Type: Interview

Are we suffering from a lack of imagination?

The pace at which social problems are outpacing our solutions underscores the need for bold philanthropy, audacious goals and capable, committed leadership in social sector organisations, says Rohini Nilekani, founder-chairperson of Arghyam and co-founder of EkStep.

 

How do you think Indian philanthropy has evolved over the years?  How have the approaches and discussions around giving developed?

I think Indian philanthropy is at an exciting stage; it is continually evolving. One of the most interesting things is that the ecosystem of philanthropy is evolving too, along with philanthropy itself and the idea of giving. Like yourself [India Leaders for Social Sector], there are many ecosystem players that are coming up, looking at leadership in the sector, matchmaking between donors and recipients, building the capacities of the sector, looking at bringing new issues to the  fore,  and so many other things [such as] auditing the sector. And, of course, with so much more wealth creation happening in the country, the spotlight is on what that wealth is doing for the country – I think we are seeing many interesting developments in Indian philanthropy

Is that increased philanthropic wealth doing enough?

No, I think we need the philanthropic muscle in India to be exercised much more. There are some constraints, though, as to why that’s not happening as much as we would like to see.

One factor is the trust deficit. Although the wealthy want to give, there is a lot of philanthropic capital all dressed up and with nowhere to go, largely because of this trust deficit.  How do you give, who do you give to, how do you get impact? You still don’t feel very sure, because of which many of us just land up creating our own organisations, trying to create the change ourselves.

I believe that a healthier thing is when the donors – I am speaking about the super wealthy—find enough channels to give through so that there is no burden of doing things themselves: because we do need a thriving civil society in a democracy. Civil society actors come from passion, from vision, from innovation, from being tied to their communities and from having deep and great context. Having a thriving civil society in a trustworthy, trusting relationship, with donors is something I consider ideal in a democracy. I think we are a little far away from that.

What opportunities must Indian philanthropy invest in to make a larger, lasting impact?

Building the capacities of the system is important. Unless the pipeline opens up to receive funds, you will not see philanthropy grow.  I talked about trust before – that’s important too. But also models of how things are really working in, say, education, health, environment, climate change, livelihoods… there are a hundred things where philanthropy should invest in, including the arts and culture. We need museums, we need performance-based culture to be supported, we need new institutions that allow people to understand the world around them. Different people are working in these areas based on their passion.

But I also think that when we talk of the disparities in India and how far behind some people are left, we have no choice but to go back to talking about the human rights framework. Some donors feel uncomfortable about this because of various things they don’t quite understand: does that mean hyper activism, does that mean getting into trouble with the state?

No matter what you call it, it is about caring about the 300 million people in this country who are our fellow citizens, who need to be supported, who need help across the board. How can Indian philanthropists, those who want to change the world for the better, start thinking a little innovatively to work with this segment?

We need to look into the future, for what’s coming at us, whether it is livelihoods, the future of work  or climate change—that’s where philanthropic capital should want to step in because they can afford to take risks, they can afford to do the things that the government cannot afford to do, things that civil society doesn’t yet have the support to imagine doing. This is the kind of challenge and opportunity for the Indian philanthropic sector.

Do you believe talent can be a limiting factor as organisations in the social sector aim for scale and sustainability?

With 1.3 billion people, we shouldn’t have to talk about the lack of talent. I think the talent is there, the grooming of the talent needs to be taken very seriously. In this sector, we must not forget to ask if there is enough commitment: if we can draw people’s commitment, people’s passion, people’s real need for their lives to have meaning, then I don’t think talent or human resources is a problem.

Having said that, because of the way the sector is growing, we really need different kinds of skills for the specific things that we need to do. I think people are recognising it. People like ILSSare coming into the sector to create the necessary talent, but we have some years to go, no doubt about it.

What can civil society organisations do to develop their leadership pipeline? How can funders help this effort?

I think we have a succession crisis in the sector right now. Many of the organisations came out of some cataclysmic events in the sixties and the seventies that brought out this amazing moral leadership in this country, which has for the last 30-40 years built a very solid civil society foundation. We are seeing succession issues in many of these organisations: after that one dynamic founder is gone, then what? We do have a leadership crisis in the sector. What ILSS and some others are doing to create the next generation of leaders is very important.

Inside organisations people really grapple with creating leadership. So, if CSR could support short courses for organisations to build their leadership, it could be very useful. Funders need to support much more institutional capacity and much more sector capacity. Leadership doesn’t come out of a vacuum and if funders could begin to think like this, it would really help.

Given the current context, what skill sets would you like to see in the social sector?

Of late I’ve been thinking, is there a lack of imagination, are we suffering from a lack of imagination? I mean, look at how the problems are outpacing the solutions. I’m not criticising; I see myself as a part of the sector so, if anything, this is a reflection rather than a criticism.

When Gandhiji just picked up a fistful of salt, what was he launching? When Vinobaji was talking about bhoodan, what was hisimagination? It was not for one district, it was not even for one nation, it was for all of humanity. When Jayaparakashji started the Sampoorna Krantiand Sarvodaya, they were talking about transforming humanity itself. Have we lost some of this spirit? How do we spark our imagination to think much bigger?

The second thing is that, while we unleash our imagination, we should also be putting our noses to the grindstone to be much more rigorous in finding out what really works and how to build systematic structures around it. That is another skill we need to build.  One more thing I would like to add is about sharing and collaboration: so, for example, if you are working in education, being curious to know what someone is working on somewhere else and being able to reach out for that.

How can the talent in corporate India engage more deeply with the social sector?

It would be great if corporate professionals, who’ve made a success of their lives, could see the kind of problems that are emerging and how they can apply their skills to solve some of those. It would be great if they start to reflect on how they would like to see the world become better and then agree to spend some of their personal time understanding that issue — because they are not just professionals, consumers, or subjects of the state; they are citizens first.

And to be a citizen means to engage with other people and to take responsibility for creating a better society because today we are more interconnected than ever. So, when we get out of our offices and cabins, how can we reconnect with all the other things that really make our lives meaningful beyond our jobs? There are so many opportunities now; there are so many young people with amazing ideas, who want to engage corporate professionals. Go and find out who’s nearest to you and I promise it will make your life richer.

What is the one cause that is closest to your heart?

The common thread in all my work is around giving people a sense of their own involvement in resolving whatever the situation may be. Whether I work in water or environment or in issues of young males in this county or the climate collaborative, that’s at the core: how do we distribute the ability to solve, how do we help people collaborate with each other? No amount of pushing solutions down the pipeline can create anything sustainable. So how do we build the strength of the samajsector? That’s the underlying issue that I care about.

A new area I am working on are the 250 million young males in this country – from puberty to the age at which they are supposed to be settled with jobs and families, but are not–and the frustration, the restlessness, the helplessness, the fear, the insecurity associated with being forced into patriarchal identities without even having thought much about it, without having role models or family connections sometimes.

How little we have done for that cohort in this country! Can we devise programmes that allow for more positive modelling for these young men so that they can be the best they want to be? This is something I have been engaged with, primarily to empower the young males themselves, but also because if we don’t focus more on them, we are never going to achieve our women’s empowerment goal. Empowering women is absolutely necessary, but to send an empowered woman into a disempowered situation gives her very bad choices.

The most ambitious thing I’ve done so far is in the context of societal platforms thinking. Societal problems are so complex that they require samaj, sarkaarand bazaarto work together; but it’s very difficult for them to work together in a really effective way. So, what can we do to reduce the friction and enable these sectors to collaborate? Can we create a technology backbone? How can we keep unpacking the commonalities across these sectors so that contextual solutions can be built on top of them? How can we build something that is unifiedbut not uniform, so that we can allow diversity to scale? How can we allow real collaboration and co-creation, and at the same time create an engine that will offer all the data when it is needed and also allow people to learn? It’s a big play; it may work, or it may not work, but we’re very excited and enthused about it.

What role do you see for technology in the civil society space?

I’ve begun to realise that if you want to respond to problems at the scale and the urgency at which they are spreading, civil society really needs to rethink its relationship with technology. I risk saying that when we see emergent backlash against technology for various good reasons. When you’re going to be technology-led you’re going to have problems, if you’re technology-enabled, you’re going to have different opportunities.

A very crucial thing I’ve learned is that when the young people of this country are going to be digital citizens, civil society has no choice but to be digital. Even to be able to respond to the abuse of technology, it has to learn to act in technology domains. At Arghyam we are trying to see how we can be an infrastructure provider instead of just a donor.

A digital civil society, where you offer checks and balances on a digital age, is something we need to strengthen in India.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Water Philanthropy in India: A Conversation with Rohini Nilekani

Rohini Nilekani in conversation with Dr. Ravina Aggarwal, Director, Columbia Global Centers | Mumbai

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Dr. Ravina Aggarwal, Director, Columbia Global Centres in Mumbai. Their discussed the state of the water crisis in India and how philanthropists can help address this issue.

Although I had started Arghyam in 2001, when I was still learning the ropes of philanthropy, it was really in 2004 that I came into a really sizeable amount of money through the sale of our Infosys shares. I didn’t need that kind of money personally, so I decided to give it to the foundation. However, it’s actually not easy to give money strategically and effectively, unless you have a real grasp on the issues at hand and how to come at them. I hired Sunita Nadhamuni as my CEO and we both got to work researching what issue directly affects the life of every single citizen in this country. We were thinking about working in the field of healthcare at the time, but I remember being in the shower one day and stopping to realise, “Wait, it’s water that you should work on.” That’s when it clicked for me.

So we started looking into the state of the water sector, whether philanthropic money was being invested there and whether it was having any impact. This is when we realised there’s no single Indian philanthropic foundation devoted to water, at a time when we were only just beginning to understand the magnitude of the water crisis in this country.
It was a shocking wake-up call and we decided that we had to try and improve the situation in some way. In our 12 years working in the sector, it’s been a sharp learning curve for us, because we didn’t know very much going in, so we were experimenting, trying, failing, and learning from our mistakes. We have grown from smaller projects and campaigns, to programmes and partnerships that enable us to affect change on a much larger scale.

Of course, there’s a lot to learn from other countries that have managed their water better. However, it’s also true that no country’s faced the kind of challenges that India
has, at a time of a global crisis, when we can no longer dump our waste somewhere else, and when climate change is already upon us. How do we re-think water management in that context? We have to become an innovation lab ourselves, and be able to experiment and create solutions for water management that are decentralized, flexible, and resilient structures.

Many corporations are now also investing in water, because it is such an obvious crisis today. We also have the India Philanthropy Initiative where a lot of the wealthy citizens who want to engage in discussions on philanthropy come together, and identify opportunities for investing philanthropy within different sectors. There is also collaboration and learning happening between CSR teams and philanthropists, so people are building networks of trust and figuring out strategies that are successful for them. We’ve been able to pull in a lot of CSR and other philanthropy funding in our projects by taking those initial risks, and being the first in that space, so that other people can easily follow.

As a foundation, however, Arghyam would not have been able to have the reach it does without our partners. We are a funding organisation, but we also come with a passion and commitment, and we try to help all our partners strategize and be more effective. Since I put up the 150 crores from my personal wealth into Arghyam over 12 years ago, we have been able to disperse 145 crores into 145 projects, across 22 states and directly affecting 50 lakh people. Through our journey, we’ve also come to focus much more on groundwater specifically.

The Invisible Issue

It’s estimated that the government has spent 400,000 crores over the last several decades on surface water, however India is also losing an alarming amount of its groundwater. Through working with our partner across the drier regions of this country, we realised how dire this situation really is. While most government concerns centre around the rivers and setting up irrigation infrastructure for surface water, there are 35 million bore wells spread across the country that people are drawing water from. But because it is invisible, or less visible than the issue of surface water, there’s no method to use it sustainably or equitably, and that is where the problem lies. India is drawing more groundwater than either America or China, and when seen from satellite maps, the depleted groundwater levels are truly shocking. One aim of Arghyam is to use science, data, and innovation to make this invisible problem visible, and to enable us to manage our groundwater better. Otherwise Cape Town’s Day Zero declaration will pale in comparison to the crisis that India will face, in terms of the sheer number of people that will be affected.

According to a 2016 estimate, 300 million people in our country live in drought affected conditions and 80% of our water is contaminated due to untreated sewage. This reality is starting to affect people across economic classes as well, so complacency will not be an option soon. I remember when my family first moved to Bangalore, the tanker would come and women and children would come running out with buckets, fighting to get the day’s water. Today, the situation hasn’t changed for a lot of people. The issue of groundwater depletion also brings to the forefront the struggle between the urban and the rural. People living in urban centres like Mumbai or Delhi have access to water, but are also part of the cycle of depletion, whether they are aware of it or not.

The consumption of water also means waste being added to it, and we don’t have any effective means of examining the repercussions of this. Initiatives to build more toilets will not make a difference if they don’t also address where those waste streams go or how to treat them, and that actually causes a larger health issue than the lack of toilets. In areas where so-called sustainable open defecation used to happen, communities used to have social protocols that dictated where to go, so that contamination was somewhat avoided. However, our research shows that now toilet waste streams are going back into the groundwater tables, directly contaminating the groundwater that people then pull up to drink. Through our work, we’ve seen places where hundreds of toilets have been set up next to wells, so nitrate contamination is also a huge issue in those areas.

Educating Ourselves, Encouraging Research

One of the ways in which Arghyam wanted to address this was through spreading knowledge and awareness. When the National Knowledge Commission was setting up portals for the whole country, meant to serve as knowledge resources in different sectors, Arghyam offered to start and fund the India Water Portal. It’s been 10 years since we set it up, and it’s been a great resource for the research community, taking up many ideological battles around water and reaching out to citizens. However, it was born in an era when digital technologies hadn’t yet converged as they have done today, so it’s not the kind of one-stop shop where citizens can easily learn how to manage water. If the India Water Portal was born today, it would have a very different sort of imagination. So we are trying to see in Arghyam a version for how we can make that a little more exciting and accessible to use. As it exists today, it continues to serve its purpose as an open knowledge platform that can be used to help the government serve communities better.

Through our partners, we’ve also been able to develop a platform called the Participatory Groundwater Management Program. I think this idea of local participation is critical to solving this problem because water distribution is always going to be a local, political issue. If you don’t have participation from the community itself, you’re immediately going to get into issues of water not being distributed equally, and a lack of regulation. India is one of the most poorly regulated groundwater regimes in the world, because of a British law from 1882 called the Easement Act, which essentially grants people ownership of any water on their land. So technically, I can dig a hole and suck up a whole aquifer and sell it – legally there is no framework to stop me from doing this. But since groundwater is a common resource, you have to create participatory mechanisms to manage it sustainably. Since we don’t have effective regulation, or institutional structures to manage groundwater, there is no other alternative.

In the absence of effective policy and regulation, we have to involve the local community and create a de facto, if not de jour model way of managing groundwater.

Participation was a very key part of our philosophy, so we named this platform the Participatory Groundwater Management Programme. Through this initiative, we have sent our hydrogeological experts to around 500 communities facing these problems. Using data practices and science, these experts help locals understand and budget for the groundwater. They learn methods for crop rotation or better crop management, and bore wells are segregated for lifeline water. After two years, communities realise that by sharing the finite resource under their feet, they can see their incomes increasing, because they are being scientific about what crops they are harvesting and how to use the water effectively. We are really encouraged by the feedback we’ve gotten, and are now trying to affect change at the policy level as well. The Atal Bhujal Yojana, where millions of dollars will be going into groundwater management, was mentioned in the budget, so I hope some of these principles that our partners have been working on for eight years will get embedded and scaled.

Participatory Governance and Indigenous Knowledge

There’s no getting around the fact that we are a deeply hierarchical society, so it takes a lot of work to create real, participatory processes. To include women’s voices, Dalit voices, and the voices of other marginalised communities in the discussion around water equity will require active work on our part. Sometimes, when NGOs leave a community, they fall back to those old power structures that are so deeply ingrained in how we govern ourselves. That is the reason why participatory processes are such a powerful idea. We have seen that people do try to keep them going because they see the results in equitable access for everyone.

Spring water in India was another issue that we tried to tackle at Arghyam. No one has accurate data on the number of springs in India, but they’re critical to many people’s livelihoods. Due to land use change, pipe water supply, and other factors, they have been neglected, but in the mountain regions many communities depend on spring water. However, springs weren’t considered as groundwater by the government until only recently. It took a lot of effort of us and our partners to actually educate people about the fact that springs are groundwater that is simply located within discharge zones. We decided to take up this neglected issue of reviving springs, and through working with our partners in about 12 states, we have so far been able to rejuvenate 7,000 springs. Six states are now working with us to map and revive all their streams, in the Northeast and Western regions of India, and hopefully we can keep going and scale this program.

Another issue with local communities is being able to respect and value their indigenous knowledge and belief systems surrounding water sources. With our presence in these areas, we do see those practices getting a little disrupted, especially because there is not enough continuity of model leadership. So the challenge we’re facing now is how to re-imagine this sacredness. How do you value water in 2018? How do you create a new grammar of sacredness for water? This is the learning curve for some of our partners.

The Need for Good Data and Research

With Arghyam, I think we see ourselves as long-term players in this sector – we are not going away anytime soon. To be able to provide research, we need to have projects and campaigns happening on the ground. On the other hand, if we’re not able to connect the dots, our physical projects aren’t going to be successful. In a long term study, you need good data, you need academicians to come in and stay the course to build real, usable knowledge. So through the foundation, we have been supporting research in various ways. We tend to have bias towards action-based research, so a lot of our work centres around collecting knowledge from fieldwork and try out different strategies. It’s an ethos of enacting action, think through the results, and finally produce the data.

With the kind of progress we’ve seen over these 12 years, I think if we continue like this, we will do incremental things, achieve success, and impact real people’s lives in a positive way. But when you look at the bigger picture, and the sheer scale at which we need to think about solutions, our work just feels like a drop in the ocean. It’s not simply a question of how much philanthropic capital we can put in, we also need to create the pipelines for which this money can be used in the water sector in a smart and sufficient way. Right now we are hoping to scale up in how we operate, moving from partnerships to platforms. The aim is to design a digital platform, a shareable infrastructure for lots of actors to be able to utilize it in a way that is effective for them. We hope that with this platform, we can scale on a larger level, rather than for Arghyam to try and go to new locations physically.

This idea was born out of my experiences working with Pratham Books, where we created an open-source platform for people to write, read, publish, print, share, and illustrate literature. Through this platform, we’ve been able to reach millions of kids. The initial idea was to create something that is designed for scale, that is open, shareable, and that allows for creation and collaboration on top of it. Nandan and I also utilised this idea in EkStep, a digital learning platform for young children that we started two and a half years ago. Our goal is to reach 200 million children in the next five years. We wanted to provide access to learning opportunities, for which this framework is incredibly effective. We decided to call this idea Societal Platforms, and we are hoping to build that out in Arghyam as well, during the next two years.

The requests we heard a lot from our partners was the need for better data and research. They need to be able to train people quickly and efficiently, and to make scare training resources easily available. So how do you design for that? This is where Arghyam wants to take on the responsibility and bring in technology, to build a platform that’s useful for data and research, for capacity building and training, and for providing deployment tools. Rather than researchers and academics working in isolation at universities, their knowledge can be pooled and accessible to others – aggregating knowledge for the public as well as for others to build off of.

Creating Solutions Together

Nowadays, it’s getting difficult for the super-wealthy to be complacent and not give back to society. You can’t have a Ferrari without owning a foundation. With the CSR law, a lot of businesses are also getting involved in the philanthropy sector. But I think, with all this influx of capital, people are also realising the challenges inherent in giving. The first thing you learn as a philanthropist is that you have to have trust. The markets operate in a very different way from the samaaj sector, so trust becomes a very important thing. You need to trust that the people who you’re giving money to have the same goal as you, and that they will do the work required.

The second thing to keep in mind is that this kind of work is not often quantifiable. The work our partners have done is to enable communities to say, “We are part of the solution, not part of the problem.” But how do you measure that? How do you measure the self-esteem that people feel from examining a problem deeply and trying to find solutions for themselves? Of course, we can collect data on wells, on how much water people get, etc. but it is that kind of unquantifiable feedback that gives us some sense of success.

At Arghyam, we are invested in our partners and try to work with them on creating solutions, rather than dictating orders. That relationship is crucial, because these are people who are working at the grassroots level and who understand the specific issues within an area or community. So we aim to work with them, keeping cooperation in mind for any kind of design. We value the feedback they bring to us as well, because it enables us to come together and innovate better solutions. So listening and cooperating with your partners is also incredibly important.

Giving Pledge is not meant to be prescriptive: Rohini Nilekani

Rohini Nilekani on why she and her husband Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani signed up for Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge initiative.
In a phone interview from Bengaluru, Rohini Nilekani explains why the couple felt the need to sign the pledge, how wealth can influence policy and how societal platforms will help them scale up. Edited excerpts:

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Our society has become so unequal. The wealthy need to be taxed more, says Rohini Nilekani

Rohini Nilekani is a bit nervous that people might have “an overdose of the Nilekanis” as she and her husband Nandan have been in the news all week for having signed the Giving Pledge, committing half their wealth — about $1.7bn — to philanthropy. She believes philanthropy isn’t just about giving but is also a means to start conversations about “deep societal issues” that don’t get enough attention. She tells Shalini Umachandran why she thinks the wealthy have to be taxed more, and philanthropy requires both heart and mind.

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The Art Of Giving : Nandan Nilekani & Rohini Nilekani

Wealth doesn’t fully belong to us, we are only trustees. Our children knew that. Power to give away is the most important value of money,” inspiring words from Nandan and Rohini Nilekani, days after signing the Giving Pledge. As part of the pledge, they have committed to donate half of their wealth to charity. In their first TV interview together, the billionaire couple talks about why India’s super wealthy need to show they are giving and what money means to them.

 

This is an edited version of Nandan Nilekani and Rohini Nilekani’s first TV interview together, days after signing the Giving Pledge. As part of the pledge, they have committed to donate half of their wealth to charity. The couple talks about why India’s super wealthy need to show they are giving and what money means to them.

Why the Giving Pledge?

Nandan and I have always planned on giving away a portion of our wealth, and now we’ve publicly committed to it. But I think we did need the time to mature and learn, and now there’s a pipeline into which we can add our wealth. It’s no use having donors who are willing to give, if they don’t know how to actually go about doing it. Now, I think, we know how to give better. We can do bigger and more strategic work. So this was the right time to do it, and we can learn a lot from the other people who have signed the Giving Pledge as well.

As Nandan points out, the Giving Pledge has brought together a set of philanthropists and has created a forum in which we can share best practices and collaborate on tackling large social issues. For us, that’s as valuable as saying that we have signed the pledge. Giving away was already part of our DNA, but this was a way to become part of a group that was looking at the same kind of problems worldwide.

We say that in our culture, Indians don’t often show that they give, but I feel like that boat has left the dock. This kind of signalling has actually become very important now, because if you’re going to be super wealthy, you have to show that you’re super generous as well. The way we see it, this wealth doesn’t belongs to us as such. However many billions Nandan and Infosys may be worth, there is a lot of luck is involved in creating so much wealth. Instead, I see myself as a trustee, and I’ve brought my children up to know this as well. They’re interested in big ideas, and in philanthropy, so it was easy for them to understand our motivation to sign the pledge. There was never any question of them feeling entitled to our wealth.

The Power and Potential of Societal Platforms

With my experience working in education, through my time at Akshara and Pratham Books, Nandan and I started looking at the EkStep Project and how to utilize technology to offer resources to children at scale. We were brainstorming whether there’s a way to think about solving societal problems in a collaborative way. We realised that we needed Societal Platforms, which would involve a massive amount collaboration, as well as philanthropic money to pull off a projects that involved this kind of risk. The Giving Pledge seemed to be that kind of a space, where the people involved are having discussions and collaborating on projects. Both Nandan and I believe in co-impact, i.e. that philanthropists have a bigger impact if they work as a collective, than they have individually. Being a part of the Giving Pledge gives us access to that collective impact.

I learned the importance of this while I was with Pratham Books. There was no way that the publishing house could affect large scale change on its own. It had to be collaborative and open, it had to bring in markets, and change the publishing paradigm. We had to work with the state as well – it couldn’t just be about one sector, but rather the whole society. This is what Societal Platform thinking is about. As Nandan rightly says, it’s not just about NGOs. We think Societal Platforms involve articulating a goal and then saying, “What is the best combination of market forces, government and civil society, to help us achieve this goal?”

One of the problems in the philanthropy sector is that it’s very hard to build partnerships. Globally, we’ve seen philanthropists face the same problem, where they try to launch projects to address certain issues, but don’t necessarily get the outcome they envisioned. The impact is either not visible or not effective. But you have to allow various actors and entities do what they do best, and get involved in the process as well. We’re trying to find a way in which people can seamlessly partner with each other, with less friction. It’s not an answer or solution, but more of an approach that we’re testing out, and hoping other people will try it.

During the last decade, both Nandan and I have really thought about the issue of seeing projects to completion, both in terms of scale as well as sustainability. I agree with Nandan that if we’re talking about creating a collaborative platform for different actors to play together, you need the digital infrastructure to do this. You have to create a platform where they can all contribute. This kind of collaboration is especially important in a country like India, where we cannot produce one solution for a societal problem and deploy it everywhere. We need the ability to have every situation be contextualized by someone who understands local conditions. That’s why a big part of what we do is ‘co-creation,’ where different parts of the solutions are co-created locally, by somebody who understands the ground reality. So the idea is that we build this framework, the tech team creates the infrastructure which is context independent, but then everything that happens after that involves working with local people who have the best knowledge and tools to deploy solutions within their context. That’s why we think this is such a powerful idea.

So far, the feedback from implementing this idea with EkStep has been great. Once people realise we want to solve the problem with their help, they all come around, and that’s what we’ve seen happening now. The way we see our role is that we need to be the facilitators, and we need to build out and deploy the risk capital. There are enough people who know what to do with that. We don’t need to tell them how to educate children, but we do need to be able to innovate on a tech platform, and then allow people on it to deploy the tools they think will serve their needs the best. So societal platforms need someone called a system leader who curates and catalyses this, by creating a way for everyone to come together to work on a solution. This has been our call to other philanthropists as well – what’s really needed is for someone to deploy real money, and invest in building that architecture that other people can then build on.

Working Together For the Future

Our aim with EkStep was to provide better learning outcomes for 200 million children by 2020, and when we decided this, we knew we were setting ourselves an extremely ambitious goal. Nandan has mentioned the necessity of setting a very definitive goal when tackling societal problems. Most civil society players don’t have the resources to be able to scale like this. With public money or shareholder money, you’re accountable to others, but with philanthropy, the money is yours and you are only accountable to yourself. So there’s certainly a risk to it, but it’s important to set an ambitious and audacious goal, which really forces you to think about scalable solutions.
Even when Nandan joined the government with the goal of providing 600 million people with Aadhaar in five years’ time, it was a massive, audacious project. But like he says, when you set these big goals, it motivates everyone to work towards that. His experience with Aadhaar has definitely taught us a lot about platform thinking, and from this we’ve learned the value of co-creation solutions, amplification of resources, and including this into a basic methodology that people can follow. It’s a ‘think-do-think’ model, where we come up with solutions, apply them, and then learn and adapt. These feedback loops are an integral part of the design principle, along with a strong philosophical core of collaboration. The design and architecture of the platform must support this.

EkStep is the first time Nandan and I have worked together on a project, and so far it has been surprisingly smooth. I was anxious since our approaches are a bit different, but I think what we each bring to the table compliments the other. The technology team and Nandan’s approach is very systematic, and there’s a lot of brainpower there, but like Nandan says, I bring with me my own experience working in education, as well as a sense of empathy. For me, the children and how we might be able to reach them, must be at the centre of our strategy.

Although only five signatories of the Giving Pledge are Indian, including Nandan and I, I think that’s not necessarily indicative of the kind of work going on in this sector. Philanthropy in India is on the rise, and many people like the Tata Trust and Azim Premji have been spending a few hundred million dollars every year on philanthropy. Many businesses are doing a lot of work on the ground, though they may not have signed the Giving Pledge themselves. Over the years, we’ve seen an increasing number of people keen on giving, and learning how to donate their wealth in a better way.

Of course, in Indian business families, there’s the idea that they must save for future generations, but I think the tide is changing now. Families with inherited wealth are parting with it easier than before, and with first generation wealth creators, giving comes very naturally. A lot of young people are coming into money, and even if they’re not billionaires, we’re seeing that they’re beginning to give very early on. The culture of wealth is shifting, and that really matters here. If the norm is to give when you come into wealth, you focus as much on giving as you would on using it on yourself. And that’s really exciting for us to see in the philanthropy sector.

Bengaluru is not inclusive: Rohini Nilekani

“The city is not inclusive. The elite and the poor have different ideas and their interests often compete with each other, leaving fewer means for them to protest together. That is why we see disparate protests. However, there are some issues like water and mobility that bring all of us together,” writer and philanthropist Rohini Nilekani said during the conversation on Bangalore vs Bengaluru: The Tale of Two Indian Cities, at The Huddle, here on Sunday.

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