Watch Rohini Nilekani read aloud from her new storybook starring Sringeri Srinivas – Annual Haircut Day – ONCE AGAIN! illustrated by Angeline and Upesh Pradhan and guest edited by Mala Kumar.
Read the sixth book in the Sringeri Srinivas series on Pratham Books StoryWeaver here!
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s comments at the SVP, Bangalore All Partner’s meet.
This pandemic has taught us a lot about ourselves, our communities, and our governments. We’ve learnt about the positives and the negatives of our public systems, and our activistic fears are being revived. But our empathy has also been stirred. I think we have all really internalised the mutual dependencies and interconnections of our world, and that functions as a kind of invitation to get away from our conditioned mindsets of avoiding difficulties. Now we can turn these difficulties into opportunities for positive change. Our governments have responded the best way they can, but private philanthropy has really picked up. Corporations and philanthropic foundations have gone out of their way to rethink their portfolios and create a rapid response. In addition, individual giving has picked up – I was a part of a fundraiser that collected $7 million in four hours. So people are really reaching out and it’s a great opportunity to achieve something incredible before donor fatigue sets in.
The Need For Societal Platform Thinking
Through our philanthropy, Nandan and I have pooled all our thinking and experience together to form something that we call ‘societal platform thinking’. The idea is that societal problems are so complex that they cannot be solved by any one sector alone. Neither Samaaj, Sarkaar, nor Bazaar on their own can provide a solution. We need all three to play their part in response to any complex societal problem. Societal platform thinking offers a way to reduce the friction to collaborate between Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar, since these sectors are not usually able to collaborate easily. By reducing the friction to collaborate, we mean that we keep some questions and philosophies close to our heart. We see our work as creating open digital public goods that allow people to participate to solve complex problems. We believe that we need to be technology-enabled but are careful not to be technology-led because technology is not the solution in itself, but part of a complex process.
Authority cannot simply come from one side of the spectrum, so we need to set up systems so that people can continue to build their own agency. Instead of always trying to push a solution down the pipeline, how can we distribute the ability to solve? How do we design a digital infrastructure so that we can distribute agency and the ability to solve rather than pushing one solution? Often, when we think of scale, we think of cookie-cutter models, however the scale we need to think about is scaling up diversity, because most problems are best solved in their context. So we need to allow contextual solutions to emerge, and think of scale in terms of diversity at scale. That is what our tech platforms try to enable. We also want to allow data to come out as an exhaust wherever actions are happening, so that this data is useful at all levels rather than just at the top. Observability, searchability, and discoverability must be spread through the entire network of the platform.
These are some of the design principles that inform the way we are working. With the EkStep Foundation, our goal is to enable 200 million children to have increased access to learning opportunities within five years. We are close to the end of that deadline and we think we will have met our goals, thanks to the platform that we helped the government to design, called DIKSHA. Through this, we have reached millions of teachers and children around the country. EkStep has been an instantiation of societal platform thinking.
Designing A New Normal
The pandemic has given us an opportunity to design a new normal. We shouldn’t be working towards going back to our old ways, because the old normal was not very just or equitable for millions of Indians. In order to think through this, we should keep three keywords in mind – responsibility, responsiveness, and resilience. Until now, our Samaaj sector focused on responsibility. Over the past few decades, we have created a whole regime of rights and have put into place policies and laws that address issues of the underprivileged and vulnerable. A thriving civil society has emerged around these ideas, with a mission of justice for all. This has led to a focus on system responsiveness. We have all these laws, but how are they going to get implemented? Where is the gap and how effective is the system? States and local governments have responded, but there is still a gap that remains because of the revolution of rising expectations. Consequently, new civil society institutions and funding organisations have emerged to increase the responsiveness of the system.
Finally, as issues like climate change came to the fore, people realised that it’s not just one kind of responsiveness that is going to work. We need to design for resilience and if change is the only constant, then we need the skills to adapt quickly and innovate through the change. Now the debate is centred around how to build resilience. I’m a strong believer in community resilience. In the context of this journey from responsibility and responsiveness to resilience, what is our responsibility post-COVID? For example, are we now going to think of societal responsibility as universal basic income, because partial solutions like NREGA will no longer suffice? We have to start to think differently because problems are growing exponentially and we can’t have linear responses. Our mindsets have to become more flexible and urgent. Things are being set in motion now, ripples that will have far-reaching consequences. We know that the first 1000 days of a child’s life are so important. If that is getting neglected because of the pandemic, that child loses two years that we can’t get back. So there are numerous things at stake, and if we don’t stem the tide now, these ripples can turn into tsunamis.
We are lucky enough to have the world’s best digital infrastructure and I’m both proud and humbled to say that Nandan has been a part of this. Earlier I used to argue with him about privacy and surveillance, but now I realise the advantage. While America is still trying to put cheques in the mail, we have been able to carry out hundreds of millions of cash transfers in the last two months to help vulnerable people, thanks to our digital infrastructure. This kind of infrastructure allows us to build some forms of resilience. We need to begin to make it pivot towards creating this resilience, because this is not the last crisis that we are going to face. Climate change is already upon us, who knows what other catastrophes are waiting. We must think about how we can enable the social sector and the state sector to build more resilience.
There has been a lot of pressure on civil society institutions over the last few years. There is much more government regulation, which is often unfair regulation. Many foreign funders have moved out and Indian philanthropists are not as generous as they need to be. So the social sector has been under stress. But during this pandemic, we have seen how they rose to the occasion. They have been the first responders because they reached the first mile. It’s been most gratifying to see how the Samaaj sector holds the trust of the community.
The first thing that philanthropic institutions must do now is to start again from a point of trust with civil society institutions. As of now, some of us have pledged that for the next few months, we will be much more flexible in the kind of reporting that needs to be done. We will give more choice to CSOs to deploy the funds. Being more trusting and allowing flexibility to CSOs is necessary because that’s what helps them build the resilience that they need. We need to create these networks of trust before the next crisis hits so that when it does happen, we can do a rapid response much more effectively. Within our portfolios, we need to look at our institutions and catalogue the assets that our CSO partners have. Some of them may be very good at one particular thing like finding people who need loans or matching livelihoods to geographies. Our job should be to help them to make that a horizontal across the portfolio so that everybody learns from each other. For example, as part of Co-Impact, Nandan and I are funding an organisation called ECHO. One of the things they do in India is guided mentoring. They have a rigorous process where every week nurses, doctors, ASHA workers, and whoever is responsible for certain healthcare activities, meet digitally and exchange notes in a very rigorous process. What they say and what we have learnt is that we need to move knowledge, not people. That’s a very important thing across all sectors. We can’t have millions of doctors going into every village, nor is it wise to move all the patients into a city hospital. It’s crucial to create that shareability and discoverability, and build these networks and nodes which allows other responses. This is why we need to have to start thinking about digital platforms.
Opportunities For Change
With all the changes that the pandemic has brought on, perhaps it’s time for us to reimagine the idea of livelihoods. Migrants have suddenly recalibrated their sense of home and what they need. This gives us a chance to reassess the rural-urban question and think of more regenerative, sustainable livelihoods in the rural economy. We need to be doing more and innovating more, in order to support entrepreneurship there. We are going to see a sea change in the way cities are going to be run, so it’s a new opportunity. We are also going to see the world moving to the digital space in ways that we could not have imagined in December. Already we are seeing massive increases in digital transactions of all kinds. What we need to focus on is ensuring that this is done in an inclusive way – this is going to be India’s digital challenge. How do you not further the digital divide?
We know what we need to do in order to address many issues of inequity, but we seem to be in “the big stuck” as Lant Pritchett calls it. It’s a flailing state, so anything we can do to build state capacity is going to give us the biggest bang for our buck. We need to think about investing in advocacy institutions and trying to be part of the solution rather than simply complaining about the problems. In addition to this, we must invest in commissioning research to find the gaps. There are intermediate organisations like Reap Benefit, Sattva, etc. that are able to connect with citizens, which builds strong feedback loops. We should use data, commission research, and meet these bridging organisations who have the reach to get the feedback loops and know where the gaps are.
In the 45 days that Bangalore has been on lockdown, we have seen our lakes getting cleaner and the Vrishabawathi river flowing clear again. The amount of sewage has not changed in the city, so that means that it’s the industrial effluents that have been making the city’s river frothing and black. This moment allows us to at least imagine living in a European cities with a clean river flowing through it. Just having that vision is something that we could not dream of for decades. So now the onus is on the Samaaj to hold the Sarkaar and our institutions accountable. Otherwise, in the name of restarting livelihoods and the economy, we will be throwing away all our environmental norms and asking for the next crisis to hit us sooner than it otherwise would.
Now is the time to support institutions that are willing to be watchdogs and demand to know why there is so much effluent going in our water bodies. There are laws, institutions, governments, and governance structures who must be held accountable. The idea is not simply to blame anyone, but think about what can be done to help the polluters mitigate that pollution. All of us have to hold people’s feet to the fire now, if we want better, cleaner air, water, and surroundings.
I had written an article called “The End Of Secession” a few years ago, in which I pointed out that air pollution has finally taught us that the elite can no longer secede. What we’re seeing now, between air pollution, the pandemic, and climate change, is that we may be sitting in our air-conditioned rooms but we can’t escape reality. The only way is to really understand that we are all in this together and we can get out of it together. In a way, it’s helpful to go through this process of fear, especially adaptive fear. Fear is a useful tool, but the minute our fear turns into negative rather than adaptive, we’ll just give into the panic. Over the last few days, two things have centred me – “Karmanye Vadhikaraste” and “Vaishnava Janate.” If we think about this, we get some capacity to remain centered in the eye of the storm instead of getting blown away. It’s an opportunity for all of us to really dwell on the power of intent, and seriously focus with joyful responsibility on the grammar of that intent because intent alone is not enough.
This is an edited version of a speech delivered by Rohini Nilekani to a closed door gathering of Asian philanthropists.
Most of us in this room are on a journey of discovery as philanthropists. We recognize that we have been lucky, we are fortunate to have wealth way beyond our needs. We want to use that wealth not just to satisfy our own whims but also to act as trustees of that wealth for the public good.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, as Lao Tse Tung famously said. For me, that step can be described as a restlessness. Since I was very young, I wanted to help create positive change. I was unhappy with the state of society in my country, India, where there was so much injustice and inequity, where there was so much poverty and lack of opportunity. I did not want to live in a society like that. I wanted to live in a better society, where there was more hope and more justice. I did not know then that I would find my way to extreme wealth and unprecedented opportunity to be part of the change I was seeking. But I did know that I would have to do something with my life that reflected my desire for the good society, or samaaj, as we call it.
All of us have influencers that shape our thinking and our action. In my case, one of the earliest influences that was the oft repeated story of my paternal grandfather, Babasaheb Soman, who showed exemplary commitment to the larger public interest all his life, first as a lawyer who encouraged out of court settlements without a fee, then as a follower of Gandhiji during the freedom movement.
Later as a journalist, I was able to meet thinkers, policy makers and report on various issues of society for the media organizations I worked at. That too helped me understand how ordinary people deal with all the challenges they face. I call the FIRST MILE, and I try even today to keep my ear to the ground.
My husband co-founded a software company in 1981, and I was lucky enough to be able to invest in it, as my husband did not have much money then! This small amount of Rs 10,000 or 1000 yuan that i put into Infosys from my savings later turned me into a wealthy woman. I must admit that it took me years to adjust to my wealth. In India, middle class people, like I was, look at wealth with great suspicion! It took me a while to figure out that in fact, I could use this wealth for precisely the kind of activism I wanted to engage in, to be part of the better society I yearned for. So my husband became an accidental entrepreneur and I became an accidental philanthropist.
Once I had internalized that, I moved quickly. I co-founded two organizations in the early 2000’s. The first was Arghyam, to help me learn to do philanthropy better. By 2005, after many experiments, we decided to focus on water, and for the past 14 years, we have been supporting good organizations all over India to improve people’s access to sustainable water. Our work has had significant policy impact, and we have worked closely with state governments and the Union government as well. In our latest avatar, we are attempting a shift from incremental to exponential by helping design a shared infrastructure for the water sector in india, especially for capacity building and data management. It is scary, it is risky, it is outside our comfort zone as an organization, but it fulfills the true role of philanthropic capital – which is to underwrite risk and innovation. So even if we fail, it is still the right thing to have tried.
The second organization I co-founded and funded in 2004 was Pratham Books. I gave it the grand vision statement of “A book in every child’s hand”, so that we were born as a scale organization, determined to be not just a not for profit publisher, but to disrupt the whole ecosystem of children’s publishing in India, which was hardly serving the needs of 250 million children. For us, it was a societal mission to democratize the joy of reading, which was the main anchor of my childhood.We started publishing in multiple Indian languages, created new, local, appropriate content, found new ways of distribution, and encouraged many new writers, editors and translators. The real breakthrough we had was to open source our content under the Creative Commons license. Since we wanted more children to access good books, and we did not have to worry about profitability, this was a perfect way to really open up the space. Our books were online, they were free to download, to read, to print, even to sell. By the time I left Pratham Books in 2014, we had already reached millions of children.
But a good founder must know when to step down. My succession plan at Pratham Books has worked better than I dreamed of. The new team has take the open platform idea even further as Story Weaver. Now it is a global platform with content in up to 200 languages, reaching millions of children around the world . There are even 250 stories in Mandarin if you want to look them up.
Even while I was putting my time into my own institutions, I was very aware that I do not have all the ideas and all the solutions. That philanthropists must not fall into the trap of doing things inside their own fence.
So, From the beginning, I also have supported ideas, individuals and institutions that display integrity and commitment to some sectors in which I have a long term interest – education, the environment, the arts, justice, good governance, active citizenship, media and gender equity- especially working with young men and boys.
This has allowed me to build a portfolio in these sectors, supporting dozens of entities around the country. I have always tried to begin from a position of trust with these organizations. It is very import that donors do not become dictators, and that they do not burden organizations with undue requests on outcome reporting that take away too much time and resources from the primary agenda of the team. This attitude has really helped me find the most interesting and innovative people to work with. I am proud of the flourishing civil society sector in India, where a breed of young and new organizations is innovating rapidly to solve emerging societal problems.
In many of these institutions I have been the first funder, taking a bet on the social entrepreneur. Only rarely have they failed to deliver. Soon, they begin to attract other funding, and though it is so hard to stay on the path of social action, with so many challenges, most of these organizations are now dreaming of scaling up. I am willing to support them at this stage of scaling up as well, which requires investing in instruction building and core capacity, where it is unfortunately hard to find other funders.
Both Nandan and I invest heavily in supporting institutions committed to long term change at scale. Some are think tanks that will have policy impact, others are building professional capacity in critical areas such as urban design, climate action, higher education etc. Supporting societal institutions is critical in a country where both markets and the state cannot solve complex societal issues on their own or even together.
In fact, the underlying philosophy between all that I do in my work is that good civic institutions, moral leadership and social innovations are the foundation of a successful society. In the continuum of samaaj (society) bazaar (markets) and sarkaar (state ), my work is firmly in the samaaj (society) sector. I believe that active citizens of the samaaj can make sure that power is held to account, that the markets and the state can be held responsible for the larger public interest. Of course, samaaj needs good institutions of both state and market to work alongside with, and we have always tried to build partnerships across sectors.
This is what has led us to what we call Societal Platform Thinking, which we have deployed at an organization Nandan and I confounded four year ago, called Ekstep, to bring learning opportunities to 200 million children. It is the first time that I have worked directly with my husband, and I am happy to report that the marriage is still surviving despite us having very different approaches and experiences in philanthropy!
Through Ekstep we have built a technology infrastructure for learning, which has been adopted by the Indian government to create a National Teacher Platform called Diksha, on which tens of thousands of teachers and millions of children will be able to learn and share.
As I come to an end of my talk, let me share some principles of Societal Platform Thinking, which incorporate all the lessons Nandan and I and the teams have learnt over three decades of our work. It is a values framework that has evolved over time.
Societal Platform Thinking is a way of looking at complex societal challenges. Systems change can only be addressed if samaaj, bazaar and sarkaar, state society and markets are able to work together with reduced friction to collaborate and co-create
The team has developed some founding guidelines for such action.
1. For many participants to work together, we need a platform, connecting many nodes. This should be a UNIFIED BUT NOT UNIFORM structure, so that situational diversity can be harnessed for designing appropriate responses. Context matters , and local actors know best what solutions can be developed in their particular situation. The platform must allow for that local knowledge to be applied, to ENABLE DIVERSITY AT SCALE.
2. Every change begins with something who feels the need for the change. We call these leaders system builders. Those who can put our bold visions that excite everyone to participate. A system builder must invest to CO-CREATE A TECHNOLOGY BACKBONE FOR A SHARED INFRASTRUCTURE for all stakeholders. However, the mission should not be technology led. It must be technology enabled. The goal of the tech infrastructure is to engage people seamlessly as possible. This technology infrastructure must be developed as Open, accessible PUBLIC DIGITAL GOODS, so that samaaj bazaar and sarkaar can build on top of it.
3. In such a scenario, there is no point trying to create ONE solution, no matter how great or effective. It is better and more sustainable, to DISTRIBUTE THE ABILITY TO SOLVE.
4. If the ability to solve can be distributed, you can find ideas from anywhere, solution making becomes discoverable, and lessons can be quickly shared. IT ALSO HELPS RESTORE AGENCY TO PEOPLE TO INNOVATE. Then they become part of the solution instead of remaining part of the problem. And the whole system become flexible, and remains open to EVOLVABILITY, one step at a time.
5. Often, philanthropists and civic entrepreneurs try out small pilots and then try to replicate them. Often, pilots succeed and scale up fails. That’s why it is important to design for scale in the beginning, and realize that there is a difference between scaling up what works and figuring out WHAT WORKS AT SCALE. Some of the points above allow you to design for population level systems change.
Today, some of these frameworks are getting embedded in a few areas of global philanthropic collaborations, of which I mention just one- Co- Impact, in which about 10 international entities have invested, including Nandan and myself, to seriously scale up impact in various societal missions.
At the end of all that, and all those big words I used, however, I want to say just this.
We are all trying to make a better world. Nothing is more humbling in one’s life than when we come to the realization , which all of us come to very quickly in this journey, that social change is the hardest thing we have ever attempted. We have all been successful in our businesses or our professions – we can even pat ourselves on the backs for it.
But making lasting change for the good is incredibly difficult. It requires us to cultivate humility, patience, and hope every single day.
So more than ever, let us dedicate ourselves to connecting our pockets to our heads and especially our hearts. Let us deploy our philanthropy, to build on the human spirit while always seeking what magnifies and elevates our own spirit. Let us stay curious, connected and committed.
Whenever I feel a little low, I remember Lao Tzu, whom i quote again.
“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”
Namaste and Thank you. Xie-Xie.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s closing keynote address delivered to the 2019 class of the Strategic Non-Profit Management – India offered developed in conjunction with the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative and offered in association with the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy at Ashoka University.
I think we are at a fairly critical time. People often refer to the social sector as the third sector, but I would argue that it actually has to be the first sector. In the continuum of Samaaj (society), Bazaar (the marketplace), and Sarkaar (the state), Samaaj must come first. Bazaar and Sarkaar were created to serve Samaaj. Samaaj includes all of us, and it created the Bazaar to serve its economic interests, and the Sarkaar to serve equality to all people, on a large scale.
But what has happened over the centuries, especially the last century, is that the state and the market have acquired tremendous power. Technological advancement has enabled the accumulation of that power in ways completely unimaginable even a few years ago. It is crucial that we understand the implications of the accumulation of power by the state and markets. In our hearts, we are citizens first. We are not consumers first, though sometimes a couple of companies would like us to forget that nowadays. And we are not subjects first, though a few governments might like us to forget that too. We are citizens first, we are human society members first, and we create institutions of social organization that are supposed to increase the well-being of Samaaj, but also hold the Bazaar and Sarkaar accountable.
Balancing the Scales
Both Bazaar and Sarkaar have grown extremely successful at driving scale, especially over the last few years. The market will always chase profits, acquire more customers, and accumulate power. Similarly, when the state achieves scale, it accumulates a lot of power for its continuing legitimacy. Both these forms of accumulation of power can create tremendous public good. Markets improve our lives in amazing ways every single day. The state enables the distribution of public services in a way that a sole individual could not possibly achieve.
So, what I’m talking about is more of a checks and balances mechanism that we need in the social sector, to hold these powers accountable to society. I think today, civil society has an especially critical role in holding the state to increase equity, along with efficiency, and holding the markets to reduce negative externalities to society. And it’s a very interesting time to do this because both the state and the market have also recognised that they cannot do anything on their own. Human problems are so interconnected today, especially driven by things like climate change, that the state and the market are quite open to the intervention of civil society in many areas.
While at the same time, there are other global threats as well. The three freedoms of democracy – the right to speak freely, the right to associate freely, and the right to practice one’s own beliefs, come with duties which we do not talk about enough. People must have the right to speak freely, but without deliberately hurting others; the right to form associations without turning into mobs; and the right to practice one’s beliefs, without preventing others from practicing theirs. So there are duties and rights, but these freedoms are increasingly coming under various kinds of shadows.
Never has it been more important for all of us in the social sector to play that balancing role. While the state and markets have been remarkably successful at achieving scale, it always remains a question whether the social sector can do that. I wonder if being unable to scale is a failure of imagination on our part. Mahatma Gandhi did not just try to improve the lives of people in Porbandar District. He did not just try to improve the lot of all of the citizens of India. He was trying to transform humanity at its core. His imagination was that big and nothing would come in the way. The trade-offs were not going to be that we would get independence by sacrificing our humanity. That was the scale of the imagination of his work.
There are so many other examples. Take someone like Vinoba Bhave. He was not trying to rescue land from just one district. He was talking about the redistribution of land, a very primary source of inequity in this country, across the nation. Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti was not only about one class or one identity group replacing the other. It was an imagination at a much loftier level. And that’s how they achieved scale, because the scale of their imaginations and their intent was powerful and very clear in their minds. Have we, perhaps, in the first sector lost a bit of that zeal for imagination? Sometimes I wonder about that. We belong to the tribe of Gandhiji, Vinoba Bhave, and Jayaprakash Narayan, and we need to look to the state and markets to understand how we can achieve scale in this sector as well.
The Need for Societal Platform Thinking
The motivation for scale is different in all three sectors. In the social sector, our goal is to improve human dignity, to create better access to goods and services, to restore agency, to increase creativity, and much more. Essentially, it is to give Izzat, Insaaf, and Imandari (respect, justice, and truth) to people. That is our real job, no matter which sector you work in. So when we want to scale, can we think of scale the same way that the Sarkaar or Bazaar does? I don’t think so.
Over the last 30 years, Nandan and I have been working in very different fields. Nandan has been a successful entrepreneur with Infosys, while doing philanthropic work. I have been working within the social sector for the last two and a half decades, helping individuals, institutions, and ideas spread and grow. Through our work, the goal was to create more public goods in the public sphere, but we have also failed a lot in our work in the social sector. I’ve learnt that it’s far easier to become a unicorn in the market or to become a successful state, than it is to create real, lasting social change. I meet many billionaire philanthropists around the world and they express this very humbly after first thinking “If I can create a great business, why can’t I create a great social sector organization?” But when they actually try it, they find just how hard it is to create scale in the social sector. And that’s because we have to understand why scale is very different in this sector.
Since 2015, Nandan and I have been working together on EkStep, with the goal that we will reach the 200 million children in this country with increased access to learning opportunities. What keeps us together is that we have different but hopefully complementary skills and we have brought those skills together with the pursuit of this goal. We have learned a lot from each other and so we have developed something called Societal Platform Thinking. We have to be careful when we are trying to solve complex, interdependent societal problems. Our methods have to be based on certain morally undeniable principles and philosophies. We have arrived at five of these basic principles, to help us and others get started.
The first thing we have learned is that a single solution will not work, no matter how great it is. If our aim is to solve the problem at the root cause, and scale, we have to design to distribute the ability to solve. We need to trust people and their ability to be part of the solution implicitly. Everyone can learn, everyone can solve, and everyone can be part of the solution. It is a question of design: where people need to see clearly, and where they need to be trusted to get involved in coming up with solutions. So, we have to also distribute the ability to see to solve, and we’ve come up with more detailed architecture about how to do that. That was the first big thing.
A second thing that we have learnt over time is that resources like talent, people, and money are hard to come by. When trying to scale, in terms of public good, a lot is hard to come by. So, we began to think through this, and we found that if you unpack complex social problems, you often find a core that is common. When you look at the common core, you realize that there are ways to make those scarce resources plentiful. Because sometimes there is abundance under your nose, it just exists in different forms. For example, if we think about education, it is very difficult to find professional, competent teachers. It’s very hard to train great teachers. But if we look at the system, there are parents, and teachers in abundance. So, that’s a simple example of how you can find abundance and make scarce resource un-scarce. We need to keep this in mind when we design for scale.
The third learning that is very dear to my heart, is that if we want to scale in a country like India, you need to address the diversity of context. Most of the problems that require scale are contextual. The solution that might work in one place may not work 100 kilometers down the road or it needs a little extra spices to be added into the mix to really work well – whether it’s food or social solutions. There is a lot of diversity, and pushing something will not work. So how do you design to scale up diversity? How will your solutions and your framing work to reflect diversity at scale? For that, in your design, you have to create a unified but not uniform intervention, design, infrastructure, and framework. Unified because we all have to achieve the same goal.
And for that, of course, you need good feedback. You need a digital tech backbone to distribute the ability to solve because you need multidirectional feedback loops. You need data coming in, not just being sucked up at one end, but moving around all the streams so that people can use the data well, in whatever form and when they need it. So you do need technology. But we have learnt that you have to be technology-enabled. If you are technology-led, you tend to make a lot of mistakes about outcome-thinking, because technology-led solutions can give you a false sense of success. You can just rack up the numbers, rack up some data points, but you may not actually get the social outcome that you want. This is important to keep in mind, because people today can get carried away thinking that technology is the solution.
These are some of the building blocks we are using at EkStep to design and reach those 200 million people. Because of this kind of thinking, we are working with the state, civil society, and the markets to move the needle to reach those kids. And so, in the social sector, when we think of scale, not everybody needs to do 200 million, right? Obviously we can’t, if all of us are trying to chase billion and two billion numbers, it will be crazy. We need many people to be doing small things well, as well. We need social innovation labs that can take some of these ideas, because failure is very important.
Taking Risks and Embracing Failure
We all fail, but what is important is that we do not grow afraid of failure. I think a lot about Gandhiji, and how one of the reasons he went to South Africa was because he had failed as a lawyer. Imagine, that failure launched a transformational epoch for humanity. So we will all fail, but it’s how we deal with failure that’s going to be important. And so many of these social innovation labs allow for the pull and push of failing, getting up, failing again, and succeeding. It’s not that every organization needs to scale, but some of our ideas need to scale.
In this sector, it is very hard for us to acknowledge failure. Philanthropists are extremely risk-averse. Usually philanthropists are very successful in business, and they have taken huge risks to get there. But when they move to the social sector, they forget how to take risks. Since they are now dealing with people’s lives and futures and common public goods, they want every venture to succeed. Businesses are allowed to fail. In fact, failure in Silicon Valley is celebrated. But in the social sector, if you fail, you might adversely affect a thousand people’s lives because of your mistake. As social sector organizations, it is very hard to tell your donors that you have failed, while needing more money from them. It’s very hard to do that. So then everybody stumbles by trying to prove just how successful they are.
It is time that we create spaces and platforms where donors, foundations, and members of civil society organizations come together and destigmatize this notion of failure. The question we should now ask is, how do we deal with failure so that we can keep innovating? When we think about scale, failure is inevitable and necessary because without it there is no innovation, and without innovation, there is no solution for scale. The fear of failure may also lead to fear of scaling, and I think we are stuck somewhere within that fear. And there is not enough celebration of the failure that leads to other successes, like Gandhi’s first failure as a lawyer. We need to strive for platforms where donors and civil society organizations can meet in a safe space to talk about these problems.
Another thing I want to touch upon is how to think about scale in this digital age. Although we live in a digital age, civil society in India has a lot of catching up to do. Some of my civil society friends are downright technophobic, and they assume all technology is bad. This is a huge challenge for us as a country of people who are not digital natives but need to advance a younger population who are. We cannot afford to stay the way we are, we cannot stay outside the gates, because the accumulation of power is also happening digitally. Unless we understand how to work efficiently in a digital age, and through digital means, we will not have the internal resources and external tool kits to hold sarkaar and bazaar accountable. So, kicking and screaming, the Indian civil sector needs to come into the digital age, which means the donor community needs to support this as well.
At the heart of it all, we still want to restore dignity and agency to people. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Look to the stars, but keep your feet on the ground”, and I think that is what we should keep in mind when we think about scaling our work, especially in the philanthropy sector.
This is an edited version of a talk Rohini Nilekani gave at the offices of the eGovernments Foundation on how samaaj impacts the way in which sarkaar and bazaar work, and the role of samaaj in eGov’s mission.
The Continuum of Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar
Since the past 25 years, I’ve been deeply involved in the civil society sector of India, which is very thriving and diverse. From listening to people, especially at the grassroots level, reading a lot, talking to people, and observing what’s happening around us from the lens of Indian society, I have tried to create a certain philosophy for myself through which I can do my work and see the world.
So, the theory is fairly simple – that there is a continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar. But we must understand that Samaaj is the foundation, Samaaj is the pillar, Samaaj is the first sector, not the third sector, as people sometimes call it. And over centuries, Sarkaar and Bazaar developed in the service of the Samaaj. The Bazaar and Sarkaar evolved as responses to the needs of diverse societies.
We are citizens first, not consumers or subjects of states and kingdoms. The Bazaar and the Sarkaar are set up and are expected to be accountable to the larger needs of Samaaj. So this is the starting point of all my philanthropic work which embeds itself in Samaaj and actors of Samaaj. eGovernments Foundation (eGov) is a Samaaj actor that is working with the Sarkaar and the Bazaar.
Over time, this dynamic between Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar obviously keeps evolving and shifting, and there have been many tugs. At the heart of everything is always power and power structures. So depending on how power structures are playing out, the fluidity, roles, responsibilities, and strength of these three sectors can keep changing. For example, my lessons from the last century is that both Bazaar and Sarkaar became very powerful and extremely oppressive in many parts of the world. With examples like Mao and Stalin, we have seen how the state began to get very powerful and took over people’s lives, oppressing the Samaaj they should be serving. Post-World War II, as reconstruction was taking place all over the world, capitalism began to advance and make substantial inroads, to the point of even dismantling the Soviet Empire. The markets began to gain an increasing amount of power, which we can see even today. Back then, they called it the military-industrial complex, but the fact is that the market had acquired a lot of power even on the consumer side, affecting the Samaaj. Today we know what is being discussed – how a clutch of transnational corporations, tech companies who represent the market, have pretty much decided how we should think.
An Age of Extremes
The pendulum has swung too far that in many cases during the last century, we have observed the market and the state colluding. When that happens, Samaaj must remain happy with crumbs. So this is really dangerous for Samaaj. And remember, Samaaj is not one homogenous unit. By Samaaj, I mean all the identities. Social identities that we hold, the human identities that we hold, the groupings that we hold, the institutions of society that exist – that’s what I mean by Samaaj.
But today, we are finding that individuals in the Samaaj sector are really subject to enormous forces of the state and the Bazaar. In 25 years, with the Internet and the mobile phone revolution, we saw individual liberties being stretched so far as well. Anybody can do anything they want from anywhere, at any time, and that includes the ability to spew hate and encourage violence, without any accountability. So from Samaaj side there are issues as well.
On the Samaaj side, we have begun to see a response to this kind of accumulation of power, which strangely enough gave individual liberty one last run in these last 25 years. I feel that we are in the middle of a huge societal correction, where we will see some new societal norms being formed around this notion of individual liberty, market power, and state authoritarianism in a digital age. I don’t know where this will lead, but I can see the corrections happening, they look like upheavals right now. Recent advances in technology have led to the fear of the capture of our days, and our hearts, and our minds by the power of the Bazaar through technology and the surveillance state.
Now, while all of this is going on, a lot of other things are happening that are very positive as well. I really don’t believe in black and whites unless I’m fighting with my husband, in which case I always do. But otherwise, a lot of very interesting things are happening in the Samaaj sector in response to this accumulation of power. Because when power accumulates, there’s always a responsive force that tries to pull it back and maintain a dynamic balance. And so you’re seeing the emergence of many civil society actors around the globe who are responding to this accumulation of power by the state and the market. And that is the interesting space in which I work.
Seeing Like a State
This brings me to the reason why this understanding is so crucial when thinking about organizations like eGovernments. I think eGov has done a fantastic job of working on the supply side for urban areas, which was so broken and almost non-existent before. The pioneering teams here did a successful job of coming from good intentions, and were able to gain the trust of the state at all its levels.
eGov was able to understand the political economy and work with the state’s institutions, bureaucrats, administrators, and officials to ensure more transparency, efficiency and accountability. But this was done from inside, behind the walls of the state. In James Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State, he talks about how the state needs to look after equity, since the market is naturally interested in profit. The main responsibility for maintaining equity on behalf of the Samaaj, falls to the state. However, while the state is mandated with the idea of equity, it often is more comfortable with efficiency. This is because efficiency is easy to measure, it is easy to design for, and it is a placeholder for equity. You feel like you’re moving somewhere good when you try to put efficient systems in place. So that’s what James Scott calls “seeing like a state.”
Here, the state looks to organize citizens and issues in a way that is efficient and convenient to deal with. So, you try to create visibility for the state, and not so much for the people. Scott describes many experiments, including Le Corbusier’s work, the collectivization of the farms in China, and similar land experiments in the Soviet Union. He talks about the redesign of agricultural places like Tanzania and scientific forestry in Germany as examples of actions that were designed to create efficiency for the state, but did not always translate into public benefit. Even with the best of intentions, the way the state sees us is very different from how we would like the state to see us. So when eGov is sitting on this side, we have to always keep in mind the original intention of eGov is to genuinely make the state more accountable to the public good in the best way it can. So no matter what all we do from the supply side, if we don’t hold this as a principal value of the design of whatever supply-side work we do, you may end up with unintended consequences.
For example, the Grievance Redressal mechanism, even if it’s designed efficiently, unless it actually works on the ground for citizens, it cannot be called a success. It may function beautifully from the state’s point of view, and it makes bureaucrats work more efficiently, since they can process 1,000 complaints at a time instead of just one. So while it brings efficiency, it may not bring equity, it may not bring well-being on the other side. This is why the lens of the Samaaj is crucial for eGov because you have come very far with bringing supply-side to some point where it understands its accountability, it understands the need for transparency, it understands how technology can transform the needs of the citizen.
So, now we need to identify the actors within Samaaj who can work with eGov to make sure that all the amazing groundwork they’ve been doing for 16 years gets translated into real public good. This might mean going back to the drawing board, to rethink the designs of some systems that are already in place. From the citizen’s side, what are the challenges for them and how can we redesign to their benefit. When we want efficiency, standardizing systems is the most convenient thing to do, but in reality these need to serve a diverse group of people. And if we’re trying to look at Societal Platform Thinking, where the goal is to address complex societal problems, one of the principles of this is to hold on to and cater to that diversity. This applies to the context of eGov as well. Diversity is at the heart of resilience, so if we want to respect and understand the importance of diversity, especially in a place like India, then we have to be willing to design for that diversity at scale.
Diversity At Scale
When we think of designing for diversity at scale, the challenge is figuring out how to standardize change. Cookie cutter standard mechanisms will kill diversity, but if you believe in diversity as a fundamental principle of good design, then you have to design for diversity at scale. Within the Grievance Redressal mechanism, for instance, the diversity of language has been taken care of, but there may be other contextual, cultural things which we might need to redesign for, to make it effective for both state and citizen.
This is what we’ve tried to do at Pratham Books, where we decided it was time an Indian publisher was able to distribute and democratize the joy of reading. We kept this principle of diversity at scale, to unlock the potential of ordinary people who created a whole reading movement for the children of this country. There are 250 million children in India, the total population of many other countries. So how do we unlock the potential of parents, teachers, writers, illustrators, translators, editors, and storytellers, in order to make a movement of people? We did this by creating an open platform, a Creative Commons platform, which allowed everybody to participate, putting a book or a story in every child’s hand.
Since I have left, the next team has done even better. Sometimes you have to leave so that the next creativity can come into an institution. And the next platform, called StoryWeaver, allows anybody, anywhere in the world to write and publish a story, to translate somebody else’s story, and to illustrate somebody else’s story. Of course, the original has to be acknowledged. You can print other people’s stories, you can sell other people’s stories, because once you take greed off the table, once you take certain power ideas off the table, you can unleash public good and creativity. So, tens of millions of children around the world have benefited by unleashing the imaginations of writers, artists, mothers, fathers, and teachers. But all of this comes from the philosophy that the Samaaj must form the base, and the Sarkaar and Bazaar should not oppress them. Instead, they should unleash the potential of Samaaj.
When we think about organizations like eGov, the time has come to shift to the Samaaj side and look at eGov’s work from that lens. We need to strive to not see like a state, but see like a citizen.
This is an edited version of a talk Rohini Nilekani gave as part of a curated series called ‘Speaking of the City,’ curated by Bangalore’s World-Famous Semi-Deluxe Writing Program at Shoonya. Rohini talks about the city’s role in her work as a philanthropist and social innovator.
An Accidental Bangalorean
It’s been 35 years since our arrival in Bangalore in 1984. That’s three and a half decades, most of my life, and certainly more than I spent in Mumbai, the town I was born and grew up in. So clearly, I am a Bangalorean now, there’s no two ways about it. But we weren’t the first to arrive in Bangalore. Infosys and Wipro were the third wave, but it was the public sector institutions that came in the ‘50s and ‘60s that brought in new kinds of migrants to the city. After the public institutions like BEL, HMT, ITI, etc. entered the picture, they brought with them a lot of new people and a new culture to Bangalore. Then in the ‘70s there was a phase of government factories as well as the hardware industries that were being set up in the city. It was only in the ‘80s that the IT revolution truly began here. The government itself decided to set up Electronic City, and brought in a lot of companies, Infosys, very clearly a major one among them.
That’s what really began our journey to Bangalore. For Nandan, who was born there, it was like a homecoming, but it was new to me – and the Infosys story was new to everyone. The story of Infosys captured media attention in the early ‘90s, as India’s first software company to set up its own five-acre premises in Electronic City. In 1993, the IPO meant it would be a public company that was an emblem for this new narrative: middle class professionals who wanted to beat the dynastic capitalists at their own game. It reflected the idea that you could remain true to your values and could still ethically create real wealth and an institution to be proud of. For us, the story of Infosys has been running like a thread through our own lives.
When we first moved to Bangalore, we lived in a house in 4th T Block, Jayanagar, with D. Linge Gowda as our landlord. He had just run an unsuccessful election campaign as a Congress candidate against Ramakrishna Hegde of the Janata Party in a Kanakapura by-election, and had lost. It was great to be living close to the Gowdas. Every day, in the evenings, I would sit with his wife for half an hour on the steps going up to our little flat and she would help me learn Kannada. Thanks to her, I was able to get a bit of a grounding in Kannada and also learn about the local food, since she used to call me down to her kitchen to have “akki” roti and other snacks. With that foundation, I was confident enough to make full public speeches in Kannada, and I always hoped that my enthusiasm would make up for my poor grammar. I made many mistakes along the way, but I found the Kannada people were always supportive to somebody who was trying to learn the language.
We brought up our children here, in this beautiful city, and I outsourced a lot of parenting to Valley School. With its 100 acres for the children to play in and Krishnamurti’s philosophy of “no reward, no punishment,” the children were as happy going to school as they were to come home. We also did a lot of ‘bussing’ in those days, taking two, three buses to go to Malleshwaram, work, etc. My father-in-law, particularly, was a great supporter of anything to do with the public sector, and he taught me how to get around the city using public transport.
As a journalist I used to write for local papers, and one of the earliest things I remember was marching with an organisation called Vimochana, which worked with women’s rights. We used to have placards outside people’s houses where there had been dowry deaths. I went there partly as a participant activist and partly as a reporter and sometimes the police would come and crack down on the protests. I used to go to report stories at the BBMP office, and one of my biggest goof-ups was when the officer I had gone to meet was not in his seat, and I asked his colleagues, “Lanchake hogidaara?” I learnt much later that that was not the smartest thing to say. Then, of course, there were the same old haunts that everyone used to go to, like Koshy’s, Vidyarthi Bhavan, MTR, Lalbagh, Cubbon Park – we did all the things that most Bangloreans used to do then. I even went through a phase of wanting to do Urdu shayari, and I took lessons from a gentleman called Khalil Ur Rehman, who was a DIG Intelligence officer who gave up his evenings to teach me Urdu. These are the kinds of people you meet in this city, who are willing to give so much of themselves to help someone else.
Writing In The City
Since I moved to Bangalore in ‘84, I was writing for several papers, including India Today and local papers as well. In ‘87, Vir Sanghvi had taken over as Editor of the Sunday Magazine, so it was an easy decision to join the magazine. With Gauri Lankesh as my predecessor, I was in excellent company though I couldn’t stay there for too long. I was also writing scripts for documentaries, and doing a lot of children’s writing at the time, to keep myself busy. Then I wrote my first novel, ‘Still Born,’ which was definitely inspired by the city.
The story follows Poorva Pandit, a journalist who lived in Basavanagudi, but it was also about a Bangalore that was growing into new media, that was growing into buildings of glass and concrete; where Basavanagudi itself was changing. I’ve just recently learned that Basavanagudi is one of the oldest settlements of this new city we call Bangalore. It was set up in 1895 as a refuge for people who were escaping the plague. So the city was very much at the background of my novel, and in the story, Poorva actually uses technology to solve her problems.
One of the inspirations for that was Atul Chitnis, who was really the pioneer of the open source movement in Bangalore. So the characters of the city also found their way into the novel, including Dr. Sudarshan, who has been working for decades in the BR hills with the Soliga tribals there, where the story is also partly based. My second book, ‘Uncommon Ground’ was based on a television series I did, where I interviewed corporate and social leaders together. I got Anand Mahindra to speak to Medha Patkar; I got Aruna Roy to speak to Sunil Mittal and so on, as a series. I thought it needed to be documented into a book which was called by the same name, ‘Uncommon Ground.’
When I think about the possibility of a third book, my inspiration would have to come from the many city writers that I have been meeting over the last so many decades, including Vivek Shanbagh, Anita Nair, and so many others. Shashi Deshpande, with whom I have had the honour to interact and learn from, on how to have a deep commitment to writing. And I’m always grateful to have been able to get Girish Karnad’s blessings on things like Ratnam Books. It’s a great time to remember, that even if Girish is no more, his work will always continue to live with us and be in our hearts.
A Space For Philanthropy
My philanthropy would have been very different if I had lived anywhere else, because this is a city of reformers. I keep joking that there are more reformers per square inch in Bangalore than in any other place in the country. It’s like a landmine of reformers – you have to be very careful, you can trip over them anytime. The kind of passion, open-mindedness, and commitment that I see here has convinced me that there’s no city in India quite like Bangalore. So living here is a dream for someone who has suddenly accumulated far too much wealth and wants to give it away. There is a cornucopia of choices for Nandan and I in Bangalore, which I’m very grateful for, because over the years I’ve learnt a lot, there’s been time and space to experiment, and passionate individuals to work alongside.
Early on, I set up an organisation called Nagrik, after one of my very dear friends had been killed in a horrible accident. Kiran Mazumdar, Jagdish Raja, Muralidhar Rao, and many others came together with me, to start Nagrik for safer roads. But it was a bit of a disaster, with a steep learning curve for us. We didn’t have any clue how to do proper institution-building. But we spent a lot of time at the city’s 32,000 junctions, trying to streamline the movement around that. That experience taught me a lot about how to actually engage in public life, and helped me with the other institutions that I supported or started.
In 1999, I was lucky enough to be invited to join Akshara Foundation. Its goal was to get every single child in Bangalore in school and learning by 2003. Well, it’s 2019, and I think we did a pretty good job of mobilising the government and the citizens to make sure that all the public schools were doing better than they were before. We were also able to set up more than 1,000 preschool centres that we call “Balwadis” as part of the Pratham network. The Akshara Foundation really taught me about the city, in a way that all the buses and walks around Lalbagh could not. We set up preschool centres wherever there was a community need for one, including a lot of slum areas across the city, and worked with government schools to set up remedial education centres. These initiatives, however, needed citizen volunteers to run. We needed people who believed in the idea and were willing to volunteer their time, because they weren’t going to earn a fortune by joining us. We used to give a very minimal stipend. So for the princely sum of Rs. 500 or Rs. 750, and we tried to get volunteers.
Hundreds of people came forward to set up Balwadis in their own homes, bringing in 20-30 children from the neighbourhood and spending three to four hours trying to teach them. It soon became a movement, and I’m proud to say that for several years, we were able to sustain it. That’s when I got to see how the people at the margins of the city live, and how their courage, risk-taking ability, and absolute can-do attitude meant that they would do anything for their children’s future, and that education was going to be a very important part of it.
The kind of support that we got was astounding. I remember young Muslim women who came forward, in the hundreds, to become teachers and volunteers, setting up classes in their own home. Some of them would not have had been allowed to work outside of their homes, but this was seen as a safe space for them to go and engage in teaching young children. I’m so grateful the Akshara Foundation is still thriving and continuing their work across many states. Ashok Kamath who just became the Namma Bangalore Achiever was the Chairman and continues to do splendid work.
I also got the chance to set up Pratham Books as well because I was part of Pratham’s network all over India. We were creating many eager new learners. But they had nothing to read, except the textbooks that were sent home to them from school. It’s a tragedy that there were very few children’s books that were attractive, engaging and written in different languages for children to read. So we set up Pratham Books. I took on the responsibility to set it up in Bangalore, together with Ashok Kamath, who did most of the running of the institution. The goal was a book in every child’s hand, and in its 15-year journey, I’m proud to say, I was there for 10 years. Now Suzanne Singh continues to take it to newer heights, and we have reached tens of millions of children – not just in this city, but throughout the country. I think a mark of a good institution is when the founder can move on, and the institution can do better. And I must say, all the institutions I have left have done far better after my leaving them than when I was still there, so I must be a very good founder.
Arghyam came up first as my idea of experimenting with philanthropy, because we came into money suddenly when we participated in the American Depositary motif that we did at Infosys. I personally came into 100 crores. I didn’t need 100 crores for my own life, and we were doing reasonably well. So I decided to put it all into the foundation. But I didn’t know what to do with it, so I first decided to learn some philanthropy heavy-lifting. We saved many children’s lives by helping them get to a respirator in time, we set up yoga centres, and we did some air pollution monitoring.
But in April 2005 I realised that if one wants to be strategic and long term and solve a real problem in society, it would have to be water. So from then on, Arghyam focused on the issue of water in India. For the last 14 years we’ve been working all around the country with various organizations, and hopefully, I’ve made some impact in the water sector. Most of Arghyam’s work is in fact outside Bangalore, except for some peripheral work I’ve been able to do with our lake-saving communities. The last thing we set up ourselves was EkStep. Nandan and I began to work together for the first time in 2014, however we had very different approaches and I didn’t know if this partnership would last, but it’s been almost five years now, and we’ve been able to change the game, bringing learning opportunities to 200 million children, which is our goal for 2020.
But apart from these institutions that we were able to fund ourselves, we were also able to support marvellous people setting up their own institutions. Whether it was BIC, ATREE, or Takshashila; new think tanks and ideas like IIHS (Indian Institute for Human Settlements), each of these institutions was set up by fiery, committed, intelligent people who were able to build both teams and institutions, and Nandan and I have been really lucky to be able to support some of them.
On the arts and culture side, it was also exciting to find entrepreneurs like Arundhati Nag at Ranga Shankara. Bangalore needed to revive its cultural spaces, and she worked so hard at it, but one day she felt that she just couldn’t go on. So she called us we realised that she was almost there, she just needed this one infusion. The next morning, I went with a check of 50 lakhs, and within a few weeks Ranga Shankara was up and running. Today she has so much support, and they do 300+ plays every year. They have completely revived the cultural space of the city. So I feel very proud to be a small part of that. Similarly many other opportunities to enrich the community came to us like the Devnandan Ubhayaker Yuva Sangeet Utsav, a small festival that has provided a big space for young Hindustani musical talent to showcase itself. All these ventures need some philanthropic capital, and it’s good to see that Bangaloreans do come forward.
In fact, India is learning how to crowdfund, and Bangalore is a huge part of this movement. It’s not just the billionaires who can save this country. In fact, billionaire funding for social movements should be a very small part of anything that happens in the country. We just did a report on everyday giving, and Bangaloreans actually account for a huge chunk of India’s growing small-giving. That’s why I love being a part of the city, because the people here are highly engaged as citizens.
When we moved to Koramangala, I got to be part of the RWA, and that’s something that most people are frightened of because they have strict rules. If you park on the wrong side of the road, woe befall you. Somebody will come and move your car. But I’m very proud to see how democracy functions at this basic level. We call civil society the third sector, but I think that’s ludicrous. It is the first sector and it begins where we live, and how we engage with public issues there. So I consider myself very lucky to live in the third block, Koramangala, with all its feisty civic activism. It’s also taught me to question how we protect our commons. How do we prioritize whose needs to be prioritized? Our road is called “billionaires road” because Rajeev Chandrasekhar is on one side, and Pradeep Khar is on another side. But two lanes beyond me, there are people who don’t get as much water as we do, which leads me straight into 2014.
The 2014 election is very sharp in my mind, though the 2019 one is already blurred away. In the heat of that awful April, March, we were all campaigning. Nandan was on the Congress party ticket against the most invincible Ananth Kumar, and we already know how that movie ended. But it was really the most gruelling time I’ve had in the city, with a very rapid learning curve, because politics is the most difficult profession of them all. I don’t think any other profession in this world comes close. It is 24/7 and the kind of demands to come at you all the time are impossible to manage. My respect for politicians went up by 500% in those few months, even though I wouldn’t exactly want to emulate most of their practices.
We listened to people all day long, what they hoped for, what they wanted, what they expected. And we learned exactly what keeps this dysfunctional law, equilibrium politics in place – it is nothing but a system of patronage and brokerage, because nobody wants to solve it. It suits everybody at some level. But it has been allowed to continue like this for so long, which is partly why we have the city that we do.
Looking Forward
Sometimes I feel that this city used to be one city, but now it is many cities. In these 35 years, it has become many cities. From eight million people, it has become 13.5 million people. It’s a city I no longer know, because in some ways, our lives have also expanded with it. Though my political ideology was groomed in Mumbai, my political sensibilities were very much developed here – in this city of ideas and reformers, this city of curiosity, the diverse cosmopolitan city of many, many cultures.
But I also never expected, no matter how it grew and how dysfunctional it became, that it would ever be a city where Gauri Lankesh could be shot outside her own home, and where trolls could actually say good things about a man like Girish Karnad dying. No matter how much the city becomes unfamiliar, all of us have a lot of work to do to keep that original idea of the city alive. This is one of the oldest human settlements in India, constructed on the basis of diversity, of mutual respect, of a cultural exploration, of looking forward, not back. There’s miles to do, lots of work to continue doing as citizens of this utterly marvellous city to which I now belong.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s speech, “Gender Equity – Including Young Men and Boys” at the 12th Dr. Lalita Iyer Memorial Lecture at IIM, Ahmedabad on April 13, 2019 at IIM, Ahmedabad.
When Nandan and I became wealthy, the responsibility of that wealth sat heavy on our shoulders, but the duty to give it away became something that we realised was not only important, but joyful. Over my 25 years working in the non-profit sector, I’ve been active in issues around education, micro-finance, ecology, arts and culture, independent media, governance, and water equity. This has given me a window into the work of grassroots organizations around the country, working in especially hard geographies and social situations. Through Nandan, I’ve also had an inside seat to corporate culture, and thanks to the Aadhaar experience, a small peek into how the government functions. It is this Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar continuum that I was able to witness, that gives me a lot of deep perspective. It’s from that perspective that I want to tackle the subject of gender equity, especially relating to the young men and boys of this country.
Snapshots of Reality
There are a few images and interactions with young men and boys that have stayed in my mind. One was in Ramanagara, Karnataka, when I saw a young boy crying in a public space, and stopped to ask him what had happened. He was with his sister and he was crying because he had done very well in his 10th standard examination, wanted to study further but the same morning, his father had informed him that he had got him a job in the local STC and that he would have to join the government. There was no question of his studying further.
Another was when our car was stopped on a busy highway by a group of fairly young men wielding lathis. They were stopping traffic to protest against a local accident but their faces were flushed with excitement and a sense of raw power. The youngest among them could not have been more than 10 or 11 years old. The last was the scene of an employment queue, where dozens of young men were waiting, praying for jobs. These were jobs like security guards, sales and service agents, or others that would barely offer subsistence wages. From their eyes, I could see equal parts of hope and despair. These snapshots assemble like a gallery for me, portraying the reality faced by 200 million young men in this country, between the ages of 13 -25, who lack opportunity, employment, and dignity.
This is why I started working towards gender equity, specifically by working with young men and boys. In the past 40 years, India has made great strides to reduce the stark gender inequalities, in terms of legal rights, economic opportunities, personal empowerment, etc. We now have specific laws to protect women and help them to advance, and have created wonderful institutions like the powerful self-help groups that 70 million women are participating in, that enable them to have access to credit, various forms of state support, and more. Most young girls and young teenagers are in school, and most have access to health services. We have included, by quota, women in local government. India has the unique pride of having more than one million women serve as elected representatives, especially across local government. We have also made serious progress in terms of maternal child health.
However, we still have a long way to go. Our newspapers report atrocities almost daily, where women are being violated and abused in shocking ways. It makes me wonder whether we are missing something here. While we work towards empowering women, which is crucial, are we actually ignoring the other half of the problem? Perhaps we need to pay more attention to the 200 million young men in this country.
Expectations, Insecurities, and Violence
As a society we force so many ideas on men – they have to be strong, bread-winners, successful, protect and bring honour to their family, and uphold the rights of women. But millions of young men simply cannot live up to these expectations. We see this even on a global scale, with ILO calling the young men of today a scarred generation. Too many of them are under-educated, underemployed and in fact, unemployable because they lack the new skills valued by the current economy, while traditional livelihoods like farming have lost their appeal.
Their expectations from women, especially, no longer coincide with what liberated women want or need. With no outlets to express themselves and perhaps no examples of how to be sensitive towards women, it’s easier to be in a gang, eve teasing women on the street, than approach them earnestly. The gender skew in this country, with 20 million missing women from female foeticide, actively hampers the life of young men. Finally, we constantly re-enforce the cultural separation of spheres between men and women. On all fronts, young men find their aspirations rising dramatically, but cannot seem to be able to realize their dreams. In her book, “Dreamers,” Snigdha Poonam profiles some of these young people and their aspirations and frustrations, and we see that what’s more difficult for men is that they watch their sisters, wives, or girlfriends move ahead while they are left behind.
The current reality is that too many young men are afraid and extremely insecure. They feel like they have no control over their future, but are not able to cry or share their fears. They lack male role models or people to talk to. Even within their peer groups, they can only re-enforce the archetypal macho image and pretend that everything is fine. We know what happens when there are millions of young people who feel this way, in any nation or society. It means that these young and restless men can turn inwards or turn outwards possibly in violence. Michael Reichert, the author of “How To Raise A Boy,” says there are three types of male violence – violence against women, violence against other men, and violence against themselves, and these three are all deeply interwoven.
India is a country with 600 million, half its population, under the age of 25. There are 230 million young men between the ages of 18-30. Some surveys show that 50% of Indian males think it’s alright or excusable to beat a woman who is disobedient. That means 115 million young men are at risk of being subject to norms that dictate violence against women. Does this explain some of the new atrocities that we hear about, or tell us why we are seeing the rise of male vigilantism? Perhaps we can’t say this for sure, but I do know that if we want an equitable country, we need to pay more attention to these young men.
They deserve to be listened to and cared for, to be educated and empowered as human beings. They deserve to fulfil their own potential, not just to support their families but for themselves. Boys need opportunities to express themselves and realise their identities as human beings first, rather than just as husbands, fathers, or sons. Yet, we don’t seem to focus enough on this demographic, and gender equity will never fully be realised until we do. For example, our legal framework treats one gender differently than the other, and since laws are a tool that reflects power structures, this becomes a real barrier towards gender equity and promotes a limited norm of male identity. In the recently struck down section 497 of the IPC, adultery was criminalised only for men. The corollary was that it treated women as property and that men could file criminal complaints against other men.
While things are in the process of changing, I feel that not enough of us are agitated about these issues. Statistics show that men are incarcerated far more than women, and men under 30 more than older men. We need to be careful about over-criminalizing young people, because there is enough data to show that it makes for repeat offenders and vicious cycles set in. There is very little public policy directed at young males, and both the state and civil society lags behind on this. When I was trying to start a portfolio on philanthropy, I found almost no programs working at any scale with this cohort. In fact, I found only six or seven organizations that I have begun to support like Equal Community Foundation, Seguim, CORO, Swayan, and Pradan.
These are but tiny little specks in the ocean. When Equal Community Foundation went to West Bengal to look at expanding their work, they spoke to 100 organizations. None had any gender-specific programs for boys, though they had many for girls. The philanthropy community also needs to step up in this regard. Even the biggest European agencies are giving only 5% of their budgets to this issue, because even though people understand the problem, they don’t know what to do and where to invest. So there’s a huge gap here, and young men are the ones losing out on resources and opportunities to better themselves.
Working Towards True Equity Through Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar
I think we now need to ask ourselves this – as we continue to work for women’s empowerment, can we also creatively face this challenge of young men’s empowerment? Can we innovate safe, shared spaces so that boys can talk to each other without ridicule and fear? Can we imagine social structures where young men can organize around financial and other needs? Can we make time for boys to learn about arts, sports, painting, music, and encourage them to pursue things that help them grow as human beings? One of the major issues with young men who are unemployed is the amount of idle time they have. This can be easily manipulated by political parties or religious organisations to encourage identity-based groupings and vigilantism, which is not good for them or society at large. We know now that people are not born with pre-formed repertoires of aggressive behaviour. These behaviours must be learnt, and the problem begins with how we socialise boys right from the day they are born or perhaps even before that.
Therefore it is important for us to question this idea of masculinity, for the sake of men and women. When empowered women enter into disempowered situations, they face a real backlash, because their new freedoms are actively challenged. In those cases, they have two choices – either they can rebel and suffer the cost of that rebellion, or they can give in which means they are moving backwards again. So empowered women need empowered men. We need to ensure that men are happy, healthy, and supportive partners to women who are also healthy, educated, and free to pursue their dreams. This is not a zero sum game because we need to work with men and women simultaneously. Change like this happens slowly in society, but we have to start somewhere, and the most effective method would be a combination of efforts from the Samaaj, Bazaar and Sarkaar.
When it comes to Sarkaar, we need policy changes, public financing of affordable shelter, better transport, identity-based access to finance, better wages, skill training, and more relevant learn-ability education. We need better facilities for sports, music, and every other life-enhancing practice, and we need better laws in place. When it comes to Bazaar, in the workplace, factories, and offices, there needs to be much more mentoring and creation of spaces to discuss aggressive competition and its impact. We’re seeing the corporate world changing itself, with companies doing work to advance society as well as turn profits. This is important, because we’re talking about equity and sustainability, not just “Quarter Se Quarter Tak” kind of profits. So this is a new opportunity to draw young professionals, especially men, away from the competitive, aggressive, masculine mentality that has occupied the stage of global capitalism. Therefore the corporate sector has a really important role to play in reimagining and reinventing spaces for the young men that it employs.
The Samaaj sector, of course, has a big role as well. Young men need safe, shared platforms where they can explore sensitive questions about everything from their politics, their patriarchal identities, their sexuality, and whether they feel trapped in them. They need good role models and structured activities, some empathy and mentoring. They need to build up their self-esteem, and become less afraid and insecure. This change starts with small steps, with each and every one of us. We need to open up these conversations in our own homes, at the dinner table or when families spend time together. We need to talk and listen to our young boys to make sure they don’t feel so alone and alienated. We may fail at first, but we can open up our minds and hearts and the power of intent will show through.
This is a creative challenge for all of us, and it’s also an urgent one, to help these young people live their lives with dignity. I’ve met so many young men who want to get into the social sector or get into the corporate sector to change the way capitalism works, and I feel so fortunate to meet people with such strong ideals. This generation is one that is on the move. Tens of millions of these young boys are moving onwards and outwards from where they were born or where they were stuck, to try to make something more of themselves. But they need society’s help. Even if they’ve been brought up with certain traditional values, they are open to new norms, especially on gender issues, and like young people everywhere, they are experimenting. If we support them, we can make it happen sooner than we think, and the whole nation’s future depends on how we engage with them.
Forty years ago we couldn’t have even imagined the kind of freedom that today’s young women have in small towns across India. I believe we can uplift young men’s lives in the same way, and create a vision of a kinder society for all. Mahatma Gandhi said, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” Non-violence as a political tool is only beginning. A country of angry young men need not to be our destiny. We could not have foreseen what happened with the freedom of women, and I believe we will be surprised by what we can do if we focus on true gender equity as a matter of national urgency. So let’s commit to a more humane, kind, and prosperous society where all our young men and women can be the best that they can be.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s keynote talk on Embracing Risk: Solving our Societal Challenges at Dasra Philanthropy Week 2019 in Mumbai. Rohini talks about how we can take greater risks, both individually and collectively, how we can embrace failure as an opportunity, and how we can mitigate the downsides.
We’ve come a long way in the philanthropy sector in India. Apart from the older, well-known philanthropists, we are seeing the arrival of so many new and seriously committed philanthropists to the sector. But no matter which sector we are engaged in, as civil society institutions, corporate CSR agencies, or philanthropists, the problems seem to rush ahead faster than our approach. Despite our solutions, we don’t quite seem to get there in time. Even after decades of work in the education sector by so many civil society organisations, this year’s ASER report makes one feel as if we’ve failed our children who, even now, cannot do simple math in class five.
Collaboration Is Essential
It’s important for us to understand why we haven’t achieved as much as we would like to, though we have put in the work. I believe in the power of intent, so I think we are going to do better, but societal problems are very complex, and none of us — individually or as sectors like philanthropy, civil society, markets, or state — can achieve those things on our own. We know that. Real, far-reaching change requires the whole continuum of samaaj, bazaar, and sarkaar, i.e. civil society, markets, and the state, to work together to actually solve these complex societal issues. This is why collaborative action is absolutely essential, because different actors in these sectors offer different skill sets, and have different contexts from which to come at a problem.
Luckily, there is a lot more opportunity today to create these collaborative platforms, like Dasra, Co-Impact, and India Philanthropy Initiative, etc. To target an area like independent media, some of us have set up a collaborative giving platform called IPSMF. Another area for collaboration is climate change, for which The India Climate Collaborative has been set up with the help of the Tata trust, with the goal of driving climate change action among philanthropy and CSR communities. In other words, there’s tremendous opportunity right now to create models based on collaboration, which is essential. In our work, my husband Nandan and I, have begun to see how we can create a framework around collaboration, that we’re calling Societal Platform Thinking.
The Importance of Trust
But collaboration is easier to talk about than to actually carry out. There’s a lot of friction to collaborate, and maybe two reasons why we cannot achieve our intended outcomes is that we are not able to take enough risk, and that we are not able to really embrace risk. We don’t know how to trust, how to let go, how to get out of our comfort zones and do things that we know might fail. So embracing risk is a lot about failure and the ability to trust. When I say trust, I mean that if you are a philanthropist, you have to be able to trust your grantee partners, give them enough flexibility to change what they’re doing based on context, and not expect them to give you ridiculous amounts of reporting, just so you can feel like you’re doing all right as a philanthropist.
You have to be able to lead with trust, and in my 30 year journey in this space, I’ve found that the more I’m able to trust, the better I can lead. Of course, there are some caveats to whom you work with. You should be able to work with trustworthy partners, but once you start off with a relationship based on trust, magic happens. It’s the key thing if you want to achieve social outcomes. Embracing risk and allowing ourselves to trust really opens up our minds and creates space for us to act. We have to be prepared when we embrace risk, to embrace failure as well. Once you say, “I’m willing to fail,” it allows you to go where you have not gone before, with much more confidence.
For example, as our economy is growing, and as our government is able to do much more social spending, there’s a lot of attention being paid to how we can implement government programs better. Certainly, CSR has become even better at doing that over the last few years. There are many civil society organizations that have helped the government achieve its own mandate better at the implementation level. But there are so many areas of society that don’t get enough attention, where the government isn’t necessarily doing enough, and where we, as philanthropists and civil society organizations, need to do much more. Issues like mental health, disability work, access to justice, environmental concerns, are all areas that need our attention. If philanthropists and CSO organisations were to embrace risk and not fear failure, we could innovate solutions that could get us out of the usual rut of our societal problems.
We keep saying that the social sector doesn’t scale. However, if personal and corporate philanthropists were to say, “I’m going to go into slightly risky areas such as justice, and allow people to innovate, to fail a little perhaps, but then to understand why they fail in trying new things,” that might change the game entirely. I really believe that 10 years later, when we look at what’s happened during this new age of Indian philanthropy, we will be able to show something new, that perhaps had never been tried before. Sometimes I wonder if we are suffering from a lack of imagination. When Vinoba Bhave started Bhoodan and Mahatma Gandhi started the Salt Satyagraha, they were thinking at a universal human level of change. But now, when we talk about one district or even 10 districts at a time, perhaps it’s not enough. We need to go beyond just measuring things incrementally, and that means looking at a much larger scale.
How can we bring change at the population scale? There is a method to achieving that. Intent is not enough and the collaborative frameworks that we need to design for that scale is a crucial factor.
Lessons Learned
I don’t think we talk enough about failure in the sector. Failure can lead to a lot of interesting outcomes. Certainly, in 30 years, I have failed repeatedly in the work that I do. In an article I recently wrote, I was thinking about how Gandhi actually failed as a lawyer here. He just couldn’t get his practice together, and then he embraced risk and set off in a boat to South Africa. Look at what one failure led to — the transformation of humanity in some sense. So we should not be afraid to fail, but be immediately ready thereafter, to embrace risk and set out to sail to shores yet unseen.
In the last 30 years of working in the social sector, I feel like I’ve learned three concrete lessons. In 1992, when we started Nagrik for safer roads, for example, I think we didn’t understand the root cause of why our roads are unsafe. When you don’t go deep enough to analyze the problem you’re working on, you tend to come up with band-aid solutions, and the whole thing collapses under its own weight. The second lesson I understood when I worked with the Akshara Foundation, Pratham Books, Arghyam, and now EkStep, is that you need to clearly demarcate the role of samaaj, bazaar, and sarkaar and not confuse them. Allow the three sectors to do what they do best. But if you force bazaar to go below the line of profitability, if you expect sarkaar to do what citizens should be doing, or if you expect citizens to take on the ownership of what sarkaar should be doing, it tends to create confusion and not achieve the societal outcome you need.
The last thing I learned was that if you really want societal level transformation, you need to recognise that none of us have all the answers. But there are people who have answers in their own context. So the question becomes how we should distribute the ability to solve? A very key way to distribute the ability to solve, instead of pushing one solution down the pipe, is to open things up. We need to create platforms and allow public goods to be created from the work that we do. So for example, with Pratham Books, once we realized that we were to open up the creation, distribution, sales, translation work, i.e. once we created a Creative Commons platform where everybody could do what they do best, we were able to scale to tens of millions of children. So this is a very important lesson. When philanthropic capital is being used, that capital in the hands of government would otherwise be taxed. We owe it to the work that we do and to the ambitions that we have, to deliberately work to create open, digital public goods, so that other people can build and innovate on a platform that we help to support as philanthropists.
As we begin this new age of Indian philanthropy and re-dedicate ourselves, let us decide that we will commit to not just working incrementally, but in terms of societal transformation, and we will do that through collaboration, by embracing risk, and without the fear of failure.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s keynote talk on Samaaj and Bazaar: Congruence over Divergence at Dasra Philanthropy Week 2019 in Mumbai. We often set up Civil Society (Samaaj) and Markets (Bazaar) as opposing binaries. In this talk, Rohini proposes that they have more in common and more to gain, collectively, in collaborating to uphold the Rule of Law.
We’ve all come a long way in the philanthropy sector in India. Apart from the older, very well-known philanthropists, we are seeing the arrival of so many new and committed philanthropists to the sector getting engaged. And yet as we look around, we see that no matter which sector we are engaged in – as civil society institutions, corporate CSR agencies, or as philanthropists – the problem seems to rush ahead faster than our approach, our solution, and we don’t seem to quite get there.
Even today, after so many people and civil society organizations working in the area of education and most of the philanthropic capital having gone to the education sector, if you look at this year’s ASER report, it feels like we might have failed our children. Even now, so many of them cannot do division and multiplication in class five. Where are they going to land later, we know that.
So it’s very important for us to understand why we have not achieved as much as we would like to, though we have done so much. And I really believe in the power of intent. So I do think that we are going to do better, but societal problems are very complex and none of us individually or even as sectors (like philanthropists, civil society, markets, or the state) can achieve those things on our own.
It really requires the whole continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar – civil society, markets, and the state – to work together with reduced friction to actually solve complex societal issues. Which is why we come to collaboration, which is absolutely essential as we need to account for the role of different actors in these sectors, the varied skill sets, and the different context from which to come at a problem from multiple angles.
Luckily, there is a lot more opportunity today to be on collaborative platforms such as Dasra, Co-Impact, the India Philanthropy Initiative, and others. Some of us also got together to look at an area like independent media, and have set up a collaborative giving platform called IPSFM [the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation]. A very new and exciting area that we’re looking at in collaboration is climate change. Led by the Tata Trust, some of us have founded The India Climate Collaborative. It has fairly ambitious goals to spur the ecosystem around working on climate change. So there’s a tremendous opportunity right now to think of collaboration.
In our work over the last four years, my husband Nandan and I have begun to see how we can create a framework around collaboration. We are calling it Societal Platform Thinking. But I acknowledge that collaboration is easier to talk about than to actually do. There’s a lot of friction to collaborate, and maybe two reasons that we cannot achieve the outcomes that would come only through collaboration is that we are not able to really embrace risk and that we don’t know perhaps how to trust, how to let go, how to get out of our comfort zones and do things that we know might fail. So, embracing risk is a lot about failure and the ability to trust. When I say trust, it means that if you are a philanthropist, you have to be able to trust your grantee partners. That means you give them enough flexibility to change what they’re doing based on context and not asking them to give ridiculous amounts of reporting, just so that you feel you are doing all right as a philanthropist.
You have to be able to lead with trust. Through my 30 year journey in this space, I’ve found that once you start off with a relationship of trust, magic happens. Of course, there are some caveats to whom you work with. You should be able to work with trustworthy partners. But I just wanted to highlight that trust is key if you want to achieve social outcomes. By embracing risk and allowing ourselves to trust, we open up our minds and spaces for us to act in. We have to be prepared when we embrace risk, of course, to embrace failure. And once you say, “I’m willing to fail”, it allows you to go where you have not gone before with much more confidence.
So today, for example, as our economy is growing and as our government is able to do much more social spending, there’s a lot of attention being paid to how we can implement government programs better. Certainly CSR has become better at doing that over the last few years. There are many civil society organizations that have helped the government achieve its own mandate at the implementation level. But there are so many areas of society that don’t get looked at enough, where the government is not necessarily doing enough, and where we as philanthropists and civil society organizations need to do much more. Look at issues like mental health, disability, access to justice, environment, and livelihoods. If we were to embrace the risk and not fear failure, we would go into those areas as philanthropists and as new CSO organizations and innovate solutions that could get us out of the usual rot of our societal problems.
Sometimes, I wonder if we are suffering from a lack of imagination. When Vinoba Bhave started ‘Bhoodan’ and Mahatma Gandhi started the ‘Salt Satyagraha’, they were thinking at a universal human level of change. Now when we talk about one district or even 10 districts at a time, that is not enough. At least some of us should be able to say that we will go beyond just doing incremental things and look at achieving a population scale. There is a method to achieving that, and here, intent is not enough. We will need collaborative frameworks that are designed for scale.
I want to talk a bit more about failure. Failure can lead to a lot of very interesting stuff. Certainly in 30 years, we have failed repeatedly in the work that I do. And in an article I recently wrote, I was thinking of how Gandhi actually failed as a lawyer. He just couldn’t get his practice together, and then he embraced risk and set off in a boat to South Africa. And look what that one failure led to – the transformation of humanity. So we should not be afraid to fail, but then immediately thereafter, to embrace risk and set out to sail to shores yet unseen.
I feel there are three lessons from all the failures that I was able to embrace in 30 years of working in the social sector. The first lesson is from when we started Nagarik for safer roads in 1992. We didn’t understand the root cause of why our roads are not safer. And when you don’t go deep enough to analyze an abstract problem you’re working on, you tend to just work on bandaged solutions. Due to this, the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. The second lesson I understood when I worked at Akshara Foundation, Pratham Books, Arghyam and now EkStep. It’s that you need to clearly demarcate the role of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar and not confuse it. Allow Samaaj to do what it does best, allow Sarkaar to do what it does best, and encourage Bazaar to do what it knows how to do best. But if you force Bazaar to go below the line of profitability, if you expect Sarkaar to do what citizens should be doing, if you expect citizens to take on the ownership of what Sarkaar should be doing, it tends to create confusion and not achieve the societal outcome you need.
And the last thing I learned was – and this is very important for philanthropists to really understand – if you want societal level transformation, none of us have the answers. But there are people who have answers in their own context.
So, how do we distribute the ability to solve? A very key way to distribute the ability to solve, instead of pushing one solution down the pipe, is to open up, to create platforms and to allow public goods to be created from the work that we do. So for example, in Pratham Books, once we created a Creative Commons platform where everybody could do what they do best, we were able to open up the creation, the distribution, the translation, and the sale of books. We were able to scale to tens of millions of children. So this is a very important lesson.
When philanthropic capital is being used, we owe it to the work that we do and to the ambitions that we have, especially now in the digital age, to create open digital public goods. So that other people can build and innovate on a platform that we support as philanthropists, in areas that perhaps people have not been bold enough to go before.
Dasra’s journey is synonymous with the new age of Indian philanthropy. As we begin this third decade and re-dedicate ourselves, let us all say today, no matter who we are, no matter what work we are doing, that we commit to at least in one area, we will not just do incremental but transformational. And we will do that through collaboration, by embracing risk, and we will do that without fear of failure.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk on Masculinity and India’s Young Men at OTV’s Prerana 2019. With 230 million men below the age of 18 in India, Rohini talks about how we need to start doing the work of questioning our understanding of masculinity and providing safe spaces for boys and men to express themselves.
Over the past few decades we’ve seen advancement in the field of women’s empowerment. At least 70 million women are in self-help groups in this country and they’re learning to find ways to make themselves stronger. But it has been a very hard journey and we still have a long way to go. Every day we hear of rapes, we hear of violence, we hear of fear. The MeToo movement has allowed some of these issues to come out.
But if we look at the flipside, there are 230 million young men in this country below the age of 18, and another 80 million men are between the ages of 18 and 25. If you look at the data, millions of these young men are uneducated or under-educated; unemployed or underemployed. Their jobs and livelihoods are at risk because the job scenario is changing very fast. Too many of them don’t have good role models in their house, instead they’re trapped by what we call the ‘patriarchy,’ in unhealthy masculine roles.
We expect our boys and men to behave a certain way, and they feel the pressure of always having to be like that, especially young people. Through my work, I’ve noticed that there is a lot of fear and a lot of insecurity among the men of India today. It’s a global phenomenon as well, because the future of work is not what it used to be. In their houses, they may find that their sisters or mothers or daughters are doing well, while they may not see their own path so clearly. So men in their own right, especially young boys, need some help. They need us all, as women and as citizens of this country, to notice what is happening to this cohort of 200 million young men. Unlike women, they don’t have safe shared spaces to speak about their masculinity, their sexuality, or fears. When do they talk amongst their peer groups, the same message of toxic masculinity gets reinforced. So there is no place for young men to go, young boys to go and ask questions.
My daughter has asked me, “Ma, how come you expect me to be very, very responsible but you don’t expect the same thing of my brother?” It’s true that we don’t expect much from them in the house as we expect from the daughters. But we expect other things, other signs of masculinity that we need to question. Do we always expect them to be the breadwinner of the family? Do we want them to be kind of sensitive along with being strong? They should know that if their wife earns more than them, that doesn’t mean they’re any less of a man. We need to start doing work that questions and allows them to question these narrow ideas of masculinity.
I’ve found that there are very few organizations in India that are doing this work. Many organizations who are working with women need to also start working with this group of young, vulnerable boys. They need to have a space where they can ask questions without being ridiculed. We need to create a society where men do not have to be burdened with old ideas of masculinity. It is 2019, and if women have changed so much, we need to give men the space to change. Otherwise, when an empowered woman enters a disempowering situation at home, she has two bad choices: One is that she can regress, or the second is that she has to rebel. Both are very bad choices. A better option is for those of us who have sons, begin these conversations in our own homes. We need men to be as empowered as we want women to be.
