Type: Keynote

The Telegraph | Rohini Nilekani urges philanthropists to embrace risk, patience for lasting social change

The third edition of ‘Setu: The Bridging Gap’ brings Kolkata’s grassroots changemakers into focus, with attendees pledging around Rs 13 crore towards social development

Philanthropic capital is the “best risk capital”, said author and philanthropist Rohini Nilekani, urging donors to embrace risks and remain patient when supporting social causes. She stressed that meaningful and sustainable social change can take 10 to 15 years and requires long-term investment and commitment.

Nilekani was addressing delegates at Taj Bengal on Friday evening, during the third edition of ‘Setu: The Bridging Gap’, organised by SVP India.

The event brings together donors, NGOs and social-sector leaders to raise awareness on philanthropy and fundraising, while highlighting stories of communities overcoming challenges and bringing a meaningful change.

Nilekani, who is the founder of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies began her keynote speech by congratulating the organisers and attendees, praising the commitment SVP has been showing by supporting for a ‘civil cause’.

She said that to get a better understanding of social responsibility, one must be aware of the privilege they had grown up with. Reflecting on her life story and journey, the former journalist also said that one cannot simply stay ideal and keep on complaining about the injustice.

Over the past 25 years, the speaker said their work had expanded across areas including water, justice, the environment and livelihoods.

At the heart of this work was a belief in the importance of samaj, or civil society. They argued that citizens should be considered the “first sector”, because a strong society forms the foundation on which both the state and markets function.

She said, “We have to invest constantly in making our societies and our communities better, more fair, more transparent, more just, more healthy, more joyous, and much, much better, every day.”

However, Nilekani also pointed out several challenges a social cause might face and how social leaders must learn to stay alert to face them.

“Ageing population, unemployment among young graduates, climate change, livelihoods and the need to build more resilient and empathetic communities are some of the challenges India faces at every step.”

Children of VAANI Deaf Children’s Foundation

Nilekani concluded her speech on an optimistic note, describing hope as her ‘new religion’.

“The future will not change automatically and that citizens must work together to create the society they want future generations to inherit,” she said.

Urging the audience to help the civil society organisations, so that they can be confident enough to create “webs of equity, justice, love, harmony, peace, and prosperity.”

The event also saw the participation of SVP India leaders and partners, including Raj Chhajer, chairperson of the SVP Kolkata chapter, Ambuj Kumar, CEO of SVP India, and Ravindra Chamaria, chairman and managing director of Infinity Group and an SVP India partner since 2018.

The event put the spotlight on four Kolkata-based nonprofit organisations — Ek Tara, VAANI Deaf Children’s Foundation, Udayan Kolkata and Young Men’s Welfare Society (YMWS). The organisations work across education, disability inclusion, healthcare, rehabilitation, livelihoods and community development.

Ek Tara works with disadvantaged children, particularly girls, on education, life skills and community-based learning. VAANI Deaf Children’s Foundation works with deaf and hearing-impaired children and their families on early identification, education, communication support and inclusion.

Udayan Kolkata supports children and young adults from leprosy-affected families through residential care, education and vocational training, while Young Men’s Welfare Society works with children, women and communities in South Bengal, including through its Khelaghar programme for early and primary education.

The event raised around Rs 13 crore, with attendees pledging to work across different social groups for development.

First Published in The Telegraph

ToI | Rohini Nilekani Urges Indian Philanthropy to Embrace Risk, Patience

Kolkata: Indian philanthropy must move beyond merely increasing the amount of money being given and become more willing to take risks, exercise patience and think strategically to create lasting social change, philanthropist Rohini Nilekani said in Kolkata on Friday.

Speaking as the chief guest at Setu 2026, the annual platform of SVP India Kolkata chapter, Nilekani said philanthropy in India was at an important crossroads. While corporate social responsibility and philanthropic giving were growing, she said the focus must now shift to the quality and long-term impact of the capital being deployed.

“In my 35 years, I have found that it takes anywhere between 10 to 15 years to actually achieve sustainable social change. It’s the most difficult thing in the world,” said Nilekani, chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, co-founder and director of EkStep, and founder and former chairperson of Arghyam.

She said philanthropists need to ask whether they are willing to support initiatives over the long term rather than expect quick and easily measurable results.

“Many businessmen and businesswomen have told me it is much easier to build a business and achieve success because there is one clear marker of success which is the bottom line. But social change has been their most difficult journey, yet most rewarding,” Nilekani said.

Nilekani also reflected on the larger purpose of wealth creation, arguing that material prosperity should come with a responsibility towards society. “Great wealth comes with even greater responsibility, which is to make the world a little better than you found it,” she said.

Asked about her greatest fear and hope for India, Nilekani said her encounters with organisations working on the ground gave her reason for optimism. “When I go out into the field and see the commitment with which some of the organisations are working at the grassroots, it gives me immense hope,” she said and added, “some of our youngnetas are working without any baggage. They are thinking differently. They are coming up with very institutional ways of addressing problems.”

Her biggest concern, she said, was that India should not lose sight of what has long defined its culture.  “Its diversity, its inclusivity, its ability to learn, its ability to constantly be vibrant, its ability to reflect, to be spiritually inclined. If we lose that, we will lose our biggest treasure,” she said.

First Published in The Times of India 

Special Address: Indian Wildlife Ecology Conference (IWEC)

Rohini Nilekani delivered a special address at the Indian Wildlife Ecology Conference (IWEC) 2026 held in Delhi on July 12, 2026.

TRANSCRIPT:

I cannot tell you how happy I am to be here in this community of wildlife ecologists, academics, practitioners, researchers, all nature lovers like me. That’s the community I can proudly belong to. And thank you so much to the organizers of the Indian Wildlife Ecology Conference (IWEC) for having me here on the second conference, where we all of course remember Ajith Kumar and all that he did and how he instituted this unique forum which brings all of you together.

So, thank you organizers and it’s my great pleasure to speak here. I have 15 minutes. I needed two and a half hours. I’ll try to cram everything I want to say in that time. Let me do the caveat first. I am not an academician. I am not a researcher, though that doesn’t make me less than all of you, because I also have a lot of opinions like you and some of them are miraculously grounded in evidence. That’s all I can say for myself.

I will say, however, that I love to be in nature and the slightest opportunity I get, I go out even if all I manage is to go into the little urban forest I have made in Bengaluru. And the recent presentation reminded me that I haven’t seen lizards – the rock agamas around me for a very long time.

So, let’s get to this.

You know it is a very unique forum, and I looked at the agenda and it’s phenomenal the kind of sessions you all have put together. I can see that you have brought together elements of Sarkaar and Samaaj, researchers, practitioners, government agencies, NGOs, and philanthropies. But I think what's missing and if I’m wrong, please point it out, that the bazaar or market representatives are missing from this event, even as spectators, even if they can’t present papers, because I am convinced now and I'm 67 years – older than most of you. So, you might have to listen to me on this, that I do believe that it is a lacuna and that it must be filled before the next conference because at least I cannot see any way of us achieving any of our goals and I think many of us have common goals – without substantially influencing the bazaar. And nor should we assume that it is not possible because I really do believe that India’s wildlife, its biodiversity, its ecology is much too important to be left to the ecologists and wildlife enthusiasts such as myself. I don’t need to tell you today about the ecological changes happening around us , I won’t spend time talking about the problem.

Well, it’s very interesting, very complex and extremely interesting to say the least about climate change, I don’t need to talk about that to you. But we can all see how landscapes are changing, you know, we are seeing the march of very successful invasive species but I’m also seeing a lot of human-wildlife conflict and it’s growing so rapidly that I do want to make a point here that even a nature nutcase like myself, I can see that the animals I’m so much in awe of and love so dearly are creeping unnaturally and unsustainably close to humans, or you can say vice versa from your side of the world. But especially in South India, I seem to constantly bump into
tigers, you know, in even urban locations near Coonoor where there is a tiger standing with a bungalow at the back.

I just wonder whether no matter what my young friend Tarsh Thekaekara talks about co-existence, whether this is very
sustainable and what should we be thinking and doing about it? As many of you know, I'm very proud that I became a
first-time producer of a wildlife documentary, ‘Nilgiris – a shared wilderness’ and let me do a plug, it’s streaming right now on Jio, so those who haven’t seen it, please do, there’s no excuse not to anymore. But during the shooting of the film, how much I learnt about the limits to co-existence, and equally about the possibilities of co-existence!

One of the things I want to say to you is I know you all go deep into your subjects and God bless you for doing that, but is it possible that the broader agenda could be to look at legislation like the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 and create some kind of straw man, a new draft which is closer to the ground realities of 2026 – because at least I have begun to believe after being in the wild so much and talking to people around wildlife so much that if we don’t make that new renewed effort and we let somebody else take that agenda – first, what’s going to happen is that humans and animals are both going to be in real trouble. The limits of tolerance are
being breached and when that happens with the conflict that will come, I think ecosystem services that are so well supported now or somewhat supported now at least will really suffer. The question to ask is, is this too much to ask of this community, is it just my agenda, but please do think about it. Many of you are excellent researchers who of course pride in knowledge for knowledge’s sake and I totally respect that.

For more than 20 years, I put my money where my mouth is on that in many institutions. Yet as I look around me, you know at my age, when I look at the gathering of many hopeful youngsters in this room, I do feel that if we don’t broaden our horizons to questions like this which affect everybody, I don’t see how we can positively impact on their future. I think these questions are part of that. I think we can't afford to only focus on narrow technical issues, important as they are, of species behavior and protection, we also have to think like environmental economists of course, but also like green business people, like future minded politicians and like artists, sound recordists and narrators.

It requires what was said in the opening session that I missed, a much more interdisciplinary approach. I know from watching so many institutions that when so many people are delightedly and delightfully immersed in their very deep narrow work, it’s very hard to achieve this goal, but I do believe that this kind of collaboration and especially when it is not imprisoned by over enthusiastic academic bureaucracy, will allow us to achieve a much broader understanding. I am sure nobody disagrees with me, it’s about how to do it that the question comes.

But as part of trying to bring in a lot of different perspectives, some of you may know that we recently instituted together with Dasra, the Samvardhan fellowship. Many of you already have academic partnerships for research, in some sense you are part of the elite of this sector, but there are so many people out there, young people I meet when I travel, who have a burning research question, they don’t quite call it that, but they want to know, located in their experience, lived experiences, how can I ask a question and have some help to answer it, so I can go back into that local area and do something about the question that I have. That’s really what the Samvardhan fellowship has been about and we have really worked hard to make sure that the young scholars whom we shall soon choose from all around the country, from different languages, will hopefully get a lot of mentorship from many of you in the room and whoever wants to join us, please let us know.

And we really hope to create a different kind of fellowship, and I hope to bring a lot more funders into that going forward, so I do hope we can find some good work coming out of that. And for the young people here, I want to reiterate what you already know, that there was no perfect past. The planet has always been in flux and always will be with or without us humans. But we humans naturally, because we are so idealistic and we are so imaginative, we want to create this ideal place of our imagination. But to all of you I would say, you know, rethink this vision. Humans are not some super villains in this story at all and we are part of nature and like so many elements in nature as all of you know so deeply, we are experimenting, we are evolving, we are following both our primitive brain and our more evolved parts of our brain.

We are failing, we are succeeding and we are going on. And I feel really inspired by Chris Thomas’ book and his optimistic
ecology. There are many critics of that here. I can also easily critique his work. I don’t know if some of you have read it. It’s called Inheritors of the Earth.

But I do want you to read it, those who haven’t, with a very open mind. He argues that in fact humans are enabling enormous biological diversification on this planet by redistributing plants and animals around the globe, accidentally or on purpose. And he does not obviously deny that we are in a massive extinction for many species.

But he also suggests through many examples and rigorous data that nature is still thriving in an age of extinction. People
critique him saying that he overestimates nature’s resilience. But to me that sounds like I need to tell those people to watch
the hubris a bit. Because I can’t believe that nature is not exactly that resilient. I am sure you have been hearing about just that in the last two days at this conference.

Now there can be a big critique of Chris’s work. But you know that evidence, that line of thinking allows me at least to be optimistic, hopeful and ready to act. We are in the process, for example, of restoring, regenerating, I am not using the word conservation, we are enabling maybe the recreation, something new of enhancing some wooded areas and some forests in our tea estate in the Nilgiris.

I cannot tell you what an incredibly exhilarating and humbling experience it has been in the last three years. And instead of looking at the invasive species as an enemy to be absolutely slashed down and burnt and pulled out from its roots, I have now begun to admire the beautiful flowers it produces, the lantana and its incredible ability to succeed in its new rather hostile environment.

I am not suggesting we grow lantana or create lantana forests. I am just saying after understanding and reading so much
more, I began to have a new respect for successful invasive species. I also donated a lot of money trying to remove lantana and it comes back faster than we can do it. But certainly, a lot of money is used by the forest department for it. I do not want to say anything more on that. I do not want to be part of losing battles. I want to be part of battles that continue to inspire young people. We can have the lantana debate later. You can still admire the beautiful flowers while we try to remove it. At the estate, while we are trying to bring back indigenous plants, we have created one of the largest private nurseries now.

There are thousands of plants, and we use what we can and share all the rest. Nature Conservation Foundation is working
with us. It has been a truly marvelous journey.

I am really learning to remain humble and to keep my mind very open and the work very flexible and that is what I want
to share with you and maybe that is what is helping me a lot. I do not want to get into the am I a neo-conservationist or am I a traditional conservationist debate. I do not want to say am I biocentric or anthropocentric. Those who have been with me in the field would probably lean towards me being on the biocentric side but my mind is open to understanding that humans are the dominant species on this planet and what does that mean? How should we deal with it? What new moral frameworks and ethical values do we need to incorporate that convince other people and not just the people in this room?

I want to look around me with hope and not despair. I have always felt despair serves very little purpose. It is like a
rocking chair. It moves around a lot but does not go anywhere. Hope on the other hand is that thing with wings. It can make us fly with the power of its thrust. I just want to say as I close – let us keep our mind open to all possibility and work hard to understand and help others to understand.

Your work is so critical, the work of each one of you in this room. What is happening? What is happening to our forests, to our oceans, to our cities and our lakes and to the earth that we live on? I want to say please all of you carry these stories further than you already do.

Much further afield into the hearts and pockets of philanthropists.We need many more philanthropists coming into this space. Please carry these stories into the budget heads of bureaucratic files. We need more government public spending coming into this space and please carry them into the balance sheets of businessmen. And of course, most of all we need to talk and walk ourselves
into the minds of citizens everywhere about how we can be better trustees of the treasures around us. But we need to understand those treasures first and that is where you come in. I often use this analogy in my talks.

Many of you know I love tigers, but I also love spiders. Sujit from Kabini showed me the utter beauty and cleverness of all
the spiders around us. So now I am very careful as I walk around and see a sliver of a web. But I started to say even when I was young, how do these spiders do it? Spin webs across empty space? It is always a marvelous mystery. And then I realized as you all
probably know already that they actually wait for the warm gentle breeze to come that allows them to throw their silken thread across empty space to a point across and then make the connecting web.

Now imagine that. These skilful spinners have to wait for a gentle breeze to allow them to do that. And I think the role of
that gentle breeze is very important. And I think that all wildlife ecologists – all of you – are actually like that gentle breeze. It is the gentle breeze that allows a worldwide web to be spun to protect and to renew this marvelous planet home on which we live. I end by saying wildlife biologists, I pray you yourselves become a flagship species for biodiversity conservation.

Thank you very much. Namaste and all the best.

Rohini Nilekani at 2026 Indiaspora Forum

TRANSCRIPT:

Namaste everyone, how are you? Good. I know you had a good meal and like Shweta said, those of you who want to take a small nap, well, I’m going to challenge you because I know who’s on the panel after me and I think they’re going to win by keeping you awake and the lazy summer of Bangalore is going to lose. So let’s see what happens.

You know, first of all, I do want to thank India Spada for having me here, Sanjeev, MR, everyone behind this very amazing organisation that has been working so tirelessly for so many years to connect the diaspora of India from all around the world with a continuing epic saga of this marvellous country. So thank you India Spada and I know how impactful you all have become and the people in this room are telling me so so yay to India Spada, we can all give them a hand.

So I read the news today, not a good idea anymore. I think many of you might have read the news as well. The world seems to have gone quite crazy and it’s not just March Madness. It’s been horrifying now for quite a while and there’s no point in disregarding or denying what is going on and you know, I feel like sometimes around me I see a lot of people just not knowing what to do and you can’t blame people for feeling hapless, helpless and hopeless because especially young people when they are hearing bombs and rockets and missiles being thrown around so recklessly in so many parts of the world, I think they might be hearing that as a pop of their own dreams bursting and we have to feel for that and try to prevent those dreams from bursting in whichever things that we can do. But that’s not what I’m going to talk to you about.

Obviously, I think we can absolutely refuse to be cowed down by fear and for me the best way I have found to do that is to open my heart as wide as I can and I find that when I manage to do that, it’s not always that I succeed, but when I do manage to do that, not only can I heal my own wounds and light up my own dark corners, but I find in myself then, once my heart is open, I find the courage to expand my work for others who are actively working on healing and I truly believe, I truly believe that right now in this darkness there is a perfect moment for us all to open our hearts. It’s a heart-opening opportunity for us all and when we look back, I hope at some point what I said today will resonate, if not in the next few weeks, at least in the next few years. So for example, when we talk about climate change and the effects of climate change become so much clearer every day, just think how much work that is ahead to heal ourselves first by healing this planet of ours, this home of ours, in so many kinds of ways and then remember all the organisations and individuals and institutions that are already hard at work doing this repair, doing this reconstruction, doing this restoration effort all over the globe.

So my question to us all today is can we open our hearts to them? Many of them are in this room, in fact, you should find them and talk to them later. So a friend told me, imagine actually all eight billion of us here on this planet, all of us human beings actually have one common goal and that is to heal our home. Now imagine if all of us saw this as our collective and joyful responsibility, then we would not only heal ourselves, we would also heal so many other living creatures alongside us and we would secure the future of those yet unborn. So imagine the magic that could happen if everyone would open up their hearts and minds with such a possibility and then my friend told me that I actually began to see this eight billion sort of sort of organism that is all in their own way trying to do something to give ourselves a decent chance in this century.

So all of you after a nice lunch must be thinking this woman is too idealistic by far. Well, maybe you think wrong because right here, right now, right here in India, there is tremendous amount of innovation, tremendous amount of effort underway for mitigation, adaptation, resilience and much more. And through my philanthropy, I work on many issues like Shweta was kind enough to point out from education and justice, to active citizenship and mental health. Together with my husband Nandan at EKSTEP, our very talented teams are helping to build digital public infrastructure to increase the equity of opportunity for all. We are deploying newly and excitingly AI in education, in agriculture, in livelihood creation. At the Centre for Exponential Change with multiple global funders, we plan to take the work of hundred social entrepreneurs to very serious scale across five countries in the global South. It’s all very inspiring and very satisfying work that we all love to do. But for me, environment and climate are my biggest investments and I feel very privileged and very lucky to have supported more than a hundred organisations, amazing organisations, amazing model leaders who are working on environmental issues across the length and breadth of this country. And I would say to you all, if those of you who are not familiar with this work, there’s very creative work going on to reduce human-animal conflict for ecological restoration. There’s a whole ecological restoration alliance building up with different models of restoration and different topographies. There’s a lot of work on agroecology, on disaster mapping, rapid response.

We recently produced a report together with Dalberg on disaster resilience and, you know, it’s important to note that 85% of the districts of India had some disaster related event in the year in which the research was carried out in 2023. There’s a lot of work to do there and there’s a lot of innovation happening there. Disaster wallets, parametric insurance, there’s so much innovation and it’s all being tried out as we speak. We know of all our conservation success in India. For example, everyone knows how we’ve brought our tigers back from the brink. We know that people are working on distributed renewable energy, on nature-based solutions, heat action plans, flood mitigation. We are using information technology and biotechnology being brought into play now for waste and water management, for example, for remote sensing and for ground truthing.

Our extremely talented filmmakers, many of whom I’m so happy to support, are creating heartwarming documentaries of the incredible biodiversity in our country. They are winning international awards. I could just go on and on and on about the kind of work that is happening in this space. It’s not only Samaaj institutions, but also the Bazaar and Sarkar that have become seriously invested in making our country’s future more sustainable. I always believe that for us our biodiversity is actually a national strategic investment and we will actually be protected from the shocks of the world and the way the world is heading now if you would invest much more in keeping the unique biodiversity that India has. Because it is the future of our food, the future of our forests, the future of our water, and the future of our medicines and health as well. So there are a lot of people looking at new pathways, but the old ones may not work, to make this country’s future more sustainable. And I’m so happy to partner with some of them.

So I want to say to this room that there are truly exciting, scalable, investable opportunities for anyone who wants to open up not only their hearts, but also their minds and hopefully their wallets to all this work, which is happening on the ground. For many of you from the Indian diaspora, you all have traditionally, I have seen from reports and analyses, that you have been very invested in education and in health and in livelihood, which are very, very critical. But my offering to you is that whether you’re working in any sector at all, there are inevitable climate adjacencies right now in each of those sectors. And that we need, for example, we will need to understand poor school attendance today. Why are some children again falling back from school? To do that, we probably have to do heat mapping in those areas. If you have to understand why there is loss of income in the summer, we’ll again have to look at the heat maps and to see what is going on with people’s health in summer. So work on healing our planetary ecosystem and driving a much smarter future is, I think, of interest to everybody in this room and outside. And to me, it is an area of work that can bring us all together with urgency and with hope.

And to me, and I say this very often in public, so those of you who have heard me before, do please forgive me. But for me, really, hope is my new religion. And it is, I do believe, the one religion that can unite people and not divide them and polarise them across the lines of their religion. So I ask this room today, even while we are reading the news, can we all recharge the aquifers of our collective current despair? With the wellsprings of hope. And I would say to you that hope, I do not see as empty optimism. Nor do I see hope as a romance. Not at all. For me, hope is not a denial of reality, so much as it is a fuel for action. It is because of my hope that I get up every day and do the things that I do. For me, it is the opposite of lazy cynicism. And that’s what allows people to just sit back and say, oh, nothing is going to change at all. So for me, hope is that positive energy that propels right action, which allows us to see abundance where other people see only scarcity, which inspires us to make the change that we want to see in the world. It gives me the energy, personally, to do small things, which may not make a big difference, but make a small thing, small difference. But it moves me out of stasis. It moves me out of inaction. It moves me out of despair. So I do believe that if we practise hope together, we can strengthen a societal muscle to build the future that we want. No matter what anybody tells us, the future is not yet written.

We all will have to create it together. And in this room of about, I guess, 300 people or so, I know that we all have two things in common for sure. One is we all have extraordinary privilege. There are still 300 million people outside who would love to be able to be part of this room. And whether we live in India or we live abroad in so many of the countries that I was told the Indian diaspora comes from over here, we all have extraordinary privilege that we have to be very grateful for at all times. And the second thing I know for sure that we all have in common is that all of us want to use their privilege so that this beloved country can meet its twisted destiny. And I know that all of you, many of you, already do so much. But I also know that we are all painfully aware that we all need to do much more.

So luckily, there are so many opportunities for us to do so here in India, working together with India’s thriving, highly committed civil society institutions of the Samaj. So many, as I said, I met right here in this room today. And if not, if you are more of a kind of a person who prefers to work with the bazaar, India’s hundred thousand startups give us enough opportunity because they are working in some very unique areas like energy. And if not, you can work with the state or the union governments of the Sarkar to deepen agency, dignity, and choice for our 1.4 million Bharatiya citizens.

That I see as the joyful responsibility before us. And it’s wonderful when I see that I met so many people today, I can feel the energy in this room to adopt this joyful responsibility. Together, I think we can do so much more. And I’ll just say I hope we can all do it in good faith and with fellow feeling for all. All those good values, old ideas, just the belief in human goodness. We should not get cynical about it at all. Never has change happened if not when people began to believe in humanity and the good that human beings can do for each other and for the planet.

So I’ll just end by saying let’s snatch back the wings of hope from the abyss of despair that we can feel sometimes in moments like today’s. But I truly believe that better times will come and it is definitely up to us. So don’t look away. Look straight into the eye of things and most importantly let hope give you the fuel and the energy to keep working for the much better world. Nanyavada and Namaste to all.

Pratham@30: Address by Rohini Nilekani

Rohini Nilekani, chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, reflects on Pratham’s 30-year journey of aligning its goals with ‘Samaaj, Sarkaar and Bazaar’.

 

Pukar’s Event | Journey of Transformation

At the PUKAR Research Fellowship graduation, Natasha Joshi, spoke about working in Samaaj and the power of collective action. She reflected on how grassroots efforts can drive meaningful social change.

India Civic Summit 2025 | Concluding Address by Gautam John (CEO, RNP)

 

The India Civic Summit 2025, held at the Bangalore International Centre by the Oorvani Foundation, was themed around citizen-led action for climate-resilient cities. Through discussions and workshops, speakers and participants shared experiences to explore ways to make cities more sustainable and liveable. The event also spotlighted community-driven initiatives in addressing climate and civic challenges.

Gautam John (CEO, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies), at the summit’s concluding address, appreciated the invaluable work done  by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) – being the invisible infrastructure that enable citizens, citizenry, and cities to function.

 

Transcript

0:00:07.9 Host: To conclude this session as well as the India Civic Summit 2025, I will invite Mr. Gautam John to come and talk to all of us and leave us with some of his thoughts on active citizenry in general. Gautam John is the CEO of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. Prior to this, he has spent several years with the Akshara Foundation building the Karnataka Learning Partnership and at Pratham Books. He was also a TED India fellow in 2009. Gautam, please take the stage.

 

0:00:43.4 Gautam John: I apologise. For those of you who were expecting Rohini, it’s me. I am neither as smart nor as wise, but I will try and channel her wisdom. Second, they promised me I would start the session. Now, I have to speak after Dr. Narayan and after all of this amazing work that happened in this city. So no pressure.

But I do want to say that for a philanthropy whose entire reason for being is based on the idea of Samaaj being foundational to recognise the raw energy, passion, talent, and interest and care that this room represents is both humbling but also deeply inspiring. To say that Samaaj is foundational and to say that citizens must co-create solutions and to say that citizens must participate in governance, is almost glib because this is what it takes to do it.

 

0:01:39.0 Gautam John: It takes patience, it takes perseverance. It takes patience, perseverance, and a whole lot of grit. In the face of immense structural challenges to hold fast to this work. And if you’ll forgive my language, I just want to say, thank you for giving a shit, because this work isn’t easy like Dr. Narayan said, like many of you have acknowledged, this work isn’t easy. It’s often thankless, and it’s almost always, how to say, invisible. And it’s not always easy trying to be the invisible infrastructure that makes citizens, citizenry, and cities work.

 

0:02:24.0 Gautam John: It’s not often easy to be invisible and not thanked, not recognised. But I do want to say it’s moves all of us forward. Like we saw the amazing examples of the organisations from Bangalore, Chennai, and Mumbai and across the country, it’s this spirit and this latent interest in what keeps us together as a society that moves us forward. And what I do want to say is really that we as a philanthropy but also we as citizens recognise that this work matters and your work matters. Every effort, no matter how small, has a way of expanding beyond what we can see. And while Gandhi may have never said, be the change you want to see, it’s true that change ripples from inside out, not necessarily from outside in.

 

0:03:16.4 Gautam John: Change doesn’t happen because someone grants it from above, it happens because people like you insist that it happens from the ground up. Thank you for your commitment, your energy, and for proving that the most powerful solutions often start with the Samaaj. Thank you very much, and thank you to Oorvani Foundation for holding this space, for all of us, all of you, and for doing it year on year. I look forward to next year. Thank you.

 

YouTube

Keynote by Rohini Nilekani – Hearth Summit Bangalore 2024

At the Hearth Summit Bangalore 2024, Rohini Nilekani (Chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies), underscored the importance of building robust support systems for changemakers, social sector professionals & leaders committed to betterment of samaaj. She articulated the progression from empathy to action, distinguishing empathy as the understanding of others’ suffering and compassion as a vital next step that enables purposeful and impactful action. Concluding her keynote address, Rohini urged individuals to prioritize well-being—beginning with themselves, extending to their organizations, and ultimately fostering it within their communities. https://youtu.be/UVoNLYR8sRU

00:00:00 Rohini Nilekani: Ellarigu namaskara…everybody doing well? Good. So, I know it’s been a wonderful two days. I know you’ve had all kinds of workshops, a lot of breathing, a lot of singing, a lot of sharing. And first let’s just call out the Wellbeing Project and everybody who participated to make the Hearth Summit so great.

[applause]

00:00:29 Rohini Nilekani: Thank you all. It’s very important. I’m very proud to be part of The Wellbeing Project, on its advisory board. It’s a global institution funded by several donors – with a single purpose of understanding that changemakers, social sector leaders and those who work to leave society better than where they found it – themselves need some support and help. And I think it’s really time to shine that spotlight because all the surveys that I have seen where social leaders and people working in those nonprofits around the world or even frontline workers, whether it is nurses, doctors, teachers, the levels of stress that they admit to are really off the charts more than in the corporate sector, more than in any other sector because it’s not been a topic that’s been brought into the sunlight for too long.

00:01:32 Rohini Nilekani: So I’m very glad that that is finally out in the open. Many organizations are now talking about it around the world and I think it’s part of a movement for all of us understanding and creating tools to manage stress when we are working at the frontlines of social change. So, I’m very happy to be part of this and to see the response of the Hearth Summits all over the world where people are themselves coming to curate, themselves coming together to find safe spaces to share, to feel safe and brave enough to talk about what is bothering them, to open up without having any fear of being rejected or misunderstood.

0:02:17 Rohini Nilekani: So, first of all, I’m so happy that this space is there. I was just in a workshop on competition and we were able to talk through our fears of competition, through our hope that the social sector will also learn to see that competition exists and not to have so much aversion to some things which are real but not necessarily so much part of our world. So, I’ve come to say, we all hear you, those of us…the donor space is opening up to this all over the world which is very important where donors are beginning to understand that unless the people of the organizations that we are funding are themselves not well, how do you expect them to look after the wellbeing of society? So, you will hopefully see more of that but you also need to bring better ideas to donors on exactly how do you present the idea of supporting wellbeing. So, it’s beginning the movement. I hope more ideas will come out, more, I hate to use this word but that’s how the real world operates, more investable opportunities for the wellbeing of social sector professionals and that should be a continuing journey.

00:03:31 Rohini Nilekani: So, I’m here to talk of the way I am seeing the world. I think one thing most people have realized is that to do the outer work, you have to do the inner work ’cause otherwise you’re going to hit a wall, you’re going to hit your own wall, you are going to become the limitation to the ambition of working for society. So, I’m sure you’ve had many of these discussions. I’m not going to give you advice but two things I will say. One is, I think we need a global movement for body intelligence and what I mean by that is, this thing is actually the only thing that you come with and go with in the whole world but so little we know about our body.

00:04:14 Rohini Nilekani: No, I’m not talking about my clothes, I’m talking about my body. That’s what you’re born with, that’s what you’re going to die with and yet too many people don’t understand how it functions. There is enough medical knowledge to now even know what to do to make your brain function better but we haven’t…we talk about all kinds of intelligences but not enough about body intelligence because rooted as we are in our body, and the self is the body, the brain is in the body, the more we learn about our body, the more we can first of all be kinder to it, which I’m still learning to do, and we can also use its miracle.

00:04:52 Rohini Nilekani: The human body is an absolute miracle. Use this miracle to help us to be more stable, more calm, more efficient. And also to understand things like, that’s very much there in the Buddhist literature, the difference between what all of us feel, that’s why we have chosen to be in the social sector, all of us feel empathy. You all feel empathy? Raise your hands, those who think you feel great empathy. Yes, exactly, all of us feel a lot of empathy but we also know that empathy by itself is not enough.

00:05:29 Rohini Nilekani: Sometimes empathy can take you in the wrong direction because you can feel pain too sharply, you can feel other people’s pain too sharply, you see yourself in that sufferer’s shoes and sometimes that makes you less able to act. So the difference I think between empathy and compassion is – empathy is a starting point. Empathy helps you to understand the suffering of others but then you need between empathy and action, you need compassion which is a little bit of detachment from empathy. You need to step back a bit so that you can show compassion through action to actually be able to help.

00:06:07 Rohini Nilekani: You know in the old days when I used to go and be in many situations of extreme poverty, whether it was Bihar or Bengaluru, in every part of the country when I started, there was poverty. Now in South India, you don’t see so much poverty and in fact in much of India. But I used to literally come back shattered, I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know how to care for myself when I came back from those field trips.

00:06:33 Rohini Nilekani: And I think I developed very poor coping mechanisms and I’d get short-tempered or angry with other people who have nothing to do with the cause of that problem. And it took me a long time to realize this difference which I’m sharing with you because if you want to be efficient caregivers of society, then you know that we all have to learn better to care for ourselves. And so just keep reading on what I just said, even I’ve just started reading about the difference between empathy and compassion. Let’s develop our compassion better so that we can act and not get drowned in our empathy which we seem to have a natural talent for.

00:07:15 Rohini Nilekani: The second thing I want to talk about is hope. I’ve been saying this everywhere, that sometimes and I think young people are showing this with very high incidence of mental stress, depression, anxiety, fears, insecurities, especially the one billion young males of the world who are at extreme risk because the world has changed so much especially for men in the last 50 years. I think there is a sense of deep anxiety and it always shows up in the politics developing around us. I think though that it is very important, especially for all of us.

First, of course, you have to learn in your own way to care for yourselves and The Wellbeing Project has a lot of tools, suggestions, frameworks that are being put out. But secondly, can we make hope the new religion? This is a religion which does not divide. It can only unite. And when I say hope, keep the faith in hope, I don’t mean it as some kind of false optimism or even some very false cheerfulness or anything or even a false cynicism, to counter a false cynicism. That’s not what hope is.

Hope is the energy, the fuel inside you that gives you every morning the energy to do right action. It gives you the humility to know that no matter what things are going wrong, even the smallest action, we can’t understand the consequences. Whichever right action you can do with your conscience, with your heart, it will eventually go into a pool, a sea of right actions by others.

00:09:01 Rohini Nilekani: We can’t 100% say what the outcome will be but doing that right action with hope is always going to save you from hopelessness, is going to save you from the dark of despair. So if we can keep hope as the new religion and develop the faithful around it to support each other, as we see darkness emerge and as we see things going wrong, there is injustice in the world. Our job is to put out a little more justice wherever we can. There is going to be darkness in the world. Our job is to light a few lamps.

00:09:38 Rohini Nilekani: That brings me to my third point, which is I have been seeing, yes, I have known thousands of people and hundreds of organizations in the social sector, first as a journalist and then myself as a social entrepreneur and then as a philanthropist. I have met the most marvelous people in the world in all these organizations. Many of my mentors are leaders of organizations that have created real positive change. But sometimes I think looking at the world today, looking at what’s going on, I want us all to also think about, yes, we want to light lights in the darkness and we should.

0:10:21 Rohini Nilekani: Nowadays I wonder, maybe we need to look at the quality of light that we are putting out. Is it the bright lights of the urban city where even owls can’t nest at night? Is it what is called light pollution, where the real light of the stars is not allowed to filter through? Is that the kind of light we are creating when we are trying to create light? Not intentionally, but unintentionally. Maybe we need to think a little about this.

And what I mean by light pollution, we all do work with right intent, but sometimes we don’t have the right grammar of our intent to take the power of our intent forward to the right place. So how can we together do that more consciously? Because otherwise to me light pollution is all the polarization that we see in the world.

00:11:15 Rohini Nilekani: Light pollution from the social sector may be that despite our desire for justice, equity, fairness, opportunity, etcetera, are we also by mistake, contributing to judging the other side too harshly and therefore breaking the pathways to bridging the gaps between all of us. That’s what I am, and I won’t elaborate on all the other pollution, but maybe you all can start thinking about it. What kind of light do we want to put out in the world? Because if we put out the wrong light, the polluter also is affected by the pollution as much as those who are affected by the polluter’s pollution.

00:12:00 Rohini Nilekani: So maybe we ourselves, because we are talking about our own wellbeing, maybe if we are putting out the wrong quality of light, it is too harsh back on us. Every time in my life when I have judgingly pointed out a finger at everybody and I get angry easily, so I do that a lot. I’m trying to be smarter at 65. By the time I’m 65 in my next life, 100% I’ll have got there. But I always find three fingers pointing back at me and I have to stop and say, that’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to create a chasm between me and another person, another idea, another institution, another thought. I want to create a bridge. And my world, how I hold myself, is going to make the difference between whether it’s going to be a bridge or it’s going to be a broken down highway.

00:12:51 Rohini Nilekani: So let’s think carefully about the light that we spread. Because the real light possibly we want to see is the light coming from the stars above. Please do look after yourselves. Look after the people in your organizations. Create small spaces to talk about this light that we all try to light. And let wellbeing become a cornerstone. Every time you discuss budgets for the year, talk about your plan for wellbeing for the year. Let’s make this a global movement for changemakers to first be well so that they can take care of the wellbeing of the Samaaj.

Wonderful. So now that all of you have been part of this summit, you’re all now certified to take the idea of wellbeing forward in your organizations, first for yourself, in your organizations, and then into the community. Let’s keep the flag flying. Let’s keep the gentle light burning. And, also never forget that we can retreat into nature to give ourselves the most solace. It doesn’t matter if you live in an urban slum. At least in India, there will be one bird and one tree, definitely a few cockroaches, ants and spiders. They are also part of nature. We can learn a lot from them. So let’s find in this ancient country of ancient stories, let’s each find our own story to tie to so that we can weave a web of stories and connections for everyone to work on their own wellbeing.

Dhanyavad. Namaste. Thank you very much.

Reflections by Rohini Nilekani – National Mental Health Festival

Rohini Nilekani (Chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies) in her concluding address at Mannotsava: National Mental Health Festival, highlighted the critical need for public engagement platforms that make mental healthcare more accessible and engaging. She reflected on the significance of uniting doctors, academics, mental health practitioners, civil society organizations, artists, and the public – to foster collective approaches aimed at enhancing both individual & community well-being, parallelly strengthening samaaj.

Transcript

0:00:13 Rohini Nilekani: Ellarukum namaskara. How are you? Okay, I’m glad to hear that. Really, thank you all. Good things must come to an end. But in my experience, the best endings always have new beginnings. So I wrote these few notes just now for the end – it’s not too long.

0:00:33 I hope that with all your support, that the end of these two days of the first National Mental Health Festival will actually become a new beginning for a movement that continues across the country. We need many more of such festivals, celebrations, melas, sambhramas, to recognize the need for understanding and protecting our own well-being, our own manasantulana, and that of those around us because we don’t live alone. So thank you all.

0:01:04 Thank you all, first, to the people of Namma Bengaluru, for showing up in such large numbers and participating so fully. Thank you so much to NIMHANS for hosting us here, for being a strategic partner in this lovely campus, and in such a calm, serene and beautiful organised space. Thank you, NIMHANS.

0:01:28 Thank you so much to NCBS, our strategic partner, who have given so many inputs and so many experts. Thank you so much. Without you, it would not be possible. Thank you to all the agencies because the collaboration here is so evident, right? So thank you to all of them. And of course, thank you to my team. Stand up all of you, please. I’ll quickly say it, how much work they have done for this, I cannot even tell you. Natasha, Shruti, Sahana, Tanya, Gautam, Abhishek, Suresh, Srinidhi, Mable, and everyone else. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

0:02:06 So, I learnt so much in these two days and I hope all of you did learn something. I learnt about young people’s alienation, but I yet witnessed their extreme engagement right around me. I learnt that the arts are critical and that Kathak, for example, can help in treating Parkinson’s. I learnt that people, and I met many in these last two days, with their own terrible personal tragedies, can still overcome their own adversity to help others in the mental health space. Yes, I met many of them and some of them are right here. I learnt that there are doctors without borders, but that we people create our own borders to keep mental patients and mental illness out of our sphere.

0:02:54 I learnt that Rahul Dravid can hit sixers outside the cricket pitch and give us life lessons. I learnt that digital futures might create mental health issues, especially for young people, but that technologies exist that will help fill the gaps in the delivery of mental health services. I learnt that we are all communities of fate, but that we can also become communities of care, because no one is alone and we are all more than our illnesses.

0:03:27 Most of all, I learnt from the experts here, the development sector practitioners, the artists, the academics, and people like Dr Shyam Bhat, that if we can all develop our ‘body intelligence’ –  I like that phrase, I’ve been thinking of it for a while, body intelligence. And body, of course, includes our mind and our brains, then maybe we can all learn how to do better self-care, to do less self-harm, to know ourselves better, to love ourselves better, and therefore, know others better, and love others better, and develop our maitri, sahanubhuti, and karuna. And so that we can have much more, this empathy, we can spread the empathy.

0:04:09 I am a yoga practitioner, and one of the most simple and elegant sutras in the Patanjali Yoga Sutras for me has always been, “Heyam Dukham Anagatam”, which means, that which can be prevented, that sorrow, that harm, that pain, which can be prevented, should be. And that’s where samaaj comes in. Can we prevent, protect, reduce the harm? Maybe then, if we can learn to do that, as some of the doctors said on these panels, we can reduce the mental health disease burden of our country.

0:04:41 And as Shyam rightly said, India matters greatly in the world. When we already had very simple understanding of the kleshas that all human beings experience, Avidya, Asmita, Raga, Dvesha, Abhinivesha, and some pathways beyond to improve that were also presented to us by sages past, Ahimsa, Satya, Asteya, Brahmacharya, and Aparigraha. We know all these things. So India’s ancient wisdom matters as much as the modern knowledge, thanks to NIMHANS, thanks to NCBS, thanks to many other countries, is developing at a pace in this country, absolutely at the cutting edge of modern knowledge.

0:05:21 So if we, following in that way, if we can create a public movement… I’m samaaj first, and I really believe it’s the samaaj that can drive change in the world. If we can create a public movement to understand and celebrate mental well-being, celebrate mental well-being, then it can become a global movement too. It won’t happen automatically. It will take Samaaj, Sarkaar and Bazaar. Sorry, I have to slip in that phrase once in my speeches.

0:05:50 Rohini Nilekani: But to end, it seems to me, like something has begun here in these past two days. A little lamp has been lit in this…just before the festival of light begins all over our country. We hope many partners will come forward in the next few months to take this one lamp and turn it into a big sea of light, dispelling the darkness that mental ill health can bring to both individuals and to our whole society. Please join us in this movement.
Dhanyawada. Namaskara.

Inaugural Address by Rohini Nilekani – Sci560 Exhibition Launch, Science Gallery Bengaluru

Rohini Nilekani (Chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and Board Member, Science Gallery Bengaluru), in her inaugural address at the exhibition launch of Sci560 – an exhibition that uncovers Bengaluru’s rich scientific legacy – speaks about the city’s impressive military-industrial-academic complex. She emphasises that in order to cultivate a robust scientific temper among citizens, there is a need to create platforms that foster meaningful engagement between the scientific community and the public.

Transcript

00:00.00 Emcee: Ms. Rohini Nilekani, the Chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and Board Member, Science Gallery Bengaluru, has been crucial in the ideation and creation of Sci560. The exhibition is a result of her vision for the public to engage with science in our city. I now invite Ms. Rohini Nilekani to deliver the inaugural address.

[Kannada]

00:00:47 Rohini Nilekani: My heartfelt gratitude, first of all, as Kiran (Mazumdar-Shaw) & as Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey also said, to the Government of Karnataka for its absolute vision to be a founder-patron of the Science Gallery Bengaluru, only one of six such galleries in the whole world. Thank you, Sir. Thank you to the continued patronage. They are giving us corpus money, they have been supporting the founding, they have made permissions possible, every kind of support, and we are truly, truly grateful on behalf of the whole city of Bengaluru. Thank you, Minister.

00:01:26: It’s not just that, actually. The state government across the last few decades has left no stone unturned to enable the making of Bangalore and its reputation as a science city. It has been an active partner in many academic and research institutions, nurtured public libraries, recent initiatives such as providing telescopes in schools and colleges, setting up science centers and planetariums in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities – Karnataka is not just Bengaluru. Conducting rural innovation summits and tech summits, they have been doing an amazing job to empower Kannadigas, our people, to make them active stakeholders in scientific progress. So Science Gallery Bengaluru…

[Kannada]

00:02:14: So, it is really very important for me, when Kiran asked me a couple of years, three years ago, to be part of the founding team.

[Kannada]

00:02:25: One is, it’s a fine example, as we just said, of a public-private partnership. And two, because I truly believe, and this is my message really, that the city’s elite, who have benefited so much from this city, need to step forward to create more and more public spaces for all citizens to engage in and to build the future of this very great metropolis. So let’s hear an applause to that. Let the city’s elite come forward.

00:02:52: You know, exactly 40 years ago, in 1984, Nandan and I came to this city first. I came as a young journalist, and while Nandan was busy setting up Infosys, I was reporting and writing on the city, learning rapidly about its people, its culture, its institutions, its politics. It rapidly became evident to me that this city has a rich history of innovation and inquiry.

00:03:16: This is a city of pioneers, risk-takers, leaders, thinkers, a city created by its very diverse public, that’s all of you, and who come not only from the corners of India, all corners but also many parts of the world, like our guests on the stage today. And I believe, I truly believe that it is this blending of diverse streams that makes this beloved Bengaluru of ours now spread way beyond the four pillars of Kempegowda to become the home to a constellation of institutions of theoretical sciences, astrophysics, engineering, biological sciences, design, aeronautics, mental health, neurosciences, nature conservation, you name it, and of course, the very many institutions of art and culture. Yet to me, it seems like many of these institutions are very far removed from the lives and aspirations of ordinary citizens.

00:04:06: If we want all Bangaloreans, the old Bangaloreans and the new Bangaloreans who come in every day, to take pride in this city, to contribute to this city, and to reimagine its future together, we must do something intentional to build a deeper connection to these institutions. As our minister said just yesterday, we need to spread a scientific temper among citizens. In this post-truth world of social media, igniting a passion for science, which of course remains true no matter how many opinions you circulate on WhatsApp University, imagine if we can unleash a revolution about our sense of wonder, our sense of possibility if we can restore our idealism and humanism through the study of science.

00:04:54: What could we unleash, we the citizens of this once and future city, if especially our youth were nurtured in a spirit of inquiry and curiosity, and especially if they had greater access to public open spaces to collaborate, to discover the workings of the mind, the brain, the marvelous world around us. Imagine what a city Bengaluru could be. These questions have actually been growing in my mind for several years. And I’ve been wanting to create a space where the citizens could come together with the scientific institutions of the city.

00:05:26: And finally my dream has come true, thanks to Science Gallery, thanks to Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey, and most of all, thanks to the collaboration of the many science institutions of this city. Last year we had an informal lunch and brainstormed, what can we do to bring science and the city closer together. What you’re going to see as you walk around the museum is a result of that marvelous brainstorming lunch.

00:05:48: The group enthusiastically signed in to the idea of collaborating, curating an exhibition like this, and they came up with the idea that they will bring one artifact each, which represents their institution and sparks more curiosity about what lies behind the walls of these amazing institutions of Bangalore. So fast forward to one year, and here we are at the opening of Vigynana 560. Very happy to see, very happy that Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey and team have put it together so quickly. I do hope you will all come together, spread the word. Many of you have heard me use the words Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar before. This exhibition and the gallery in which it is hosted, our beloved Science Gallery, is exactly what can happen when these three sectors come together. And at the end, I would really say…

[Kannada]