Philanthropist Rohini Nilekani talks to Lakshmi Pratury about setting up Infosys in the early 90’s, her attempt to encourage children to read more books, and her foundation, Arghyam, which works with water and sanitation issues.
My marriage and my family’s journey with Infosys happened almost at the same time, and I think we were so young that we could afford to take any kinds of risks. For seven years we often had to go to the US, moving between cities and experiencing different things. But when we came into money, it was very difficult for me to deal with that kind of extreme wealth. It took me years to settle into the idea of it. In the early ’90s, we had this idea that wealth was never made ethically in India, which is not fair to all the earlier industrialists. Even though I knew how Infosys and the fortune came about and how dedicated and ethical the team was, it was really hard to deal with the wealth. I didn’t know what to do with it. When you don’t have money, it seems very desirable, but when you have too much of it, it can create quite a lot of problems.
It took me a while to realise that instead of looking at it as a problem I had to look at it as an opportunity. That’s when I realised that I could use that wealth to do many of the things that I always wanted to do even as a journalist, by helping others to make this world a better place. One of the areas I wanted to make a difference in was education. With Pratham Books, our goal is to reach millions of children with good, Indian, low-cost books, many of which are absolutely free through the Creative Commons.
One of the greatest joys of my life is to see children reading our books. For most Indian children, the only books they get are textbooks, and you can’t curl up with that at night. We wanted to democratise the joy of reading. So in 2004, we began publishing books and created a whole eco-system of children’s publishing that I think benefited the entire industry.
I also decided to put my own 100 crores from a good investment into my foundation, Arghyam. At that point, we asked ourselves how we could use that money strategically, to address certain gaps. So we started work in water, and over the past 12 years we’ve supported fantastic nonprofits in this country across 23 states, and have worked closely with several state governments. The goal is to get communities to accept that there’s a problem, and then help them become part of the solution by understanding how to use water sustainably. One of the things that we are working on is conserving groundwater and reviving springs all over the country. There are millions of undocumented springs in India. We need to collect more data on them because they provide good, clean energy, are perennial sources of drinking water to communities, and feed all our rivers.
Many of our rivers don’t reach the sea. We don’t think of these problems because a lot of us have easy access to water, but far too many people don’t. We need to get water-wise and water conscious, and through Arghyam we try to instill that in people. India has had some traditions of being a low water society, coming from a very strong environmental justice ethic. But we also need to become a low water economy, because there’s no way we can achieve our economic growth goals if we don’t look at the key resource of water. This is the responsibility of our generation.
India has spent thousands of crores on surface water, by creating command areas, dams, etc. But that money has under-performed because India is actually a groundwater civilisation. We have been an open well civilisation, and after the bore wells came, we started digging deep into the earth for water. 70% of our drinking water needs and 80% of our agriculture needs are actually met through groundwater. What we have been trying to do is to make that invisible water visible, so that we can manage it better. We are also working with the government to improve our groundwater management policies which are woefully missing right now. Currently, you can dig a hole in the ground and you have the right to pull out the entire aquifer. We need to make laws more compatible with this century’s needs.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Vikram Singh Mehta at the 2016 Times Lit Fest in Delhi.
When my family happened to get rich a few years ago, I had to grapple with the question of what to do with this wealth. As someone who was a journalist, and who grew up thinking about issues of social justice, the wealthy were always a class that seemed very distant from myself. So suddenly I was in a position where I now had to think about how I should behave because now I was on the other side. I think we do need to question how the wealthy, including myself, should hold themselves up to the responsibility of that wealth.
It’s an interesting question both in India and around the world. Today, most of the world’s wealth is concentrated in a few hands. The recent Credit Suisse report stated that 1% of India’s wealthy owns 60% of India’s wealth. I’m afraid that includes myself, but is this right? Can we envision another model? Why is this happening, and how does it concern everybody else? These are the questions that we need to consider. There needs to be more public pressure on the wealthy. The issue of who makes money and what they do with it should be on the table, especially in a democracy like ours.
The Journey of Philanthropy
As Vikram Singh Mehta points out, traditional models of philanthropy meant that the uber-rich simply signed cheques to hospitals or temples. However, with the rise of first generation wealth creators there has been a sea change in attitudes towards philanthropy. Post-liberalisation there was an explosion of wealth within a few hands in some sunrise sectors like IT and pharmaceuticals. Many of the old industrial families were able to capitalise on these openings created by economic liberalisation, and were able to not only consolidate their old wealth but become fabulously wealthy in the last 25 years. However, in spite of the criticisms of wealth in the West, they have made it impossible for people to be extremely wealthy without being extremely philanthropic. As is frequently said, “If you own Ferraris, you better be running some foundations as well.” I think we are all influenced by that to a certain degree. There are such stark differences in our society that people cannot ignore it, but we should be doing a lot more than we are right now.
The beauty of philanthropy is that it is voluntary. My journey in serious philanthropy started in 1999, when I became a part of the Pratham network in Karnataka. I was invited to join the Akshara Foundation, which was set up by the state government. I didn’t have that much money then, but I thought it was a huge opportunity to understand how to get into a sector at scale. So I gave some of my money and a lot of my time, towards our collective goal of getting every child in school and learning well. This goal allowed us to think of universalising education as a basic right. It meant we had to figure out how to build partnerships with wealthy people like myself, as well as the state government, civil society organizations, parents, teachers, and the school system.
We needed to come together to move the needle on what is one of India’s biggest tragedies. We’re still continuing to work on that problem today. It’s not so easy to solve deeply complex problems like this. Currently, Nandan and I have started another initiative in education called EkStep, which we are putting substantial money into. In 2001, I had also set up Arghyam with the money that came to me, and we have been focusing on water issues for the last 12 years. These are vast and complex problems, but we need more people to use their wealth, time, talent, and resources to engage with them.
In India, when we go deep into any sector to look at the root causes of problems, we inevitably find governance failures which need to be addressed either through institutional mechanisms or some other way. For example, we could think about why water is becoming such a huge crisis in the country. One of the reasons is that most of our public infrastructure building has gone into surface water. We have spent around 400,000 crores to build canals, irrigation mega-systems, and dams. In fact, each year the value of that reduces because our optimisation of that infrastructure is reducing due to siltation and other issues.
On the other hand, we have 30 million bore-wells, mostly in private hands, drawing out more groundwater than America or China. 250 billion cubic meters of water are sucked out from our aquifers every year, which is draining our rivers as well. We have no institutional infrastructure to manage groundwater, and it remains the most unregulated key resource in India. So some of our work is in the absence of institutional design. We have to think about what Arghyam could support to make sure that we behave in a more water-wise way. To that end, we support a lot of institutions around the country that are doing participatory groundwater management. We use collective knowledge, science, and data to try and make that invisible water visible. We try to create broad social protocols to manage water better, by cutting back on one crop, changing cropping patterns, securing lifeline bore-wells separately, etc. Learning from that experience and its success, we are moving towards influencing public policy in order to create better groundwater management laws and institutions.
The Question of Inequality
In a society where people believe they have equal opportunity and a chance to do better, they won’t resent the rich for having yachts, islands, diamonds, or planes. If people feel that they can also become wealthy, I think the wealthy would not be judged very harshly. But if you are from the working class and you see that your income and job opportunities are stagnating, then they begin resenting the one percent and say, “We’re fed up of this, we want our opportunities back.” So how the wealthy behave is also a function of the kind of economic opportunities that exist in their society.
Our wealthy have to get interested in social issues. The question of inequality is now very much in the public consciousness, and the wealthy cannot run away from that question anymore. We need to ask how wealth is created in any country or society, and if it’s not being created in the right way, we need to ask why that is. Due to crony capitalism or by any other means, are only a few people garnering the value which should be distributed better? I don’t mean the Marxist sense of the term ‘distribution’, but just common sense. We can’t have 600 million people standing outside the glass ball, while only a few people are inside. We have to figure out ways for our society to become one where people have more opportunity and a level playing field.
Unfortunately, the over-financialisation of today’s global economy has made it possible for money to beget money. Rousseau said something that still holds true today — money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes much more difficult to acquire than the second million. We need to ask ourselves whether this is the kind of society we want. What responsibility does it place on the wealthy? Whose wealth is it? Taxation and finance also have a huge role to play in this. India is one of the least taxed countries in the world As taxation and finance become more liberal, we must consider whether the wealthy should either hold that money in public trust or pay tax. Is India ready for an inheritance tax like America? I think if we see that happening, people will become philanthropic very quickly.
In terms of CSR, I do think that the bazaar has to be very responsive to societal needs, however the 2% law is the government outsourcing something that the state should be doing. States can partner with corporations in some things, but in India if the bigger companies use that 2%, which is a tax by other means, to actually improve their inside fence activities and reduce their negative fallout on the environment and society, we might not need CSR to solve societal problems. A lot of problems in India are caused by corporations dumping their externalities on to society. The way contractual labor is treated and the way our effluents are dumped and poison our rivers is extremely concerning. I wish that 2% was spent inside the fence of corporate India to improve its own house first because that might help society more. If corporations would focus on minimising their damage to the environment, the concentration of wealth created by their business practices and breaking the rule of law, that is as philanthropic as any other activity that they could do.
There has been research done all over the world, and increasingly, they have found that employees want to work for companies that are ethical and that practice philanthropy. If employees want to work for a company like that, it also incentivises the corporate sector to be different. Today people want to give meaning to their lives and not just have a job, which is a great trend. I hope we see a lot of response from the large multinational corporations towards resolving some of these big cross-country questions of malpractice, and do more outreach in communities instead.
Opportunities and Challenges
Corporations and individuals will always want to use philanthropy to brand themselves. Even people who give to charity put their names up on hospital wards, and that’s not such a bad thing. But the real work and opportunity for the wealthy is to absorb risk, innovate, and take big bets. If we look at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, not everybody agrees with everything that they do, but they have huge goals. They say, “We’ll wipe out malaria in this world, and we’ll back science to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems.”
The wealthy can afford to do that in a way that governments can’t. Governments need some things to be proven before spending public money on it. That’s what the opportunity of really big wealth is — to underwrite big innovation to solve complex societal problems.There are also a growing number of intermediary organisations that can help people make more informed decisions about philanthropy, like Dasra. Some of us are supporting and building out the ecosystem of giving so that donors know about the issues and about the organisations working in that space, and therefore can make more informed choices.
While doing charity or philanthropy, we have to keep in mind that the poor don’t just want money, they want justice, respect, and opportunities. It’s important for those who give in the name of wanting to improve society to make sure you’re empowering people to become part of the solution and not remain part of the problem. We have about 200-300 million people in this country who have become ecological refugees, urbanisation refugees, or refugees from poor agricultural policy. So we need to keep this in mind when framing social issues, and listen to people on the ground.
McKinsey had carried out a study about India’s demographics and they had found that about 11 crore Indians are excluded, i.e. they are at the bottom of the bottom, much below the poverty line. They don’t have a shelter over their heads, and they’re scattered all over the country. So can the policy makers and the business community come together to address this 11 crore, which is larger today then what it was when they wrote the study? I sincerely hope we can. I attended a panel discussion about the Maoist territories and the situation in places like Dantewada. So many of us are disconnected from the fate of 200 million people in this country. We cannot have a country with such great economic growth, without at least trying to achieve prosperity for all. That is the challenge before us.
We still need to build out a lot more infrastructure and institutions in India. But what we’re looking at now, with something like EkStep, is how to use technology to build those platforms at a fraction of the cost and in a way that is accessible to all. We are trying to develop a platform where everyone can collaborate and come together to do what they do best, in order for children to access better quality learning. But the Indian wealthy need to be much more philanthropic and strategic in their giving, and I hope we are heading there. The E&Y does a survey every year, and last year’s report stated that, for this GDP of our country and the kind of wealth we have here, India is actually becoming an outlier. More people are giving more money away faster than other countries were at this stage of their economic growth. So there’s hope yet.
We need to become as much a moral superpower as an economic superpower. We live in such fascinating times because we can unleash so much innovation.The wealthy are there in this country. The opportunities are there. So many technologies are also converging. There are huge opportunities for us right now, if the wealthy take up that responsibility.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s interview with Dasra, for the Indian Philanthropy Series.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s interview with Dasra, for the Indian Philanthropy Series.
In a country like India, philanthropy means something quite different than it does in Western countries where the basic standard of living is higher. So my giving comes from my political self as well as my philosophical self. I began my giving a long time ago when I didn’t have much to give in terms of money. I started small, by supporting young girls through scholarships. It was really when we came into serious wealth that we began to do what might be called philanthropy, as opposed to traditional charity or simply giving because somebody else is in need. In the last 20 years I have been interested in this space.
Although I came into serious wealth only around 2004, I had already set up a foundation, Arghyam, in 2001 to practice giving away a little. When I came into that big chunk of money for the first time, I decided to put it all into Arghyam. I now had to find a way to give strategically. Until then, I was giving in a way that felt heart-warming. I helped children and allowed young people to study, but this was not going to make a significant social impact. So in 2005, I decided that Arghyam will focus entirely on the water sector in India. This is when my personal strategic philanthropy journey started.
In 2004, I set up Pratham Books, a nonprofit children’s publisher, along with two other trustees, under the general collaboration of Pratham. We were trying to have a genuine impact at scale, by making sure that we published enough good books that were local, indigenous, and relevant to children. We also had to figure out different distribution mechanisms to get the books into children’s hands. This experience gave me the opportunity to learn the ropes of doing things at scale and focusing on making a real impact in children’s education and the joy of reading. Arghyam involved a steep learning curve as well. As with many other philanthropists who are not necessarily familiar with the sectors that they decide to invest, we had to spend time getting familiar with the sector and figuring out the best way to leverage resources in order to have a beneficial social impact.
When I began working with the Akshara Foundation, they had already been set up by the state government of Karnataka and the Pratham network. That helped me understand that public-private partnerships can work very effectively when the government is willing to play a certain role. Pratham Books was also a platform for creative collaboration, where people were willing to give up their personal time for a societal mission that they believed in. Drawing from this, EkStep was a natural extension of this model, and I was able to get Nandan and his team onboard as well. EkStep came about because we realised that in spite of so many philanthropic, government, and civil society investments working on education, India is still struggling with the issue of children not learning. We were at MIT and looking at the MOOCs there, and asked ourselves, why not create a platform for young children to learn, which we help create but which also allows for the interplay of many other people’s talents? In this way, the platform would not just depend and be limited by our knowledge and resources, but would include what other people have to offer, whether that’s money, talent, or time.
The team has done a lot of technological innovation on that front, which is really exciting because EkStep, at its core, is a technology platform. That’s another learning curve for me, to see how the team is building technological products that are very complex at the backend but are simple for the user. There’s joy in this kind of learning. As a philanthropist, you must keep taking bigger risks because that’s what philanthropic capital should be doing. Who else would be able to put in the significant resources required for EkStep, with no expectation of financial return? Hopefully this risk will result in beneficial social impact, and at a rapid pace.
The Need For Strategic Philanthropy
The philanthropy sector in India is still comparatively new. Only a few decades old, it’s beginning to mature now. In the West, the rich talk a lot about their philanthropy, both within their own circles as well as publicly. We need Indians to start using their networks and circles of influence to talk about how wealth in India should be used. We live in a country where 600 million people are waiting to be in the same room as us, so the responsibility of wealth in India is very different than it is in other countries. People need to talk about how they’re using their wealth for the public good.
There are certain things that can be done in the ecosystem and through policy, to open up the philanthropy sector a bit more. If you look at policy, other countries have an inheritance tax, which certainly opens up the purse strings quite rapidly. This has been successful in driving the philanthropy sector in other countries. We also need to make it easier to set up nonprofit institutions and reduce the regulatory cholesterol around them. Today, we’re seeing how the debate about cracking down on nonprofits is making it difficult to do political work in the nonprofit space. After all, if we want to change things in India, a lot of that work is going to be political. I mean ‘political’ in the sense of grassroots work rather than referring to a particular political party. The government needs to be secure enough to allow nonprofits to do human rights-based work.
There needs to be more transparency, but there should also be more flexibility for nonprofits to be able to work effectively. It’s no use opening up a channel of money without opening up the pipe that receives it. We also need ecosystem players who will build the capacity of the nonprofit sector and draw in more professionals, so that we have more institutions doing work effectively. While policy and ecosystem changes have to be made, there’s also a third issue of changing personal mindsets. The wealthy have begun to feel more confident that we are not going back to slow growth. People can see that they’re going to become wealthier or remain wealthy, and so they feel more confident and secure in their wealth. This was not true 10 years ago when I spoke to wealthy people, because they didn’t know whether the government’s liberal policies would last. I think that fear has subsided now, and new wealth is increasing in India. Now people need to learn how to give and how to trust the entities that exist to use their money effectively. We need to persuade people to move beyond charity and instead begin doing more strategic and collaborative philanthropy.
We need to see people give more and give transparently. When people give, it should be with the aim of building institutional capacity in whichever sector they want to be working in. That needs to happen rapidly, otherwise we’ll have a bottleneck situation very soon. Over the next decade, the philanthropy sector will also grow and become more relevant than it is now, and for that we need people to start thinking outside the normal areas of giving. For example, people give freely to education, as they should. However, the health sector in India is extremely under-funded. What happened with nonprofits, donors, and the government in the education sector has not happened enough in the health sector, even though health is a basic human right. Philanthropy needs to come into sectors like health in these next 10 years. There are so many avenues for giving, especially in India where sometimes one feels like they want to give to several causes. Since we all can’t personally go out and do things, we have to rely on enlightened leadership, good institutions and processes, and supportive communities. I believe in supporting people with high commitment, good ideas, and integrity, where I can see a possibility of real change happening even if it’s at a smaller level.
Whether we look at the water sector, education, or media, what the work is essentially doing is reflecting back to society its own capacity to do good. Apart from education and water, the areas I have funded such as independent media, culture and the arts, policy advocacy, and think tanks, are hugely under-funded in India. We need to build out the country’s intellectual infrastructure more than ever before, and we have to recognise that governments cannot act alone. They need new ideas and pilots to be executed outside the government, and evidence-based data that can be used to make better policies and laws. India’s intellectual infrastructure needs to be developed with think tanks and evidence-making institutions, and philanthropic capital is best suited to help build out a range of institutions doing research and advocacy that feeds into effective policy.
Models For Collaborative Philanthropy
Everyone has resources of some kind to give. Those who want to give money should begin with their passion. Philanthropy is always going to be a combination of heart and head, not either alone, so it’s best to go with your area of interest. What bothers you? What do you think is not working in society? What do you feel bad about? What keeps you awake at night? That is where one should begin. One of the things that is beginning to happen more often is that the wealthy in India are coming together to discuss how and why they give. I think that’s very important and necessary.
About four years ago, Azim Premji got many of us together, and we decided to set up the India Philanthropy Initiative. Our goal is to see what we can all together do to make rich people give more. We hold an annual event where we get a few big donors to come and talk about their approaches. All of us mingle, talk to each other, and try to learn from each other. We also have several thematic sessions every year, whether it’s on sanitation or education. Those who are actively doing philanthropy and the organisations they work with come together. Others come to learn, and after that we try to follow-up to make sure more money goes into that particular sector. So far it has been quite successful. I hope we can pick up the pace, but it’s a solid beginning and we have gotten very good responses. The younger generation of the wealthy are also creating their own talking and giving clubs and I think they’ll do more innovative and generous giving in the future.
The time has come in India for philanthropists to collaborate more closely. We have to find innovative ways to do it, where the philanthropist’s own ways of doing things can continue, and yet the collaboration leads to benefits that are more than the sum of its parts. There are many models of collaborating. One way of doing so can be seen with Pratham — it set up its own way of delivering education services, with many people as co-funders. The funders did not necessarily need to talk to each other, but they all knew that they were supporting a good cause. That’s one simple way of collaborating.
Perhaps a more interesting model is when philanthropists come together to conceive of a whole new idea and area to fund, and guide a new sector to open up. For example, I was doing a lot of small grants in the independent media space, and Azim Premji’s new initiative is also planning to do that. When we got talking, we realised that this is one area where collaborative philanthropy would be almost necessary for the right impact. So we came together to set up the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation (IPSMF). We now have 12 donors who have made commitments, and an independent trust. It’s very interesting as an institutional model because the donors have promised to be hands-off and not make decisions about who the money will be given to, because the media is such a sensitive place and many of the donors are business people, so we don’t want any conflict of interest. Some of the first grants have been made by the trustees, and we really hope that in five years we can have some impact on enabling the news that needs to be heard. It’s a great model for people to think about replicating in other areas, where perhaps a single philanthropist might be out of their depth. When a single person is the first mover, most of the political risk is attached to them. However, if we do things together as a credible group, we can achieve much more. There are many sectors that would benefit from this approach.
Collaboration between philanthropists is not always easy because people have different ideas about what they think will work. We first need to build consensus and have a common theory of change — a lot of work has to be done before the collaboration begins, to make sure we’re all on the same page and believe in a common goal. I’ve realised that simple collaboration is easy, but to conceptualise something new is much harder and must be done carefully. You have to build it out slowly. So the partnerships we are doing are small in nature. We want to see how well we can work together before we build out larger partnerships. It’s okay to fail, but we need to try and collaborate. It doesn’t make sense not to anymore.
Many societal problems that philanthropic capital aims to play a role in solving usually have to do with public services, whether it’s water, health, sanitation, education, or energy. These are either provided or regulated by the state. When philanthropists begin working in any of these areas, at some point they will inevitably encounter the state in some form. People who are trying to make a difference should proactively engage with the state and understand its role. I mean the state at any level, be it the local Panchayat, the district Zila Parishad, or the central government. For example, in Arghyam we realised we couldn’t work in water, a public service that we depend on the state to provide, without negotiating with the state. The government needs philanthropists to collaborate with, in terms of public service delivery of essential services. Suppose the nonprofit that we support in Arghyam had come up with a really innovative way of managing groundwater that the government has not implemented. We need to be able to convince the government that public money, if spent in that way, may achieve more equity and sustainability in water. So we have to work with the government. While it may sound hard, if we want to be effective, we can’t avoid it.
We also inevitably encounter policy issues that we want to have an influence on, where we see a gap or opportunity for change. It’s important for philanthropists to start thinking about that from get-go. When we design our philanthropy, we need to think about the role of the state in that particular sector, where we might encounter it, and how to proactively engage with it. If we want to do anything at scale and have a real impact beyond our own resources and philanthropy, we need to creatively and patiently engage with the state.
Giving From the Head and the Heart
Nandan and I are both quite active in our philanthropy. We have slightly different ideas, which is good because we need diversity about what to support, based on our own interests. We did some combined work, supporting institutions like IIHS and Yale. Nandan gives a lot of money to institutions, as well as mentorship. I do very different things, often running institutions myself. I also do cheque writing and institution building. We certainly inform each other before writing big cheques, and sometimes family discussions at the dinner table are often about giving, whom to give, what to give, and what can be effective. It’s important to keep those discussions alive in the family. But for the first time, Nandan and I are collaborating on implementing the work of EkStep. I tend to look at what’s actually happening in the field, at a grassroots level, while he’s better at technology and understanding how to build that in. So the yin and yang works nicely when it comes to giving, and it’s good for families to talk and bounce ideas off each other. Philanthropy is both about the head and the heart, and if families work together, you can bring both those elements into your giving.
One of the questions that some women struggle with is whether they can do philanthropy with family wealth, especially women who have not been working because they’ve been homemakers and doing the other foundational things for the family. I feel that women should not hesitate. In the same way that they would buy something for the family, when they’re doing philanthropy and there is consensus, they should be bold and use their passion, heart, time, and imagination, because giving forward sets the tone for the family and for the children. Everybody contributes to the accumulation of wealth in a family, and women should not hesitate to give forward.
Sometimes I worry that Indian philanthropy is not edgy enough, not taking enough risks or grappling with the bigger problems. For example, in 10 years if some of these climate change predictions are true and monsoon patterns change, that would be devastating for millions of people in India. Shouldn’t Indian philanthropy make the big leaps to look at things 10 years away and say, “What are the things that we can start tackling now?” Instead I feel like Indian philanthropy may get stuck tinkering on the sidelines.
We may see a little bit of incremental work in education or health, but we will not tackle the really big problems that are facing us because we don’t know how to.
But if all the people who have produced their own wealth can be so creative as to build huge business empires, focus their attention on the problems we’re facing, we would have more innovative philanthropy. We don’t have to copy the West. Today, we have problems in India that the West never faced. We have to build an indigenous model of innovative philanthropy, taking bigger risks, collaborating, being more audacious, and giving more. That’s what will make this country go forward in a way that’s different from some of the bad predictions and projections of it. I think we have a huge responsibility on our shoulders, and we should enjoy taking it on.
Laws are intimidating. They’re full of jargon, and it’s impossible for the uninitiated to find out exactly what law applies in which situation. What India needs is a one-stop resource, where laws are documented, easily accessed and simply explained. This is the vacuum that Nyaaya seeks to fill. The lawyer and engineer-run non-profit is building the country’s first free online searchable repository of every central and state law.
Interview – Rohini Nilekani.
Rohini Nilekani is one of India’s most prominent and outspoken philanthropists. She talks to Alliance editor Charles Keidan about how she gives and to whom; why, for someone whose philanthropy is very public, she sometimes gives anonymously; the social responsibility of the rich; the need for philanthropy, and, at the same time, the need to ensure that its power is kept within bounds.
‘Accidental philanthropist’ uses her good fortune and influence to create more opportunities for India’s poor. Deeply involved in initiatives that have unleashed disruptive change in India across a range of issues, from education to the environment, she has mastered the art of giving.
Philanthropist Rohini Nilekani on how the wealthy can be persuaded to give more to charity, importance of natural resources to improve living standards, and the India Philanthropy Initiative.
Rohini Nilekani on the Role of Women in Philanthropy – Dasra India.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk on the Role of Women in Philanthropy at the Indian Philanthropy Forum held by Dasra.
The Economic Times has reported that Indian women are the most stressed in the world. 87% of women here feel stressed most of the time, and 82% feel like they have no time to relax. We see this reality reflected in our day-to-day lives, but it’s shocking to see the statistics, put the state of things black and white terms. The cause of this, according to the article, is that India today functions with a 21st century economy but with a society that is still stuck in the 20th century. The role of women in our society is still constricted by a very patriarchal framework. So much of the work that women do is invisible and undervalued, which affects the kind of economic rights they have. There are, of course, women who do have a clear sense of how we add value, how we create both visible and invisible wealth, and are therefore aware of the role they can play in giving back to society. But I think, for the majority of women in this country, this is not true. So in a society where it’s difficult for women to accumulate wealth, we need to understand that women can be philanthropists in many other ways.
Only a few women are wealthy, either through their own efforts or through inheritance of family wealth. These are the philanthropists who would be able to give away large amounts of money to serve the public good. But women have played a far greater role in philanthropy than merely giving wealth away. As a philanthropist, there are many things you have to offer including your time, energy, and talents, to work towards a better society. Throughout history, this has been the impetus for philanthropy – the desire in people to create positive change. This is the starting point of philanthropy, and women have been doing this for centuries, regardless of their position in society or the wealth they possessed.
In India, Maharashtrian women played a seminal role in advocating for and advancing the political participation of women in our society. From the days when Manu said that all women should stay at home and be controlled either by their fathers, husbands or sons, Indian society has moved forward. We have won battles, but the war is still being waged. Throughout, it was women leaders who moved out of their comfort zones and worked to ensure that everyone had an equal voice in society.
For example, in 1848 Savitribai Phule, Jyotiba Phule’s partner, set up the first school for girls in India. Lady Avabai Jejeebhoy who was thinking about public infrastructure back in the 1840s, funded the construction of the Mahim causeway. Women like Dr. Iravati Karve, Durgabai Deshmukh, and Pandita Ramabai, were key female figures throughout Indian history. They gave back to the community, but they also did so in a way that was a form of political action. These are the kind of women on whose shoulders so many of us stand and we owe them a huge debt for making it possible for women to participate more fully in Indian society.
When I think about myself, I would say that I’d always end up being an activist. Whether I had become wealthy or not, in some way or the other, I would have been in the field of social action. As it happened, I did come into some wealth through Infosys. At the time, I really struggled with this. Whose wealth is it anyway? It wasn’t my wealth. Could I really do whatever I like with it? Can I buy whatever I like? Can I give it away to whomever I like? It took years for me to be comfortable with the idea of wealth on that scale.
When Infosys was set up, I actually did put in some real equity, Rs.10,000 to be precise. Half of this amount was a gift from my parents and the other half was from my savings from my Bank of India account. That was put into Infosys between ’81 and ’82. Now that happened to turn into this kind of wealth, but did I make that money myself? No. This led me to think about how wealth creation really happens in our society. If we think of any institution in society, can we really say that it was the Ambanis or the Nilekanis or the Tatas who created their own wealth? Of course not. It is a completely social venture. Many things need to be in place before an innovator or entrepreneur can create new value. It comes from what exists. So that was the first thing that I had to struggle with.
The second thing I had to struggle with was how much of that work is invisible? I started to think about the kind of work that some of us did for Infosys. If there were mostly men working there, the women were chauffeurs, cooks, and supporters of our husbands. Shouldn’t that also be counted as work? What if I hadn’t invested my Rs.10,000 in Infosys? Would that still allow me to share the wealth and think that it’s mine to give away? It’s important for us to think through these things, because that wealth doesn’t belong to Nandan or to me particularly, it has to belong to all of society. Only after thinking through these issues did I say, “I am a trustee of this wealth. In any case, this is neither Nandan’s wealth nor mine. We are holding it for a while, we’re holding some of it very closely and buying this nice saree and these earrings. But a lot of it must go forward.” And I became more comfortable about it after that.
Then, of course, the great exciting adventure is to figure out how to give it away. You cannot live with this amount of wealth in a society like India. It’s just ridiculous. You cannot happily live in a country where we’re unsure whether 400 million people are going to bed with all the nutrition they require for the day. The great adventure is to say, how can we change this? In that process, we will have to think about how to change the accumulation of wealth in the first place.
A lot of wealth today gets concentrated in the hands of people like me, because we allow certain intellectual property rights to accumulate to individuals and corporations. What if it was not like that? Centuries ago, when the Ajanta and Ellora caves were made or other such examples of art were built and created in this country, they were done as open source creations. What if we brought that sort of culture back to the 21st century, when we’re tackling so many unprecedented problems which require collective action? If we had a more in a collaborative open source kind of model for value creation going forward, then how would wealth creation itself change? Women, I think, would play a vital role in bringing these issues to the forefront.
I believe that the future of India will see women coming into their own, and becoming official wealth creators. This will substantially change the way women will give back to society, going forward. Women in philanthropy will play an increasingly bigger role, giving with a feminine, nurturing energy, which might change how we all give back to society. We talk a lot about impact, and I think women will hopefully tackle the root causes and real social issues. It’s not only the wealthy women who are going to be giving in India. Women of all social and economic classes have been giving in many ways, and they’re going to do more structured giving. For me, the biggest example of this is the self-help groups that we’ve seen forming all over the country. Over the last 25 years, around five million self-help groups have been formed, each with 10-15 members. So we have anywhere between 50 and 70 million women of a lower to middle economic stature in this country who are working towards social good. Women really do have the potential to change the face of Indian philanthropy.
This is an edited version of a panel discussion with Mr. Mahesh Krishnamurthy, Nandan and Rohini Nilekani, for GiveIndia.org, an online donation platform.
My journey in the nonprofit sector began with a serendipitous meeting with CV Madhukar. Towards the end of 1999, when my children were starting to become more independent, I was lucky enough to cross paths with Madhukar. He asked if I was interested in helping him make sure that every child in Bangalore, and then Karnataka, would be in school and learning well, and I said yes. I worked with the Akshara Foundation until 2009, however Arghyam’s work really began in 2001. We had finally come into some money with Infosys ADR, and that’s when I felt that I needed to put all of it into Arghyam and strategically focus on one area. Until then, I was a little scattered in my giving. So with the 100 crores that I put into Arghyam, we decided to start work on water and sanitation. It was the first Indian foundation that was committed to water and sanitation. A lot of the work done until then was packaged alongside rural development and funded by foreign philanthropy. We were, and continue to be, the first Indian foundation focused exclusively on lifeline water, a critical need all over India.
I was really searching for an area that would have high impact and was also a gap area where we could do some serious strategic work over a period of time. I was standing in the shower on April 5, 2005, when I was holding water in my hands and a light bulb went off. I realised it had to be water. My CEO and I started researching and we realised just how much potential there was for philanthropy, and partnering with government and other nonprofits. I am very glad we chose water because there is still a lot more work to do there.
For Nandan’s part, he began his philanthropy journey by going back to all the schools and colleges he studied at, and systematically giving them endowments. Since he was busy, first with Infosys and then with Aadhaar, he focused on funding different organisations. For example, one of the places we have funded is the Indian Institute of Human Settlements because we think that urbanisation is going to be a huge challenge for India. In the next 30 years, when a few hundred million people are going to move into cities, unless we have the capability to deal with that we can’t really adjust it. The logical thing was to have a university which produced quality people with interdisciplinary skills on urban issues, so that’s what led to the urban project and we set up India’s first university that focuses on sustainable urbanisation.
We have also been having many conversations about literacy issues, and how to leverage technology to problem solve, and have set up a foundation to address those issues. India has spent a huge amount of money on education in the last 15 years, from the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan onwards. While there’s been great progress in getting kids into school, the learning outcomes are not up-to-date. The 10th ASER report shows that there is no particular improvement in learning outcomes. So we thought, maybe there is a way to use modern technology, smartphones, and game-based learning to change that.
Philanthropy often starts because some issue really affects a person and they feel passionately about it and want to play a role in solving it. We’ve seen this around the world, when people set up their own foundations and learn the ropes of giving in one focused area. However, both Nandan and I feel that if you give too much of your philanthropy within your own gate, you’re perhaps losing out on the opportunity to give forward to other people who have experience, passion, commitment, and who need financial resources. Therefore we have tried to diversify our philanthropy way beyond our own gates. We give widely, in very diverse areas, because in India you need to do everything. When I find committed leadership that is doing work in certain areas that I care about, I would like to fund that as well.
Tackling the Governance Deficit
Addressing governance issues is important because whichever silo you work in, be it education, microfinance, sanitation, food, or health, you will eventually hate the governance deficit. Take education for example — we can take the children to the schools, but we need them to be learning, for which we need teachers to be engaging; we need them to have the right training; we need the school administrators to be doing their job; we need the evaluation and monitoring systems to be in place to know that the children are learning, and so on. In addition, we need the budgeting to be transparent, whichever pipeline is coming through, we want to make sure the money is actually coming and that it is being used well. Sector by sector by sector, these are very real gaps. Even though there may be enabling public policy and a very high demand, in the end if things don’t come together because of the government’s deficit, then we’re hitting a brick wall.
Luckily, there are many people who are now coming up with very innovative ideas to enable governance. No matter which sector we are working in, any philanthropy that we do, we must put something aside to improve the governance of that sector. When you work in governance as I do, you do have to speak truth to power, you do have to stand up to government, or at least support people who stand up to government and say, “Well, things are just not working because there is corruption, there’s no transparency, and there’s no efficiency.” So that’s why sometimes it is tricky to fund initiatives in governance and there are many ways to do it. One way is to come together as a consortium. For example, if you are funding independent media but don’t want to be the first mover, you can pool resources and do it. I admire people like George Soros, who are able to clandestinely support democracy behind the Iron Curtain in many innovative ways, by funding a lot of groups. It’s important in India to be funding issues of governance. You can do it quite safely or you can take tremendous risks, but it’s very necessary because no matter which sector you work in, it won’t work unless you fix the pipelines.
The Challenges of Scaling
On one hand, India has a long philanthropic tradition. On the other hand, giving is still relatively small and it’s towards very traditional causes. It’s not necessarily to issues that are core to where India needs to be over the next 30 years. In the last five years however, there has been remarkable upsurge in giving and philanthropy in India. We are involved with various initiatives to encourage broad-based philanthropy and there’s tremendous uptick in that. It’s also related to the fact that we have first-generation wealth creation happening, and both professionals and entrepreneurs are getting there. So things are changing. As Nandan points out, we now have an issue of absorption capacity. Many big givers are having trouble finding enough good organisations to fund because the other side doesn’t have the infrastructure or governance to absorb the money.
We have a million nonprofits, but how many of them are scaled relative to the sited problem that they are pursuing or have? One of the reasons that nonprofits are not able to do that is because they are perpetually chasing after things that they need to function better, but perhaps many givers don’t really understand that. Surprisingly, people understand this perfectly well when building their own enterprises. But when they look at the nonprofit sector, somehow that knowledge does not get transferred. It’s a simple fact that nonprofits need accountants, HR, admin, finance people, and strong leadership. HR function is critically important in nonprofits and severely underestimated and underfunded. All those functions require people and resources, and we need philanthropists who understand that. In businesses, you can’t possibly be successful without giving attention to those department functions. We need the same kind of thinking in this sector. That’s why we have so many small nonprofits who are not able to scale.
In a way, philanthropy is a form of risk capital because philanthropists can do things that governments can’t do and markets won’t do. Governments can do some things well, like allocating billions of dollars to a problem, however ensuring that it is effective and transformational is often a challenge. Markets and market players have to ultimately make profit, so they can’t do some long-term things. Nonprofits can, but they don’t often have the scale to do it. So, the philanthropists can be somewhere in the intersection of all this, and look for things to do which the other players can’t because of the risk.
Ironically, philanthropists are often afraid to take risks with what should be their risk capital. Instead, they want to measure everything and make sure everything has impact. I think philanthropists should say, “Nine things failed. Oh, that’s wonderful.” That means you tried 10 things and one succeeded. But while Indians are giving more, I wish we would give more without fear of failure. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think we need to measure. For me, the critical question is what are you measuring? And are you only going to do what you can measure? If we’re talking about empowering people to build their own capacities, it’s very difficult to put a number to that. How would you measure empowering a whole community to become part of the solution instead of a problem? Often your oppressors are the ones closest to you. How are you going to measure when you’re able to stand up to your closest oppressor? There are many things like that which I think can’t be measured. With Pratham books, it was very easy to measure the number of books we were publishing, the people buying them, our reach, the number of authors and illustrators in the ecosystem, etc. But we can’t let ourselves be obsessed with those numbers and not look at the impact that cannot be measured.
In companies, you have to show your shareholders your bottom line. Here, we are accountable to society, where every rupee of philanthropy is a rupee that might have otherwise gone to the government as taxation. So, it is highly accountable to society, but I do think that we should take more risks when we do philanthropy. It’s okay to allow people who are committed to something and want to try something new to prove it.
Bridging the Ideological Divide
There is often an ideological or political mismatch between the givers and those who need resources. So many of our nonprofits, for very good reasons, have been on the left side or Gandhian side of the political spectrum. Activists like Medha Patkar stand with thousands of people, literally knee-deep in the Narmada river asking,“Where are we supposed to go? Our rehabilitation money promised by the government, promised by the law has not come to us.” I can’t think of too many philanthropists in India today who are going to stand up and say, “Yes this is a just cause, and we need to support it.” Issues that have to do with exclusion, human rights, political rights, or humanitarian issues are ones that many of us don’t like to think about or talk about.
Perhaps somewhere in the education system, a few generations got depoliticized. Politics is really just about the redistribution of power in society. What we read and the discourse that happens in public, shifts our sense of society. For a couple of generations, perhaps, that became less important than other things, but today we are seeing a re-politicization. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. But politicization is messy, it’s not a smooth, linear journey toward public good.
We hope that our government is actually following certain principles of justice, but there are too many people left out. In order for resources to reach everyone, we would need to scale a lot more and have a lot more ideological matchmaking as well. People who made wealth from markets are not keen on giving to Gandhian, Marxist-oriented or socialist-oriented organisations. Today we are seeing different kinds of nonprofits come up, dealing with service delivery or transparency or new issues that the rest of the world is also engaged in. So we’re beginning to see different players, both on the philanthropy side and the nonprofit side.
While people believe in justice and equity, they may not like a certain approach or a certain activism enough to feel comfortable funding it. Personally, I do fund organisations on both sides of the ideological spectrum. For example, I fund EPW, a left-leaning important weekly that addresses issues that the media often ignores, as well as Takshashila, a right-leaning think tank which also produces publications. Both of them come with high integrity and commitment. In India today, we need to deepen the political discourse. I don’t have to agree with everybody I fund, that would be impossible. Instead, I ask myself what the pillars of a good democracy are — good public platforms to discuss and help convince each other. That is why I believe in funding both Takshashila and EPW.
The Need for a Strong Samaaj
I believe that we need to build a very strong society or Samaaj. We need people’s institutions and citizens to be empowered to act so that we can keep the markets and the government accountable. If we don’t have that, governments and markets can become very oppressive. The whole of the last century is littered with fine examples of those kinds of oppression. So a lot of my philanthropy is centred around how we can create a citizenry that is aware of its own role, its own responsibility, and what the markets and the state can and should do, and what they should not do.
For example, the Avantika foundation came out of something that we were doing at Arghyam. We created an ASHWAS household survey of sanitation in Karnataka. It was quite a comprehensive report, and we found out that so many things were wrong, so we went back to GPs with that information. We gave the gram panchayats their own report saying, “In your GP, here’s what we found from you.” We reflected it back to them and said, “We’d like to help you with an action plan, to help make things better.” But when our teams went around, we found that the GPs didn’t have the capacity to state where they wanted to be in five years and how they could systematically make steps to get there.
One of my colleagues with a background in organisational behaviour saw an opportunity to work on this. Over the last five years, she came up with a very detailed process mapping and solutions platform for gram panchayats to understand that they can be autonomous institutions empowered to make all the line departments, where most of the money flows accountable to them horizontally. Right now what happens is the government flows money into the gram panchayats, but they are accountable upwards into their own programs. Nobody is really accountable to the GPs. So this organisation has come up with a wonderful solution that is working quite well. It’s a small organisation, but it has been selected by the government as a model for the Rajiv Gandhi Panchayat Sashaktikaran Abhiyan.
In my philanthropy, I think with both my head and my heart. When it comes to the heart, there are some visceral things that make you feel good, like a child opening one of our Pratham books for the first time. Sometimes children who had never seen a book would just clutch theirs and be happy. Those are the kinds of moments that really grip you. But others, like the fact that we are able to help build institutions, are incredibly gratifying as well. For example, through Arghyam we were able to impact public policy at different levels, and foster leadership on the ground. With the springs program, we helped people who depend on spring water to understand what their water resources were and how to create the kind of institutions that would protect those springs. It’s hugely satisfying work.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Neera Nundy during the Dasra Philanthropy Forum, held at the Ford Foundation in New York.
15 years ago, when we came into some wealth, I was lucky enough to have invested in a small company which my husband had started. Over the years, it made us wealthy enough that I had to start thinking about the responsibilities that wealth brought with it. It took me some time to figure it out, but now I firmly believe that all wealth needs to be used for the public good, because that is what it’s meant for. Through my own journey in India, I have seen a rise in new wealth creation over the past two decades and many more people are looking to philanthropy now. There is also a concerted effort, from myself as well as others, to encourage people to speak out publicly about who they give to, and the reasons that they support certain causes. In addition to this, there’s a lot more public attention and pressure on the wealthy.
My journey in philanthropy began with working in the education sector, which I did for many years. I co-founded and supported an organisation that became India’s largest nonprofit children’s publishing house, Pratham Books. Through this, we were able to reach millions of children for the first time with indigenous, age appropriate books. Our goal was to put a book in every child’s hand and make it a joyful experience. For the last 10 years, I have also been deeply involved in the water and sanitation sector through my foundation, Arghyam. Recently, I have expanded my philanthropy portfolio to issues of transparent and accountable governance, and supporting independent media. I have found that no matter what silo you work in, whether it’s health, adolescent girls, water, etc. in a country like India, you are going to hit the governance deficit. If we can work to create better governance, I think our philanthropy goals can also be met more efficiently.
The Challenges of Philanthropy in India
While it’s true that Indian philanthropists need to give more, other countries also have a stake in our future. India is a hugely strategic country in the world today. If India succeeds and its 400 million strong population does well, the world does well alongside it. India is also a place where philanthropists can gain a very enriching learning experience, through doing pilots or scaling up on the ground, and those lessons can then be applied to any other country. We have been seeing this happen over the last few years. Another reason why I would strongly recommend that people in America and the diaspora support innovative efforts in India is because a lot of traditional philanthropic capital is fleeing India for a variety of reasons, and that vacuum needs to be filled. A lot of potential exists for good philanthropy, and philanthropy rewards the giver as much as the receiver.
In India, finding the right organisations to work with is certainly difficult. One wants good leadership, integrity, and partners on the same wavelength as you. It’s also a challenge to know exactly which area to work in and what kind of impact you want to have. Over the years, I have not been very fanatical about metrics and outcomes, but that does not mean that you don’t want your philanthropic rupee or dollar to have some impact on the lives of the people or the issue you are trying to support. So getting the metrics right, making sure you have the right partner, and that you’re strategically working towards a goal are some of the challenges to overcome. It is also partly the receivers’ responsibility to make their case. Those who need to raise philanthropic capital must explain why philanthropists’ money being put in these directions is going to serve the cause. Traditionally in India, many organisations have not been up to that level of communication or branding because going out and selling yourself is seen as the wrong thing to do. But I think the time has come to challenge that, and organisations like Dasra make a very strategic case for investment in areas such as the adolescent girl child, urban sanitation, and malnourishment.
In terms of how I choose who to give to, in India there is a wide range of people who have real experience or have really thought about something and therefore have a certain approach. Sometimes, I may not even fully agree with the approach, but if I believe in that leadership or the commitment and passion, I’m willing to go with that organisation. However, I also have some ideas on what areas I’d like to focus on, such as water, sanitation, governance, and the environment, etc. So I come from the cost perspective and look for good people and good institutions to support. It’s true that sometimes you have to support the cause and hope to gather the right people, and sometimes you’ll have to go with the good people and trust that they will be supporting and leading the right cause. I think trust becomes essential there.
Impact Investing and the State of the Samaaj
Nandan and I are independent thinkers so although we have a common social vision, sometimes our approaches are quite different. So I do philanthropy my way, he does philanthropy his way, and then in between there’s a bridge where we do stuff together. For example, we have both supported several institutions, because we believe that we need to build out all kinds of institutions in India. Whether it’s NCAR or IIHS, we have both given to the same organisation, sometimes separately. Currently, we have embarked on a new game-based learning project together. But otherwise, we talk to each other a lot about what we are going to do independently as well.
Together, we have been learning more about the Giving Pledge, a fantastic thing that the Gates and the Buffets are doing. Perhaps culturally in India, we would need a different approach. Over the last three years, we have been through the India Philanthropy Initiative, and we often brainstorm with Bill Gates as well. We are trying a different track in India and I think it’s working. On the impact investing side, over the last 20 years we have seen a lot of work happening where philanthropic capital is going towards filling the governance gap through market opportunities for the lower end of the economic pyramid, and in many cases it has been an astounding success. But I have kept my own portfolio to nonprofit activity and have so far stayed away from too many direct for-profit investments, even if they are at a very small and local level.
This is because I don’t come from a corporate background so that’s not my skill set.
Many people are doing impact investing, investing in social enterprises that are for-profit. But I do think that there is still a lot more work that needs to be done on the for-profit side, because we need to invest in the samaaj first, or at least concurrently, so that markets can be more accountable to people and governments can be more accountable to citizens. That work is essential and most of my philanthropic capital will be going into that space.
