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.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani and Pavan Srinath’s discussion on malnutrition and sanitation in India. This conversation took place on the sidelines of the Takshashila-Hudson conference, “Shaping India’s New Growth Agenda: Implications for the World” in Bangalore on August 1-2, 2014.
Over the last two decades India has made a lot of progress in the area of sanitation, and this is due to several factors including greater public policy changes. Now that the nation’s attention is focused on sanitation, it’s become clear to us how sanitation is crucially linked to public health.
For young children and vulnerable populations, lack of access to clean water and sanitation has multiple long-term implications. Our public policy must aggressively drive institutional reforms around the issue of sanitation. Through the work that we’ve been doing at our foundation, Arghyam, we know that behavioural choices can affect a significant amount of change. The government has a program where people who need toilets will be given financial incentives to install them. But I think we will need to do more than that, in terms of making sure that everybody uses clean toilets and reduces open defecation.
There is good public policy, but we also need to plug some of the gaps. We need a lot more philanthropic capital to come in, perhaps through a sanitation fund, so we can work with the government on this issue. If we want to see lower malnutrition and child mortality rates, we need to work on sanitation aggressively, as well as women’s safety. The demand for sanitation has been building up because of the pressure on land and urbanisation, and we only have another 10 years to address this so it is time to get our act together.
Financing toilets for the poor is certainly an issue, and there’s a need for money upfront to build those toilets with access to water. But I think we need to work around that, perhaps by encouraging banks to give out loans, etc. The financial aspect of it is a problem right now because of corruption and bureaucratic delays in getting that money to the people who need it. However, the bigger obstacle is cultural behaviour that we need to change. People need to internalise the idea that every single person in a household, including women, children, and the elderly, must have access to safe and clean sanitation. There’s a lot the government can do to spread more awareness, and I think more research is required. Civil society actors also have a big role to play in this.
We know that clean water and safe sanitation would go much further in terms of the prevention of malnutrition than any other solution. But we must also have a framework of rights for people to have equitable access to food. In India, we must focus on implementation, whether it’s about food policy, toilets, or education outcomes. We need to focus on getting the right incentive structures from the executive, along with the political class which is listening to people’s demands. We all seem to have some broad consensus on the ‘what’, so now we need to focus on the ‘how’. We have to build up the quality of demand, and that is where civil society comes in. When the quality of demand is built up, the supply system has to respond. We can’t have 600 million young restless people and not respond to their demands. And we are seeing some of those breakthroughs now, in the areas of water and sanitation. The next decade is a critical one, so we need to work together to demand and implement these changes.
BANGALORE: One story was narrated to hundreds of children across the country on Saturday, thanks to the initiative of Pratham Books, headed by Rohini Nilekani. Rohini speaks to STOI on the importance of reading and why it lags among children.
The work of governments and ngos over the past two decades has certainly helped millions of children, all first-generation learners, get into school and take their first steps towards reading. However, for a vast majority, there is almost nothing joyful or interesting for them to practise their newfound skills on. The children of our elite classes have access to books from around the world, but kids learning in their own languages have precious little children’s literature to choose from.
The result is there for all to see, when survey after survey laments that one in two Class V children in India cannot read a passage fluently in any language.
A debate was going on about a government proposal to make it compulsory for companies to spend 2% of their net pro?ts on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Rohini Nilekani, philanthropist and chairperson of Arghyam, a foundation she set up with a private endowment to work on water and sanitation issues in India, says she has been “against the 2% rule from the beginning” because “I don’t think government should outsource its governance. And, secondly, making it mandatory is going to straightjacket [CSR] in a way that may not necessarily yield the best results. But now that it’s been done, we just have to make the best of it.”
This is an edited version of a conversation at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2013, between Kishwar Desai, Jaishree Misra, and Rohini Nilekani, as part of the Rajasthan Patrika Series.
Often, I find myself wishing that the subject of my book, “Stillborn” was not as relevant as it is today. But when we look at the data, unfortunately things have gotten worse since I wrote my novel. At the time, I was a stay-at-home mother and I wasn’t able to do much journalism, but there is a writer in all of us and I felt like this is something I wanted to do. I happened to read an article in the papers that was reporting on people who were not scientists, but were giving women radioactive rotis to see what would happen to them. That story stayed with me, the plot developing from there as I researched more about it. But unlike the blood and gore thrillers that I was reading at the time, the story of Yati and Poorva that emerged was using the garb of the suspense novel to address something more serious. As a journalist and a writer, I felt like the story had to be told in this form.
There have been hundreds of deaths in India due to clinical trials, and very few of them have gotten compensation from the government. This is because there are a lot of powerful agents between the people affected by this and the pharmaceutical sector, which allows them a level of impunity that is shocking. Some of the most recent anti-cancer vaccines were tried out on tribal women, who would not have access to even the most basic form of justice. It’s been 62 years since we have declared India to be a republic, but we still have a long way to go in terms of safeguarding the rights and lives of all our citizens.
As Desai points out through her books as well, Indian women’s bodies are being exploited and experimented on in ways that may seem like science fiction, but are very real. The health sector is growing at a fast pace, while laws around surrogacy and drug trials have yet to catch up. The Drug Controller of India simply does not have enough resources. So while India has become one of the world’s most popular destinations for clinical trials, whether they are happening with the informed consent of the participants is questionable. Participants should be able to know the risks they are facing when they try out a medicine for a drug manufacturer but unfortunately people are not as transparent or upfront about these issues.
With regard to the complicated issue of surrogacy in India where women from lower income families agree to act as surrogates for wealthy couples, often for very little money, discussions about commodification are difficult to tackle. In our culture, wet nurses were not unheard of, yet in a way that is also using a woman’s body and what it produces to nourish someone else’s child. The problem lies when there are complete strangers from around the world who are essentially renting Indian women’s wombs, and whether those women are informed and supported through that experience. So I appreciate Desai’s ability to look at this issue from different viewpoints in her novel.
However, when we look at the drug trials and issues of medical malpractice, we have a more clear-cut situation. In my novel, I based the story on the facts — I wanted to show the Indian farming industry that was growing rapidly at the time, and facing international competition. The question was whether it would sink or swim, and whether it was going to do so by abiding international norms or trample over human rights for the sake of profits. That was the story I was interested in telling. It has been 10 years, but I’m hopeful that robust regulation will come in before long, because the world is watching us now.
While it’s easy to talk about these issues, the more challenging task is to think about some of the solutions that we need to see happen in India. All of us read the newspapers nowadays and we get frustrated and angry about what is happening in the country. But what we have seen happening with the Nirbhaya case for example, is that we have now reached a tipping point where people are beginning to look outside of themselves. Middle class families are thinking about what is going on beyond their class, because it’s clear that it will impact all of us. I can see an increase in people’s empathy, which is crucial if we want to progress as a society. In terms of women’s empowerment, we are taking great strides. No other country in the world has elected one million women to local political power. Slowly but surely, that will result in real change. Women now have a voice on gram sabhas and gram panchayats, and local planning priorities reflect that, with more focus given to health care, education, and access to water.
Data tells us that up to 60 million women have been a part of self-help groups, institutions of empowerment where women can discuss issues and come up with solutions. Together they make their voices heard through collective action. So we can see really positive changes happening in this space, ones that actively empower women and local communities. In addition to this, there are more women entering the workforce, who may not have had access to these jobs 10 years ago. Corporates are ensuring that their policies are progressive and work towards gender equity, because there’s a lot of public pressure for them to do so. It’s not easy, of course, and there are still many hurdles that women face. But things are changing for the better.
We have to keep in mind that regulations and laws are not a silver bullet. Regulation often lags behind innovation, but it is not the only tool we can use to achieve societal change. We also need social and collective action, information and awareness, and empowerment of the people. Alongside empowering women, we have to engage with men and boys if we really want a more equitable society. More spaces need to be created in this country where men can express their hopes and fears without having to succumb to living up to stereotypes of masculinity. Without these avenues to express their feelings, the violent consequences have been well recorded. We have to start having those conversations if we want lasting change.
In case you missed it, the Christian Science Monitor recently published a wonderfully inspiring story about Rohini Nilekani, the Bangalore based philanthropist who founded Pratham Books, a nonprofit publishing company that provides low cost books to millions of poor children across India.
When she found herself suddenly wealthy, the Indian philanthropist founded Pratham Books, a nonprofit publisher that uses innovative ways to put low-cost books in the hands of millions of kids.
“My mission is to put a book in every child’s hand,” says Rohini Nilekani That’s an ambitious goal anywhere, but especially in India, where there are more than 300 million children, most of whom can’t afford books, or even read.
