good has come out of it, but CSR is not going to change the world. If we move to private philanthropy, there is a huge opportunity that some of us have tried to harness, by doubling down on working in an area that interests us. That is in addition to doing immediate COVID-19 relief and supporting civil society organisations on the frontline, getting basic essentials like rations and healthcare to people. As reports are coming in from the ground we know that there is still a lot of desperation out there, so this work will be necessary for a while.
However, alongside this crucial work, we also have a chance to think about the mid and the long term consequences. How should personal philanthropy invest in creating a more flexible and resilient society? This is not going to be the last pandemic, nor has it been the first. We have already been seeing the effects of climate change across the globe, and we know the future holds more changes. So how do we allow society to take the agency to see what’s coming and prepare, adjust, and create new kinds of structures that will be needed. We need a different kind of leadership, and a different kind of followership too. We need to help civil society organisations to build those things – it doesn’t just happen overnight. But sometimes, a trigger like this can help us start that process, and that’s where I’m doing some of my investing as well.
Encouraging Innovation
I have been working in the early childhood and childhood learning sector for 21 years now. I co-founded Pratham books, where we have reached millions of children with indigenous simple content. Over the last four and a half years at EkStep, our focus has been on how we can enable India’s young children to have better opportunities to learn. After 20 years, this is the first time I feel genuinely hopeful. This is because of many things the government and civil society has done over the decades, as well as the technologies that have converged to enable us to reimagine learning for every single child.
In order to reach the goal of no child being left behind, digital, and online tools are a critical component. Of course, we need children to be surrounded by caring adults, and not simply a screen. But we must learn to accept the digital classroom or the digital idea of learning as well. There is no perfect solution and mistakes will be made, but if we don’t experiment with this, I think the future will be very unfair for some children. Of course schools, classrooms, and personal interaction is important, but we’re also living through a time when children being physically together in a classroom is dangerous for them.
We have to face our reality now and reimagine solutions, because this is not the last health situation that’s coming our way in this century. We may see floods, earthquakes, droughts, tornadoes – many events could disrupt the school system. So we have to have a Plan B which may become Plan A in the future. We need to be able to quickly switch to something that is a blend of physical and virtual. For that, we have to keep the virtual going, and we have to keep learning what works well for children, parents, and teachers.
We have accepted that children need a social setting in which to learn from peers and to have a common knowledge curriculum, so that everybody has at least a common core from which they’re learning. So we do need the school setting for the most part. What we’re seeing now is that there’s so much uncertainty, and when children have large amounts of unstructured time we know that parents get very anxious. But we’ve also seen how little children watching an interesting and interactive thing happening on the screen can actually result in joyful learning. I don’t think we should stop that from happening. We need to allow for experimenting and encourage the private and government school systems to innovate and learn.
Building Bridges Between the Physical and Virtual
Nobody can speak accurately about the future, but I do think that we’re going to see a lot of change. We’ve truly seen some of our worst fears come to life as this virus has taken over the world. In some ways, we have developed a new societal muscle to deal with something this unprecedented. And I think that people will keep exercising this muscle so that next time something like this happens, we’re better prepared for it. I think there’s going to be a fundamental shift in how we think about eating, travel, learning, and working.
With EkStep foundation, I’ve been delightfully surprised to see how proactive the union government has been and how many states have come onboard, understanding that the future must be a blend of the physical and virtual. Our QR coded textbooks are all over the country, which builds a bridge between the physical and digital world. The textbook is something that you can find in every Indian household. So we have taken this static thing and embedded a QR code, which can be updated any time. Both the state and union governments have adopted it very proactively and they are learning from each other’s best practices. Since there’s no physical infrastructure involved, they can do this quickly and efficiently because they get data in real time. They know when it’s working or not working, and can course-correct easily. Of course progress has risks and we have to watch out for those, but I’m very happy with how things are going so far, and the government’s openness to digital learning.
In terms of what’s happening on the ground now with this pandemic, we have done quick relief with all the organisations that we are already working with, because there is a lot of trust there. So anybody who came to us saying, “We’re going to give basic relief” we completely supported and allowed them to change budgets around and do what needed to be done. But we also know that this is not going to be enough. Only the government has the capacity and ability for the kind of effort needed to restore agency to people, so that they can go back to their lives and livelihood. Philanthropy can only be a band aid solution right now. My goal for this year is to now focus and double down on the sectors that I’m interested in. I’m increasing our budgets in areas like environment, justice, education, and independent media. We will help those organisations to think about what resilience looks like and what communities should be prepared for.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Gopal Sankaranarayanan, as part of the Casual Conversations with Citizens series. Rohini shares her experiences of life and encounters with the law, rights, and most importantly, her ideas of justice.
I grew up in a fairly middle class household in Mumbai, and my parents wanted the best for my sisters and I. My mother was from a land-owning feudal setup but wanted us to have a liberal, convent education and be independent. The stories we were told, and the values we were taught said that wealth does not come from possessions or money, but a good education and how it is applied.
My grandparents inspired me a lot as well. My grandfather, Babasaheb Soman, was from the Belgaum-Khanapur area. Despite being in the legal profession, he spent most of his time trying to convince his clients not to go to court, which in turn meant that he did not earn much money. My grandmother, on the other hand, came from Gwalior as a young second bride to Babasahed Soman. Her father was an ambassador to the court, so she came from palatial surroundings to my grandfather’s relatively humble home.
Their stories were told a lot. I didn’t meet my grandfather – he worked with Gandhi during Champaran, and died just before Independence. But his stories are alive in our family. My grandmother, who I did meet, showed me how to really live. Having gone from wealth to humble living, she decided to go into severe austerity for the last 20 years of her life by living in one single room. So it was quite a journey.
I met Nandan in December 1977, when he was at IIT and I was at Elphinstone College in Mumbai. At the time we were young and free and trying to be radical, and not thinking about wealth. Even 10 years into Infosys, nobody thought we would come into this kind of unprecedented wealth.
Law and the Power of Knowledge
As a journalist you get to see people encountering the law, because you write their stories. I remember as a cub reporter, I had to report on a murder, for which I had to think about issues of justice, policing, and crime. I think as a reporter you are constantly doing stories that involve jurisprudence in some form, but otherwise journalists don’t really encounter the law. In fact, we’re quite privileged in that regard. A good example of this is when I was covering a protest against a dowry-related act of violence that had taken place. Some people had killed a woman, so we were outside that house, and I had my camera and my notebook with me. When the police came, all those people got arrested, but I didn’t because I was also reporting. Which is to say, when you’re reporting, it’s a very different privilege.
Later, when I went to see how a high court functions, I was quite appalled because nobody could hear the judge. The audio system was poor and the crowd was too big, there was so much confusion. I saw a lot of people outside. One fellow was actually crying when I was talking to him, saying, “This is the 30th time I’ve come, and my case has been adjourned. My life is falling apart”. It really bothered me that something as simple as decent and competent access to a court is not a reality for most people.
So I’ve always been interested, both as a journalist and writer and because my grandfather was also in the legal profession, about the issues of law in society. How does the law interface with society? Who learns from whom? It’s a two-way conversation, but often not discussed enough in the public domain. It seems to be hiding behind black robes sometimes, but it should be out in the public domain because law is about society. And so those issues are really important to put out into many languages, into casual conversations on the streets and in our homes, and that’s what made me suggest the idea of a portal that makes the law easy to understand for ordinary people.
We still need to find ways to make lawmaking more transparent. In this, civil society plays a big role. I think we are also to blame as voters. I’ve said this before – we don’t realize that lawmaking is a very critical function of the legislators we elect and then expect to solve our personal problems individually. If we also took the time to understand that making good laws is a significant part of the work that legislators must do, then they can have a conversation with us to say, “Okay we are thinking of such a law, do you even have an opinion on it, then we can represent you when those laws are being framed.” I think that needs to start happening and it’s a two-way conversation, we must use our legislators. We can have civil-society organizations step in, so there is a much broader democratic consultation before laws are made.
There is also an issue with the regulation of laws. There is no law that says, for example, that people can go and dump effluents in Vrishabhavathi river in Bangalore. Nothing allows you to do that. But people wait for everybody else to be asleep and go and do it. So, how many policemen, how many people do we need to watch over other people’s bad intent from being practiced? We need our governance institutions to step up and say, “Look, this pollution is going to affect all of us together.” So, we definitely have deficits of governance and regulation. We have deficits in terms of how laws are framed. And this is a wonderful time for more people to get involved with these issues of law and society and do all they can to improve the discourse, at least. Everyone can be a part of that and reduce some of the polarization in thinking. How can we do much more preventive work like mediation outside the courts? How can we think of ways where people can do much more peacemaking and prevention before things even reach the courts? So, I think there’s a role for a lot of people to get engaged with these questions.
We need to give first-time legislators a primer on how to go ahead with lawmaking. The work that PRS Legislative Research and Vidhi Center for Legal Policy are doing are good examples. Vidhi is trying to help legislators and parliamentary committees make laws that are more clear, contemporary, and within the frame of the constitution. PRS Legislative Research, on the other hand, is helping legislators and parliamentarians understand what laws are on the table, how to make better votes happen around them, and how to have better debates.
Finally, when it comes to the judicial academy, it should be similar to medical education where you have continuing education to retain your license to practice. Given that change is happening at a dizzying speed, especially because of technology, this is the right time for it, because otherwise how are judges supposed to keep up?
Gender is a Cross-Cutting Theme
I’m not a career woman in the conventional sense of the term. As a journalist I only worked for a few years, after which I did a lot of freelancing. I gave up my job when my daughter was born because I found it hard to juggle both. But I was in a privileged position to be able to do so, and to take six years off from work to dedicate to my children because Nandan was very busy at the time. Additionally, my profession allowed me to write articles and do simple things on the side, so I was able to take advantage of that.
In that way, I did have the struggles that other working women have. All the things that women have to balance can be very tough. The demands keep changing and you have to make many sacrifices, because it is impossible to do it all, no matter what people say. Something has to give. If you’re lucky, you have a support system around you. Which is why it is so necessary that we work with men and boys, so that we can enable them to become the support system that women need.
In my three decades of work so far, what I’ve seen is that no matter which area you work in, gender is a cross-cutting theme. Take water, which is an area I have worked on for 15 years now – the burden of water is on women at a household level, and in that way gender is an important part of our work in water, though we do not necessarily call it out.
At a macro level, as a writer and a reader, when you are looking at what’s happening around us and trying to unpack things, you begin to think about the other side. In this case, that is thinking about who a woman is dealing with – she is dealing with a man on the street, or her husband, or her father, or her son, or somebody who has a different way of looking at women’s empowerment perhaps than she does. That makes her choices very complicated.
Having thought of this I then began to look at young men, and asked myself where do all these things spring from? What is the root of patriarchal thinking? What do young males think when they are 13 and their hormones are raging?
It was this line of questioning that made me look at what work was being done in this area, to try to support more of it, and create a whole portfolio across India where young men can safely examine their masculinity and come to terms with who they are. This is very necessary if we want women’s empowerment.
The Need for Collaboration
In terms of collaboration, there are two kinds of models that we can look at. The first is between philanthropists, and the time has come when philanthropists globally are recognising the need to work together. This is an important point in the journey of The Giving Pledge where if we look at the difference between how much has been promised versus how much has been given, there is a huge gap. People don’t necessarily know how to give money, it’s not so easy. There are many intermediary organizations that are also helping bigger philanthropists, bigger foundations to connect with smaller first time donors. And there are many, many more open spaces for that sharing and discovery. So this is actually a very great time for that.
In this context, there is a need for all of us to learn from those who have given better and given more. Thankfully, there are many intermediary organizations that are helping the bigger philanthropists and foundations connect with smaller first-time donors. Additionally, there are many open spaces for that sharing and discovery. It’s a great time for cross-learning in the space of philanthropy.
The second kind of collaboration is between philanthropists and the government. Here, it is especially important to note that the money that even a philanthropist like Bill Gates has is nothing compared to what the government has. However, what philanthropists or people who want to invest in social change do possess is the ability to take some risks with their capital. They can say, “Let’s just try something. And if it fails then we’ll try something else.” This is not a luxury the government has.
Indian governments, whether at the center, state, Panchayat, or even the municipality level – are usually open to suggestions. From there, it is a journey of co-creation between the government body and the philanthropist. The government body will have ideas, because they have budgets, schemes, or programmes, and as a philanthropist you have to fit into all of that. But you do get the space to innovate and that’s the important thing.
Take Arghyam as an example. Approximately 10-15 years ago, there were marvelous institutions doing work on groundwater, at a time when there were no groundwater laws. Arghyam, in collaboration with these civil society organizations, came up with something called Participatory Groundwater Management which is now a cornerstone of all government policy on water. Which is to say that it is possible to find space and opportunity to work very well with the government.
On Successes and Learnings
When I think about my success, the first success that comes to mind is Pratham books which I co-founded in 2004. When we set it up in Bangalore, our goal was to get a book in every child’s hand. I stayed there for 10 years, and the next team came in and took it on. Over the years, millions of children have been able to get books in their own language, get them free or at very affordable prices, access them across the country, and soon all across the globe, thanks to the Creative Commons platform we created. I think that I consider it a genuine success.
If we are considering the future of citizens as lawmakers and law abiders, it is especially important to ensure that children learn better. To this end, I have worked with two kinds of organizations. With EkStep, our mission is to increase access to learning opportunities for 200 million children by next year. I think we are on track to do that because we are working very closely with all the governments – approximately 28 or 30 states now want to develop a platform for getting teachers to teach better and access resources. EkStep does not create content. Instead, it supports the whole content creation ecosystem. In that sense, we do not decide what needs to be taught, but we focus on ensuring that whatever is being taught is being taught better, be it in terms of access, ability to discover, or ability to share. In essence, it is a technology enabled platform.
On the other hand, organizations like Akshara Foundation, which I have been involved with deeply, looked at the importance of teaching values, what the atmosphere in a classroom should be like, and what the relationship between children and teachers should be. Together, I think we are able to engage with different parts of the system. The present is a great time for us to really engage with the whole school system so that children are more curious and connected to issues of future citizenship.
The other success that comes to mind is Arghyam, where we’ve made some serious inroads in policy when it comes to water. We’ve been able to support dozens of organizations that have been working on the ground for decades. The government has already come out with two massive schemes in water, the thinking for which came from some of Arghyam’s partners. These policies in turn impact millions of people across the country.
A learning experience that stands out for me was with an organization called Nagarik. I had just lost a very dear friend in a ghastly accident and so we set up this organization for road safety in 1992. We were spectacularly unsuccessful. Though there were amazing people like Sivakumar and Kiran Mazumdar and Jagdish Raja involved, we just didn’t know what to do. We were perhaps a little ahead of our time and we were doing the wrong things and under-investing, and so it did not work. But it taught me that just passion and unstructured use of your time is not going to make any change possible. Knowing what I do today, I would do Nagarik very differently. But that is how we learn – by failing.
The Need for a Strong Samaaj
There are issues that remain unresolved in India on ground water, and that’s just one example of the commons. So, who owns the commons? Whose land is it? Whose water is it? We haven’t really resolved that. Different countries have resolved this in different ways, but personally I worry about the hard edge of that. To say that either the community owns it, or the private sector can be given a lease on it, or the state holds it in trust and decides whether the private sector gets it or you and I get it – they are all problematic constructs. So, we need a stepped-up governance architecture on the public commons. We have to use the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ where possible. For example, even if we say the state is a trustee of the commons, we have to leave some of it to be solved at the most local possible level. So, panchayats under the 73rd amendment need to be rejuvenated now but many local water bodies can be managed through dialogue and within those small areas or even across, within district boundaries. So, in practice, community resources are being managed by communities.
Once in a while a heavy-handed law will come down and an eminent domain will be called in and will say, “We are putting a fine here, we are putting a road here,” and there’s always conflict at those points. But I don’t even know if this can be resolved once and for all. We have to keep learning from the best examples available to us and then framing and sharpening our laws accordingly.
But you see, it’s when it comes to finite public resources that all these conversations arise. In education, if you have five extra books, I don’t get one less book. I can get five books too. If you get an education, I don’t get less of an education. But when it comes to these finite public goods, that’s when these contestations arise, and I think those discussions are still wide open in India. And we have to be wary of saying that the state will be the final authority. The common thread that runs through all my work is the dynamic continuum between Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar. Today, we need to strengthen Samaaj because right now it is very divisive and polarized. We have to start a deep conversation as to what is a good society. And then, therefore, redefine the role of the state and the market so that they remain accountable to the larger public interest. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of becoming consumers of the market or subjects of the state and forgetting that the real work for all of us, as citizens, is to contribute to a good society. We have to co-create good governance because the state alone will not do it. We have to co-create good markets that work for us, because the markets alone will never do it.
With this in mind, we need to be thinking about how we re-invest the commons with regenerative property so that more people can use them equitably and in a just manner. This is something the Samaaj sector needs to collectively think through. Here, the law needs to be engaged to enable implementation in a way that is equitable and just, and looks at intergenerational justice. These are the issues that keep me interested and I get to support so many good organizations that are deeply thinking through these issues.
The Future of Indian Philanthropy
Going forward, India’s super wealthy need to be more generous and more transparent about how generous they are. There are some people who are very generous and don’t like to talk about it. But for more people to increase their generosity, we need to build bridges of trust amongst the wealthy. People often get insecure and feel the need to protect their wealth. When economies are doing well or when people see a trajectory for their children, they are reassured and become more generous.
Even if people are more generous, I hope that philanthropy doesn’t remain charity. I also hope that philanthropy and justice do not remain octagonal, and that there is more convergence between the two. Because it is true philanthropy when you have understood there are structural issues of inequity that you have to address through your philanthropy.
That being said, you can’t do it alone. Nobody has figured out how to have a perfectly equitable society, but we can move towards an ideal where this kind of runaway wealth becomes structurally impossible to garner, because nobody needs this kind of wealth. So, how do you then, in your philanthropy at least, keep some portion of your portfolio to look at issues of justice, to find organizations you can trust who will work on these issues, so that the burden of philanthropy itself is reduced on people. That’s a long, hard journey for many people. And we also need many more institutions working on justice to better communicate what they do and the importance of their work, so that they are able to attract investments. So, there’s lots of work ahead but it’s a very exciting time because people have recognised how interconnected our destinies are.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s comments and message during the ChaloGive fundraiser.
The way COVID-19 has restructured all our lives is unprecedented. Nobody expected everything to unravel quite this quickly. We recently conducted some surveys with Omidyar and Dalberg, and 64% of the respondents said that they were facing a serious loss of income. So the situation right now is really dire and needs immediate responses. But I think the philanthropic community also needs to start thinking about the mid and long term response. India has a very thriving civil society, and we have seen this in action because they have been the first responders in many cases. They have been giving us the feedback loops that we need to tweak the State’s decision-making process.
A few of us in the sector have made a public statement about what philanthropists should do at a time like this — we need to operate on trust. All these years working with nonprofits as partners, means that we should be able to trust them. At this point, we must loosen up all our impact reporting requirements, and give them complete freedom in terms of the use of that philanthropic capital for needs on the ground as they see it. We need to come from a place of generosity, so we are revising our budgets and doing what we have to do to respond as quickly as we can. In addition, retail giving has stepped up considerably. Many corporations in India have been giving to all the government schemes as well as to nonprofits. But some are also strategically holding their firepower, so that when donor fatigue sets in, they can come in and give. We have to think about structural things that need to continue to happen, so that people are not left to struggle with things like loss of livelihoods or water security. So the philanthropic community is thinking at these two levels – how can we give more flexibility to all our partners right now and how can we start planning for the midterm?
In terms of getting the diasporic community engaged in giving, it has been an ongoing challenge. I know from my travels that many people in the diaspora want to give, but sometimes they don’t know how to give and whom to give to. There have been attempts to create platforms that assist people with building these networks of trust, and channels like ChaloGive, where people feel comfortable giving. But we need to create more intermediary organisations that allow for networks of trust to build, not just when there are disasters but beyond that.
We also need to allow nonprofits to communicate what they do more effectively and tell their stories better. There’s nothing more powerful than a good story to keep people engaged. These are the two things we really require in order to reach the diaspora who care so much about what’s happening to the 600 million Indians who are in need. I don’t think any of us want to return to the old normal. The old normal was not a very just normal in India. There was not enough justice and equity. We want to use this opportunity to create a new normal. All of us who have anything to do with India know that all our fates are interconnected. So we keep that story of interconnection alive, and we keep being inspired by this interconnectedness so that we can engage our hearts, and our pockets as well. Our aim is to make things better, not just to return to where we were.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s interview on the importance of digital-led education and early childhood learning, on Pratham’s 25th anniversary.
Every child deserves education as a fundamental right in this country. But even today, we are not able to guarantee that right for all the children in India. The journey of bringing this about is one filled with both joy and despair, and Pratham has been on this path for 25 years. In December 1999, I was asked to join the Pratham network and I’m so grateful for that opportunity. In those days, Pratham was also growing and setting up chapters. The Karnataka chapter became Akshara Foundation, with the goal of putting every child in Bangalore in school by 2000. But it’s 2020, and the work continues. We realise how complex it is to achieve even this basic goal of creating sustainable social change in the field of education. But we are taking what we have learnt and building on that in 2020. Pratham has centred the crucial question of children’s education, and it’s impossible to ignore it now.
A People’s Movement
We can no longer ignore the three pillars of education — teachability, learnability, and accountability. The education system needs to enable all three of these pillars, with parents and communities involved in the learning process while the child remains at the centre. Learning cannot be limited to what a child does at school, it requires having an environment at home that also enables it. We saw this with Pratham Books, which we began in 2004 when we realised that Read India meant that thousands of children were learning how to read but they might not have access to books. We set out to change the paradigm of children’s publishing in India, because democratising the joy of reading was integral to giving agency to children to learn. So the idea behind Pratham Books was to be more than just a publisher. We were trying to think about how to provide local content, in accessible languages, that would be relevant and affordable, as well as fun for children to read. Since those humble beginnings, the digital platform has gone global, with content being offered in 200 languages.
This is a people’s movement, and education is a public good. This is the basic value on which Pratham was built, where everyone is allowed to participate in the movement because this is a societal mission. Educating children and democratising the joy of reading was the mission statement of Pratham Books. And it was reflected even in the operating model that we set up, putting everything under the Creative Commons license so that anyone could access and use these books. As a non-profit, our bottom line was less important than having these books be accessible, and I think today we can all be proud of what has been achieved. We started off with the goal of “a book in every child’s hand,” which has evolved into content in every child’s hand, on any digital device. I think this is the way forward, in terms of thinking about how we can make it a publicly accessible, ever-evolving good.
The possibility of an open, evolvable, technology-enabled system that serves as public infrastructure is something that I have to credit Nandan and the team at Pratham for teaching me. Rather than being technology-led, a technology-enabled system allows for the three pillars of teachability, learnability, and accountability to steadily improve. Technology allows you to gather people with different skill sets virtually, and allows them to learn from each other very quickly. And that means people are able to share knowledge instantly, which is much harder to do across geographies and distances. So I’ve understood the power of technology to help us solve societal problems like education. But we have to be careful not to be led by the technology itself, and to remember to keep it in the context of the distribution of the ability to solve.
Redefining How Children Learn
There is a movement gaining global credibility, that suggests bypassing the teacher by making children agents of their own learning. This is perhaps already happening, with so many devices in the hands of children. But I don’t think we can undervalue teachers. They are necessary to a child’s education, because the goal of learning is to create a better human being, a better citizen, and to allow that person to achieve their potential. Whether you call them a guru, a guide, a mentor, or a teacher, they are absolutely necessary to make that possible future visible to the child. It’s a two-way process that requires that the teacher also be a caring adult with knowledge that they are willing to transmit to the child. However, the role of the teacher remains absolutely critical.
Schools are said to be microcosms of the nation and its future. I hope that we can break down the kinds of social barriers that stop children from being able to congregate, socialise, and learn. But schools need not be the only place where education takes place, and technology definitely allows for that. This extends to the field of higher education as well. We need more universities and colleges in India, attracting the best talent and experimenting in building people’s skills and knowledge. I think this will look like a combination of virtual and physical classrooms, so that access and learning can happen in multiple streams.
In the 21st century, we have an opportunity to redefine how learning happens, and Pratham has been a pioneer in experimenting with education. For preschool aged children, the Balwadi Programme ensured that socialising and learning was a joyful experience. At the Akshara Foundation as well, we thought about what we wanted to impart outside of the curriculum. How do you open up minds and allow children to become more curious, without falling in the trap of exercising authority over them? The cornerstone of early childhood education must be kindness. As children grow up, we need to experiment to see what kinds of environments will allow them to thrive.
Early childhood education is also a Samaaj question, because it begins in the child’s home. We cannot delegate that early teaching role to non-profits or school systems, so how do we enable children’s parents or grandparents to be active in the learning process? This was the question that led to Nandan, Shankar Maruwada, and I setting up EkStep in 2014. We took what Nandan had learnt from Aadhaar and what I learnt from Pratham Books, in terms of how to go about a large-scale experiment, and thought about how to apply it to the problem of 200 million children in India who needed access to learning opportunities. That is how EkStep was born. During these last five years, we have been looking at how technology can enable the public infrastructure of our education system to evolve further. So the tech team at EkStep built Sunbird, which is open-source and accessible to all. This became the backbone of the National Teacher Mission platform called DIKSHA.
As a result of this, we are working with several state governments to see how teachers can work on the platform and improve digital content. We’re also working with state governments to put QR codes in their textbooks so that anybody with a digital device can access that digital content, which will keep improving and responding to what children need. What we have learnt with EkStep is that it is possible to create a unified, but not uniform, infrastructure so that contextual solution-making can keep happening. This means that teachers are allowed the opportunity to innovate using the DIKSHA content and the QR codes, and helping children who might be struggling in the classroom.
School of Tomorrow
My passion in the education sector lies in providing children with the foundational learning of reading, writing, and math skills. Once they have that, a world of opportunities opens up to them. So with EkStep, my role is to think about how to help younger children achieve this goal of learnability. Of course, there are concerns about how much to expose younger children to digital devices before it becomes a kind of addiction. We do have to be careful to see that it doesn’t harm children, but I believe this could play a crucial supplementary role to children’s education. It also grants children agency and freedom, which might allow them to actually learn more quickly, so it’s certainly something we need to consider further. In India, we need to think about the digital divide as well, that could be disastrous for children of certain economic classes who might not have access to those devices.
Finally, we need to take risks and also learn from our mistakes and course-correct quickly. It’s only when we attempt something, that we can take a step back and assess what can be changed and what works. The school of tomorrow has to have this freedom in terms of time and curriculum for these small experiments to be done at scale. That also means taking the big risk out of big reform. Rather than having something either succeed wildly or fail badly, small changes where everyone is altering behaviour to see what works means that we will be able to achieve serious change without the risk of a shock to the system. So if we can begin to adapt, learn from our mistakes, I think we can begin this work of affecting large-scale change.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Pratham co-founder, Dr. Madhav Chavan, on the ASER 2019 report.
It’s been 20 years since I have been part of the Pratham family, and when we started our work in Karnataka what I enjoyed most was working at the Balwadis with the children and teachers. That’s why I think this latest ASER report is so crucial when we think about the future of our country, because it lies in the hands of those children. In this new decade, we have to fulfil our promise to the young children of India.
The data tells us that this is probably the last generation of Indian parents who will still be uneducated. We’re seeing that mothers now have at least a 3rd or 4th standard education level, and that’s going to make a huge difference because the report shows the direct correlation between the education of mothers and the learning ability of their children. We’re seeing this through the work being done by Pratham and its partners, where learning systems and the state of children’s education is brought to the agenda of the Sarkaar, Bazaar, and Samaaj.
To me, the ASER report is like an x-ray of the country’s learning system, and it’s the first time we have focused on this age group. The end result of education is not simply to enable children to learn how to read and do math, it is also to help them become better human beings and citizens, and fulfil their potential. Emotional and cognitive skills in the early years of childhood lay down the foundation for that growth. We see how children’s confidence and sense of agency grows when they are allowed to free-play and explore using their own sense of scientific enquiry. The ASER survey allowed them to do exactly that, in terms of solving puzzles, putting things together, letting their imaginations guide them, talking about their emotions, and translating them to make sense of their world. That is why this report gives us a new opportunity to redesign early learning for children in the Anganwadi in the early school years.
Early Childhood Education
One of the things that stand out from the report is the importance of early childhood education, in the larger sense of cognitive and emotional learning. The problem that we have seen in the Balwadis, as Dr. Madhav Chavan points out, is that the motive is to get children ‘school-ready’ but imitating a school set-up and gearing children towards that is not the purpose of early childhood learning. I remember in the early 2000s, we would talk about it in terms of socialising the child rather than getting them school-ready. It was about ensuring that the child is comfortable with other children, and this is what the early childhood education movement has been endorsing for years. But many people were focused on Primary Education and Elementary education, and we forgot that this system is not ideal at all. This report gives us the opportunity to resume our focus on preschool ages.
At Pratham, Dr. Chavan is changing this, especially with the “Hamara Gaon” program, which is a community-based program that aims to lead to a lifelong learning journey for everyone involved. Rather than conducting remedial education from one village to the next, the idea is to ensure community ownership of the program in thousands of villages. The donor community is also coming around to this idea that we need to invest in a long-term association and build an understanding and ownership of what education should be. We have been busy trying to tackle issues of illiteracy and remediation, but we need to also address education holistically. It is not just about reading and writing, but rather about the development of the child and the society as well.
We are seeing a change in education patterns over generations. In villages there are fewer school dropouts, especially with mothers having completed at least a certain level of education. What we saw at Pratham when we started out 25 years ago was that the demand for education was just maturing. Putting your child through 14 years at an institution to learn things you did not understand was a big ask, but people saw that at the end of those years their children could dream of livelihoods and opportunities that they couldn’t. Now I feel as though we are on the cusp of another change. During my travels, people talk about how even their Bachelor’s degree or educational qualifications are not necessarily guaranteeing them a good job, and a lot of people are frustrated by that. We’re at a point where people are realising that we need to shift our approach to education, and maybe the Samaaj institutions can lead that conversation.
As Dr. Chavan points out, there are also going to be massive changes in the economy, with regards to the kinds of jobs that are available in the future. With the technology revolution, many industries will not need humans to perform certain repetitive jobs, so there is a challenge that is emerging in our society. The biggest thing that we can do as humans is to bring up our own children, it’s care work for the old and the young. It also means we need to harness our creativity, because that is something technology cannot replace yet. Economies constantly create new opportunities, so this is a real opportunity to de-link people’s sense of self from what they do with their hands. We are seeing this younger generation take up this challenge, with so many young people giving up so-called lucrative careers to try very different things. This is important because children should feel like they are able to innovate the future for themselves.
The Potential of Digital Tools
There is a digital divide that is emerging between generations, which I noticed when visiting the tribal belts in Gadchiroli. However, the fact is that we are moving towards a digital society, so we do need to think of how we can safely and creatively offer children the benefits of digital technology while reducing the risk of harm. Through our work at EkStep, we are exploring new ideas of how parents can engage with their children, and how technology can be used to develop cognitive and emotional skills in younger children, at scale, by offering material for the adults around them to understand and use.
Technology can be an asset to education, and a way to bring in the Bazaar into this project of democratising the system. Through EkStep, we have developed a software infrastructure that is open source and free for anyone to use. This has become the backbone of the DIKSHA program, and we are working with the Sarkaar as well to bring this to people across the country. The government has put QR code in 500 million textbooks around the country, so that teachers and children can scan the code and access our platform to learn more. And teachers are also using the platform to create better digital content themselves, because it is the teachers in the classrooms who know what their students specifically need.
So far, we have seen about 100 million downloads, and we are seeing that teachers and students are using it evenly. The aim is to allow people the agency to teach, learn, and create better accountability structures as well. The technology platform is constantly evolving, but what we need to keep in mind is the importance of being tech-enabled, and not just not tech-led. Keeping in mind the diversity of our population and our needs, technology must be used in a way that we create something unified but not uniform. We need to think about how to use technology to allow people to create their own solutions based on contextual situations; to distribute the ability to solve using digital tools. A teacher in Jharkhand may have very different requirements than a teacher in Kerala, and we are seeing that teachers are innovating rapidly, while using the same platform to do so.
I think India’s social sector is a little tech-phobic, I used to be too, but we need to embrace this because technology can really be used as a tool to enable and assist progress in the education sector. There are fears of addiction, that children are going to be stuck to devices and screens, but this was the critique of television as well. It’s up to the Samaaj to learn how to deal with this and how to draw boundaries for children. Throughout human history we have been warned of the dangers of technology, and we do need humanists, experts, ethicists, along with technologists to sit together and talk about how to control for addictions, how to address inequality, and how to limit access if needed. I don’t see why my grandson should have access to an iPad while a child in Gadchiroli does not. The digital world should be made equitable, so we have to find a way to do this. Some state governments are putting digital devices in schools, and as Dr. Chavan notes, we are experimenting with this in villages on a fairly large scale. The hope is that by the end of 2020, we will have placed digital devices in libraries in about 5000 villages, and if the donors are happy, maybe that number will increase. We need to go beyond using technology for education, to now educate people on how to use technology.
Fostering a Culture of Learning
What has happened with our education system is that we only see it in isolation, but education cannot only be limited to what happens in institutions. We need to open up those walls of schools and colleges, and bring learning to all aspects of children’s lives. Dr. Chavan notes that even in the Anganwadi program, the focus is not just on the Anganwadi and what the teachers there do, but how to collaborate with the mothers and help them engage with their children so that the learning process continues even at home. We need to shift our culture of education to a more democratic one, where informal learning is also valued. We need to restore agency to parents, to the home, but also to the larger community as well.
The statistics tell us this as well – parents believe that if their children get good marks in school, they will be able to get a good job, but of India’s 1.3 billion population, our workforce is only 500 million. 800 million people are not a part of the formal work sector, and out of the 500 million who are, the people who will take a salary home at the end of the month is not more than 18% according to the ILO. The numbers are telling us that this correlation between education and a salaried job is not necessarily true anymore. If we look at women, 75% of them from the ages of 15-64 are not part of the workforce. So, we do need a cultural shift, and with adult learning we are seeing that. People are going beyond the goal of literacy; they are ready to learn and they are using YouTube and other platforms to do so.
There is also a societal question, at the core of childcare, about the responsibility and role of the family, the state, and corporations, especially since we are trying to encourage women’s participation in the workforce. I have been to many international conferences where feminists and progressive institutions are demanding that the state play a much larger role in the care of children, by offering facilities so that women can work. We have not tackled this question enough in India, and it is a difficult one to problem-solve for.
It also brings us to the question of what kind of institutional structure we should be imagining for the future, whether it progresses from the Anganwadi system and whether we can try different models to experiment with. I don’t think there will be just one solution, but it is time to try them out, do research, collect evidence, and then carry out at scale. Dr. Chavan makes an excellent point about the distinction between the social responsibility and the state’s responsibility in terms of the upbringing of children. We may expect the Sarkaar to provide certain resources and structures, but if we just give up autonomy to the state, what happens is that we think ‘This is not my job’ because someone else is being paid to do it. What we really need is a centre where children can come together, which everyone plays an equal part in creating and maintaining. This is the socialisation of education, where the walls are broken down – you don’t have teachers telling parents ‘This is not your business, you do not have the expertise.’ With an increasing number of parents being educated, we can begin to imagine a more equitable day care centre where children will learn better. Instead of being stuck within structures of syllabi and textbooks, we can collectively redefine what learning means and how children should learn. So rather than putting the onus on the state, we should start thinking about how to de-structure this whole system.
At the same time, in order to scale we need the state to work alongside the Samaaj. Perhaps the framework of early years can parallel the kind of structures we see in the healthcare system – with a combination of home-based interventions where the state goes physically to the house, along with primary health care centres. As Nandan mentioned, we’re seeing a kind of evolution in the way we think about learning. In the 19th century, we saw primary and school education, whereas the 20th century was all about higher education and the importance of degrees. However, this century is one of lifelong learning, which means that these structures that we have been using need to evolve along with our attitude towards learning.
As someone who grew up in a normal, middle-class family, my parents instilled in us values about wealth that prioritised giving rather than consuming it. My maternal grandfather was known for setting up colleges and giving to various institutions. My paternal grandfather didn’t have much wealth, partly because as a lawyer he was less interested in making money than settling disputes out of court. He was part of the first batch that responded to Mahatma Gandhi’s call for volunteers in Champaran in 1917. His name was Sadashiv Soman, and he is mentioned in Gandhi’s autobiography. He helped set up Gandhiji’s first ashram in Bhitiharwa, and stayed there for months along with Kasturba Gandhi, helping the locals with education and sanitation. So that was the kind of legacy we grew up with. We understood that there was a societal responsibility that we all carry.
After I did my postgraduate diploma in Mass Communications at St. Xavier’s College, I became a journalist. At the beginning of my career, I was writing for Bombay Magazine and then freelancing for India Today and other publications. I had joined Sunday Magazine, but then took a break when the kids came along. In our urban middle-class life, we had enough money for everything that we needed. We were focused more on what we wanted to do with our lives. My mother encouraged all her daughters to be ambitious, study well, and plan for a career even though she could not have one herself. She was a teacher and took tuitions from home, and she was always creatively and productively engaged and encouraged us to do the same. She had a keen interest in politics as well. But in terms of money, we never really compared ourselves to others. Personally, I think that was because of the relatively good public infrastructure in Mumbai. We had good learning institutions, public transport, spaces for art and culture, and safe public spaces. All of that reduced the need for extra disposable income.
In 1981, when Infosys was set up by my husband and others, we had just gotten married. We were young and could afford to take a risk, so they started Infosys and I invested Rs.10,000 in the company — money that I had partly saved and partly been given by my parents. Since Infosys became so phenomenally successful, I became wealthy alongside Nandan as well as independently of him. Nandan often says, “I am an accidental entrepreneur.” Similarly, I then became an accidental philanthropist.
It took me a while to get used to this kind of wealth, coming from the background that I did. I was always left-leaning on the political spectrum, so I was a little suspicious of the wealthy as I grew up. It took me a while to get used to my own wealth, but then I realised that wealth can be an opportunity to achieve the goals that I had always dreamt of. I always wanted to live in a society that looked out for its weakest members and realised that wealth could be one vector to make that happen. Once I dealt with that, we began to use our wealth for larger societal gain. I started making small grants and later much more strategic grants. This culminated in our joining The Giving Pledge, where we have pledged to give away at least half our wealth. It was set up by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet. The idea is that there is an accumulation of extreme wealth in the hands of very few people, and so they encourage people to make a pledge. The money can be given anywhere by the people who commit to it, as long as people accept the responsibility of wealth to create societal benefit.
I have also been a serial social entrepreneur. I co-founded Pratham Books where I wanted to help democratise the joy of reading to millions of children. From 2004-2014, I served as the founder-chairperson of Pratham Books and we reached millions of kids with local, indigenised content in multiple languages at an affordable price. With a personal endowment, I aso set up Arghyam, which means ‘offering’ in Sanskrit. In 2005, Arghyam started focussing on the water sector. Over the years, we have supported nonprofits around the country in participatory groundwater management. India is facing a serious water crisis and I hope that Arghyam has been able to positively influence the sector. Apart from this, Nandan and I, along with Shankar Maruwada, have set up the EkStep Foundation in 2014, where we are working in the education sector with the goal of enabling access to learning opportunities for 200 million children. We are using technology as the backbone to achieve that. I also support work in various areas such as environment, governance, independent media, justice, and gender.
My philosophy has always been that, in the continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar (Society, Markets, and the State), we need to ensure a strong Samaaj. Markets and the state are meant to serve society, not dominate it. My focus is entirely on the Samaaj sector. I believe that we are not just consumers for the market, nor are we simply subjects for the state. We are citizens in our own rights, we co-create good markets, and we must co-create good governance. In all the work I do and institutions that I give to, I try to support ideas, individuals, and institutions that help build up civic capacity in the Samaaj space. We need moral leadership, institutions, and grassroots work. We need to build strong societies to keep the market and state accountable for the larger public good. That has been my philosophy for work and giving.
This journey has been exhilarating and humbling. We have such a vibrant and innovative civil society in India, though it is renewing itself now and is also under much pressure. In whichever sector that I choose, I identify people with high integrity, commitment, and a long-term perseverance to achieve the goals that they have chosen. Outcomes are difficult to measure and achieve, but I am okay with it as long as we are headed in the right direction. I understand that we will occasionally fail, and that philanthropy is extreme risk capital. We are investing where markets won’t and the state can’t. For example, through Arghyam we have made a significant impact on the ground, creating lots of communities that are managing their water more sustainably. We have achieved tremendous policy impact over the years. But we also try to be patient and work alongside our partners. Sometimes donors can be very unreasonable in the impact that they want to achieve, and I try not to be like that. I try to build a relationship of trust.
Both Nandan and I want to create a large impact through building public institutions. India still needs to build out its intellectual infrastructure. To that end, we support several institutions of learning and research in the social sector. We have supported the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), which is building out professional capacity to nurture an urbanising India. We have also supported Bangalore International Centre (BIC), which is a hub where people can come and learn from each other. I also support the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. Well run public institutions are a strategic and long-term way to develop wealth. Some of these institutions do a lot of evidence-based research for policy advocacy, so that of course impacts millions of lives because good policy and good laws make a huge difference to society. I think that’s the forward impact of giving wealth away wisely.
We live in times of extreme inequality. I don’t think it’s healthy for any country or society to have so much disparity. India and the US are outliers in this, and the pattern of extreme inequality means that very few people control a lot of wealth, have garnered tremendous resources, and consequently power. Today’s technologies enable even more of that and the way markets are structured allows continual accumulation of wealth by the wealthy. That’s not good for societies, for justice, or for future generations. I try to look at wealth in this context, and understand the distortions of power that can creep in from our ability to give. That is why I try to create a lot of voice and diversity in my philanthropy portfolio.
In terms of our wealth, we spend on travel and health care. We have already given our children what we think is their rightful share of our wealth. Since we have made The Giving Pledge, we have to focus a lot on our philanthropy and it is going to be a tremendous uphill task to give that wealth away in our lifetime. It is not easy to give so much money in a meaningful and effective manner. It takes a lot of hard work.
When I think about the next generation, I believe they’ll see a lot of upheaval in their lifetime especially because of climate change. I would ask them not to focus on money, and to stay curious, connected, and committed as citizens. That is how lives become meaningful, not through wealth. Research shows us that wealth does not necessarily produce happiness, but rather it’s how you deal with the wealth that would ensure that. We need millennials to practice empathy. We get wealthy due to accidents of fate, but our fate remains intertwined with the rest of humanity. When we understand how interconnected we all are and internalise this, our monetary situation becomes a creative opportunity.
As 1.3 billion people seek better lives in a monsoon-dependent economy, the white and green revolutions may have produced grains and milk, but water is in some parts of India today more expensive and less accessible than milk. Ground water resources are depleting. NIITI Ayog sees a crisis by 2020. Where do we stand? How can water sharing disputes like the Cauvery problem be really overcome? Where can we go from here? How can communities, technologies or business models solve the problem or not? How can corporate, policymakers, NGOs and individuals contribute constructively.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Dr. Mihir Shah at Knowledge Factory, 2019 held in Bangalore.
As 1.3 billion people seek better lives in a monsoon-dependent economy, the white and green revolutions may have produced grains and milk. But in some parts of India today, water is more expensive and less accessible than milk. Ground water resources are depleting, and NITI Ayog sees a crisis by 2020. So how do communities, policymakers, and corporates create constructive solutions to this problem?
The Relationship Between Rivers and Cities
When we talk about reforming policy or making a change which would actually impact people positively on the ground, there are a couple of things to keep in mind, which Dr. Shah, with his experience on the planning commission and his work in Samaj Pragati Sahayog, puts it succinctly. The first is to be in a position to reform government systems and processes, because we cannot solve problems like water without involving the government.
While drafting the Twelfth Five Year Plan for India’s water policy, Dr. Shah created a working group of experts from outside the government, despite resistance from the Prime Minister’s Office. He brought in experts like Tushar Shah and Sunita Narayan to influence policy which was focused on arriving at a common ground on water. Everyone was forced to put their fundamentalisms outside to arrive at this common ground and make compromises. However, they were able to sign off on a document that represented a paradigm shift in how water will be managed in this country.
This is one sort of model if we are to re-imagine the relationship of rivers and our urban settlements, where we create working groups, bringing together elements of the continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar. You cannot solve complex societal issues without reducing the friction to collaborate between Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar, and this example shows us the way forward. We know that the Bazaar has a lot of innovation, including technological innovations to offer the water sector and I think we’ve not deployed enough of those. From Samaaj side, sometimes there has been a resistance to using technologies but I think the time has come when we seriously need to look at many new technologies which need the Bazaar’s active involvement to put them out into the world, with policy support from the state. With these working groups that were set up under the Planning Commission, there was a paradigm shift in water management governance as well. As Dr. Shah points out, we applaud higher rates of growth, but do not realize that these cannot be sustained unless we also take care of the larger ecosystem, the ecology that is sustaining this process of economic growth.
For example, if we look at the relationship between cities and rivers, there is an engineering cliché, that rivers which flow into the sea are a waste and they should be dammed to bring water to the cities around it. But if we remember the lessons on the hydrological cycle that we learnt at school, we would know that it doesn’t make any sense not to allow rivers to flow into the sea. Many of our rivers today are not reaching the sea and that’s going to have serious consequences on the hydrological cycle and the monsoon patterns over time. To say that we are wasting water when we let it go into the ocean is ignoring very basic science that we learnt in third grade.
Instead we are redirecting rivers to our cities, encroaching on the drainage lines which means encroaching on the channels through which these rivers are flowing themselves. If the water is not allowed to flow through its natural course, when heavy rainfall or climate change events arise, we then face problems of urban flooding. Life and livelihood on the subcontinent could be deeply threatened. So if we don’t understand ecology and how to sustain our rivers, then we are already dooming ourselves, and our cities.
A Problem of Imagination
The situation in Bangalore is particularly interesting because we bring water from the Kaveri at great expense and at a great energy cost. We actually pump up the water from a great distance, but so many of us in the city take the Kaveri for granted. We don’t think about who is being deprived of that water by this relocation, and instead we use it, pollute it, fail to treat it, and then we send it off, creating a lot of negative downstream impact because of that.
ATREE, an organization that I support, has been doing a lot of work on the Vrishabhavathi and the Arkavati – two rivers that were tributaries of Kaveri, that were flowing through our city. Vrishabhavathi originates from the bull-temple itself, and the Dakshina Pinakini is not far from the city, originating in the Nandi Hills. There are a lot of people trying to understand how we can revive these rivers and drive back the Kaveri because Bangalore does have enough rain and lakes, and we would also have rivers if we are able to rejuvenate them. We really don’t need to bring Kaveri water to feed this thirsty city. But as of now, the Vrishabhavathi is nothing but a drain. The imagination of citizens with their rivers is destroyed, so we have no relationship with the idea of a river anymore. Nobody remembers a healthy flowing river in this city anymore, which is a real pity. But imagine if we could bring back these three rivers, the Dakshina Pinakini, the Vrishabhavathi and the Arkavati – that would mean so much.
Some of the research that was conducted at ATREE showed that one of the reasons why the Arkavati is not flowing anymore is because there has been so much groundwater pumping in an unrestricted fashion, which is affecting the base flow of rivers. In India, we have an un-channelled groundwater regime, and so our river flows are getting seriously affected because people are sucking groundwater from anywhere, without any regulation. Usually, after the monsoon, these rivers gain water from the groundwater basin. However, since groundwater has been extracted, deeper and deeper, the water now flows from the river into the ground, which results in them losing water and eventually drying up.
As Dr. Shah notes, we need policy changes as well as a people’s movement to protect our water. This work cannot be achieved by the government alone, citizens also need to understand the management of groundwater. As of now, the government has initiated the Atal Bhujal Yojana as part of the Twelfth Five Year Plan, with six thousand crores (three given by the World Bank and three coming from India). However, along with cooperation from bureaucrats and hydrogeologists, we need the citizens, who are the primary stakeholders, to come together. The dissemination of this information to people who are actually using this groundwater will ensure that they use it sustainably. So it’s a complete relationship of interdependence between different forms of water and between nation and society. That interdependence has to be embodied in powerful partnerships for change. Without that, we will continue to make mistakes and the paradigm shift will not come.
So we need to focus on local solutions which are reviving lakes, roof-water harvesting, managing the groundwater more sustainably, and using waste water more creatively. Wastewater is another problem, as Dr. Shah mentions, because water quality is becoming a very serious issue in India. Unless we are able to recycle water and make it of the requisite quality, we are causing a great deal of ecological damage. Our cities only imagine treatment plants at the ends of its bounds, but actually they need to be throughout the city so that clean water is being returned to the storm water drains. We can see successful examples of this in Jakkur and small towns where, instead of making the same outmoded mistakes, we are able to bring in 21st century technologies to treat wastewater. So it’s a question of breaking down the pure engineering paradigm, understanding the power of decentralization, and keeping an interdisciplinary, ecology-based, landscape-oriented design.
We Need to Work Together
If we look at urban governance in India, we can see clearly that our current model of both our cities and rivers has not yet emerged . Even in a powerful place like Delhi, the Yamuna is nothing but a drain. It’s the most polluted stretch of river imaginable, which is surprising when you consider that there is no lack of money, and that our nation’s capital should be setting an example of how to look after our rivers. But unfortunately, we have not empowered our cities at all, in terms of how they are run, who elects the mayors, how long the mayors are empowered to do their job, or how they can raise financing to do intra-city projects. It’s these things that also allow citizens to be directly in contact with a responsive and accountable administration. I think Bangalore is also suffering for the same reasons, because we do not have the right governance institution for urban management. Many countries in Europe show how a decentralized, accountable governance model actually has the capacity to raise capital for things like this. A lot of us take hope from the situation of the River Thames. In the ‘60s, it was a biologically dead river, but the city got its act together and today the River Thames in London is the cleanest river in Europe. There are 125 species of fish in it now, and we can see how rivers and biodiversity ecosystems are so inextricably linked. It’s a question of imagination as well. Can we imagine Bangalore with two rivers flowing, with clean, treated water feeding those rivers? I want to imagine our lakes being revived because we collectively did the work of reviving them. I think we should strive for that imagination.
When I went to Uttarakhand with Ravi Chopra of People Science Institute, we visited 16 river valleys, and it was heart-breaking to see how the dams were built back-to-back and to serve far away cities. Rivers that were so full of life became slowly choked as they reached Delhi. We need to realize that we cannot afford this. As Dr. Shah said, the economy rests on the base of the ecology and if we forget that connection, we’re not going to be able to have the sustainable growth that is necessary to lift the remaining 300 million people out of poverty in this country. We need to view water in a multi-disciplinary manner, in a cross-disciplinary manner and with multiple stakeholders all coming together, sitting across the table with mutual respect for each other.
So we need to create a citizen movement, to put pressure on our politicians. Without water, there is no life. Our urban economy suffers and we can already see that in parts of Bangalore where there is water scarcity. Some people think that the city will see mass relocation, if we are not able to manage our water properly, and we cannot afford to let that happen. We need to start thinking about re-engaging with our city’s water future, because that can make the difference between whether our cities are going to thrive or have to face a serious crisis.
A lot of ink is spilled and awards are bestowed each year celebrating the success of the social sector—and there is much to celebrate. But the truth is, if innovation is essential to the ultimate achievements of the sector, we should spend less time on success, and more time on failure. We lament the inability of the social sector to scale, but we do not support organizations to innovate on a continuous basis. We know that acceptance of failure is an essential part of innovation, which in turn is required for successful outcomes. Yet, we do not bridge the gap. Progress on this issue will require candid communication between social entrepreneurs and the philanthropic community. Unfortunately, such candour is rare. This article presents the perspectives of two sector leaders: Rohini Nilekani, philanthropist, social entrepreneur, and writer; and Kyle Zimmer, award-winning social entrepreneur and Schwab Foundation Fellow. Hopefully, it will spark further conversations within the sector.
