Type: Keynote

Romancing the Black Panther – Rohini Nilekani with Usha KR

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani in conversation with Usha KR about conservation, our connection with the environment, and her fascination with the black panther of Kabini. This was held as part of BIC’s Bangalore Literature Festival, 2020. 

 

Picture this – we are all in Kabini, waiting for Blacky, the panther of the forest. We are holding our breaths. He is just next to us behind the lantana bushes or maybe in that ficus nearby. I can almost feel him and so can the langurs and the chital. Their continuous alarm calls reverberate through the forest. The morning mists have cleared but our human eyes can see nothing, no shadows, no movement at all; nor can the super lenses of all the photographers and array of modern Canons on a hair trigger ready to shoot. Cut. We have to leave this story unfinished again. It is 9:11 AM, and we have to get to the gate by 9:30 AM at the latest or the poor safari jeep driver can lose his license for several days. So the photographers pack up their expensive cameras and the tourists grumble, “Sha! Almost, almost.” Frustratingly, this pattern has repeated itself for me several times, especially in the past few months.

Just Another Leopard? 

Through 2020, this year of the virus, I have often escaped the forlorn city of Bengaluru and lodged myself in Kabini, my favorite part of the Nagarhole forest in Southwestern Karnataka. Even though I appreciate every inch of the forest, from the spider, the ant, and the jackal, to the trees and the water bodies, and all the creatures in between, there is one animal that I very much want to find. He is the fabled Blacky or ‘Kariya’ as he is locally called, the melanistic leopard who has lived in the tourist zone of Kabini for the past six years. This black panther has been the focus of numerous viral photographs, documentaries, and articles. Arguably, he is the world’s most famous black panther. People come from all around the world to see him. Often, they return without a glimpse, but when they do see him, their “Oohs” and “Aahs” and their photographs only serve to add to the mystery and glamour around this elusive creature. Quite objectively, he’s a beautiful animal. He’s perfectly imperfect, evenly black with magnificent yellow eyes and a sleek muscled body. When found paired with a normal female leopard the contrast creates an even more striking image.

Moreover, he is the one black panther in the world who is relatively possible to find as he has a well-documented territory, mercifully overlapping the tourist area of the forest. So it’s no wonder that tourists and photographers flock there to see him. In Kabini, all conversations among strangers are likely to begin with, “Have you seen Blacky?” and then begin the endless stories of how many times and of all the near-misses. But all this hype and hoopla leaves real environmentalists and foresters rather cold. “What’s all the fuss about,” they ask. “It is just another leopard,” they say, shaking their heads at the frenzy on display.

This is true. The black panther is just another big cat in the wild. He’s just another leopard with a melanistic condition that leaves his spots intact but darkens the rest of his coat as well. There are many melanistic leopards in Karnataka alone, so there should be no reason to think of this one as special. And yet I am one of the humble hordes who has fallen under his spell, happily participating in the fantasy. For me, it has been a magical journey thus far. I first heard of this panther in 2015 when my friend and world-renowned wildlife documentary filmmaker and photographer Sandesh Kadur showed me some really stunning images. Till then, the term, “Black panther” for me was more about the radical political movements in the West. But I was strangely drawn to the pictures and started watching out for the animal on the regular safaris that my husband Nandan and I would anyway take to Nagarhole two or three times a year.

Over time, as the fame of the black panther grew, my interest in him began to peak as well. He appeared often enough at safari time to keep people interested, but not often enough to become a routine sighting. All sorts of legends begin to build around him, of his prowess at mating with many leopards and fighting competitors. This peaked in 2019, when Shaaz Bin Jung’s film for National Geographic came out. It came in on the heels of the successful superhero movie, ‘Black Panther’. The documentary was rather cheekily called ‘The Real Black Panther’. Shaaz posted some spectacular shots on social media that of course went viral and throngs of tourists headed to Kabini. By this time, I had been seriously searching for him whenever I could because Blacky was in his prime and seen regularly enough in the public zone for Shaaz and others to get some remarkable sequences of him and his various mates and dueling partners.

However, domestic issues including the very joyful responsibility of helping out with my grandson kept me tied to home territory in those years. Then came 2020. Strangely, the pandemic set me free. My domestic issues were resolved. The lockdown had been lifted. My travel commitments had almost vanished. I was finally in a position to go to the forest more often because I could continue my virtual meetings anywhere. And I used the new freedom to the hilt. This year, I have clocked more than 40 days and nights in Kabini doing dozens of safaris, soaking in the forest with all its amazing flora and fauna. And yes, desperately seeking Blacky, whom I’ve still not seen. I think I’ve become a little notorious in the Kabini Jungle. There are many other photographers, filmmakers, and even tourists who are seen regularly on safari, but I have become a bit of a fixture, a woman in a strange-looking sun hat and a colourful face mask, perpetually doing the rounds in Zone A, since this is where Blacky lives.

I have come to know all the safari Jeep drivers and many of the forest guards and officials as well. I have learned that their opinion of me is a bit divided. Some feel sorry for me, and they often say, “Don’t worry, madam. We’ll show you Blacky soon. This time definitely. Khandita.” Others who have neutrally observed that Blacky never seems to show up when I am on safari worry that I’m a bit of an ill omen as far as this coveted cat is concerned. One cheekily asks me when I’m leaving for Bengaluru so that this panther can come out. Sandesh Kadur’s film crew joked that they can strategize their filming of the panther based on my safari schedule. My little grandson, Tanush, is kinder. Once when I rued, “Maybe Blacky doesn’t like me,” he said, “No, no ami. He’s only playing hide and seek with you.” But the annoying fact is that the data shows that too often, Blacky comes out on the safari just after I have left the forest. This has happened too many times, especially this year. No matter whether I stay for one day, three days or five days, Blacky shows up soon after I am back in Bengaluru.

A Symbol With a Larger Message 

I wonder, why we want the things that we cannot have. We are partly excited by the thrill of the chase but psychologists also say that often, when we want something or someone, we begin to ascribe characteristics of value to it which may not actually be possessed by that object of interest. I consider this as I watch myself be drawn into romancing the black panther who has no clue that any human is remotely interested in him. I looked up one definition of romance. It says it is ‘a quality of or feeling of mystery, excitement and remoteness from everyday life’. I think that’s a great way to describe this adventure that I have undertaken, to find a single unique animal among hundreds of his species in a forest of 625 square kilometers, where tourists are only allowed into 10% of the area for a limited amount of time each day. What are the chances?

Many people say to me, “Oh, it is just a jinx. It will be broken soon. Once you see him, you will see him often.” So, I persevere in joyful pursuit of the presumed pleasure of sighting Blacky. I keep tabs on his comings and goings. I plan my trips to Kabini after much speculation on when he is likely to emerge. People say, “The dark one likes moonless nights.” Others swear he comes out on festivals and full moon nights. I try all options. Results? Nada. With or without Blacky, I still love my forest bathing or shinrin-yoku, as the Japanese call it. The rhythm of my safari visits, day after day, waking up at 5:00 AM, doing my two safaris, squeezing in all those virtual meetings, and having early dinners – I have created a sort of rhythm that becomes like a substitute for happiness itself. Once I’m in the forest, it’s an experience like meditation, of being hyper-aware of the slightest rustle, of being in the present moment for long periods of time. No past, no future.

As Henry David Thoreau urged us centuries ago, “I am trying to find my eternity in each moment.” I am taken up with a sense of wonder, marvelling at something so tangibly bigger than us all and perhaps this is what humanity is desperate for now. Perhaps we have lost our way somewhere, somehow. Alain de Botton, the popular TED speaker, Swiss-born British philosopher, lectures on modern society and its many anxieties. “We have nothing,” he says, “at the centre that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don’t worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves. Our heroes are human heroes and that’s a very new situation.” “Most other societies,” he says, “have had right at their centre the worship of something transcendent; a God, a spirit, a natural force, or the universe, whatever it is. That is why we are particularly drawn to nature for an escape from the human ant hill, an escape from our own competition and our own dramas.” Botton’s analysis seems very authentic to me. Unlike our tribal communities in this country, we urban folks like myself have winnowed out our animistic cultures. But this yearning for Blacky definitely has some renewed yearning for the mystical at its very core.

Especially in a year that has made us confront our own mortality and forced us into closeness and isolation, the promise of the open, untamed, and unregulated has been too much of a lure, which brings me to a far more serious question, “How does this particular obsession tie into my broader work on environmental sustainability, biodiversity conservation, and greener livelihoods? Are these two interests at odds?” After all, the idea of biodiversity is quite opposite to the emphasis on any one animal. There’s a strong criticism of people’s devotion to a few flagship species such as the tiger. Some conservationists believe that the excessive attention on these species allow people to ignore all the other species that are as critical, each in their own way, to sustaining the web of life. Urbanites especially, who are often quite deracinated from the wild, may not be aware of the consequences of an imbalanced reaction to a few species or to one particular celebrity animal for that matter. For example, all the tourist Jeeps crowding noisily, their cameras clicking away like gunfire around Blacky or around the beloved tigress Machali of Ranthambore or Tadoba’s famous Maya, do disturb the animals and makes their cubs skittish too.

A narrow focus on some animals can do genuine harm, not just to them, but also to other species or landscapes because the whole system is so intricately interconnected that it eventually may be detrimental even to the species that people claim to love. Some environmentalists are therefore dead against giving human names to wild animals and taking a very anthropocentric approach to conservation. And there is some truth there for us to consider. We have to be very vigilant not to let the symbol become bigger than the message it carries. We have to be careful, especially as tourists, to go into the wild not to extract value alone, but as trustees of the forest’s innate worth. Yet, maybe the love for one kind of animal can also lead people to understand more about how that animal is connected to the food chain and the environment in which it must thrive, and how all that connects back to human well-being as well.

A Lesson in Humility 

Many conservationists themselves have been victims of the emotional attachment to a particular species because it is a very powerful thing, and maybe we humans cannot conserve and cannot renew our ecology without that pull, that undeniable attraction. We can’t seem to feel drawn to ants or cockroaches, so understandably, it must be a charismatic species that becomes the objects of our attention. Perhaps this can be a powerful way to harness a much broader public constituency and to engage local communities who are very critical for conservation. People have been obsessed with all sorts of animals throughout human history. Love, it seems, can have many forms. The innovator, Nikola Tesla, used to love a white pigeon. He said he loved it as a man loves a woman, and he also claimed that the pigeon loved him back. Literature and art have celebrated the possibility of such passion enthusiastically, and many writers have also talked of these practices all over especially in India. Some of the best stories, especially for children, have been about the human love for animals. Think of ‘Black Beauty’, ‘The Yearling’, ‘My Friend Flicka’, and ‘Lassie’. It’s not just domesticated animals that evoke love and passion in books and in movies – there was ‘Free Willy’, ‘King Kong’, ‘Hachiko’, ‘The Black Stallion’, ‘Beethoven’, ‘The War Horse’, ‘Seabiscuit’, etc. There are also stories and movies inspired by real-life heroes who have had a passion for animals like Joy Adamson and Elsa the lioness in ‘Born Free’ and ‘Living Free’; Jane Goodall and her bond with Flint, the chimpanzee, in the film ‘Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees’ and much later in the documentary simply called ‘Jane’.

More recently, there was a Netflix documentary called ‘My Octopus Teacher’, about Craig Foster’s journey of self-learning with a common octopus in the South African kelp forest. I feel similarly – my experience also has allowed me to see Blacky as a kind of a guru in the sense that I have learnt many lessons from him and from my journey chasing him. They are lessons of perseverance, patience, grit, and learning how little we really need in life. I have personally understood what might be the foundations of happiness in the sense that, in the suspension of my normal self, I’ve experienced a complete loss of control. Occasionally, I joked that I feel like a hapless puppet. When Blacky calls, when he comes out, I must go and I have experienced such a loss of control as a kind of a freedom, a kind of a joy. But most of all, it has taught me that my wealth and the power that undeniably goes with it, has been pretty worthless in this case. Blacky has not revealed himself to me no matter what I do. Through this, he has taught me more about humility than all my other teachers combined.

By taking his non-appearances personally, I make myself vulnerable, open, and Blacky entreats me to surrender to a grace not defined in material terms. I’m invited into another realm of possibility. In every sense, of course, it has also exposed my own privilege and my own sense of that privilege. In a pandemic, when most people have had other problems, I have not had to worry about things like the cost of my visits. I can leave at a moment’s notice, my hapless driver in tow. I can reschedule my meetings. I can even change other people’s plans.

Unfortunately, access to the forest in the safari has become an elite privilege. It is expensive and time consuming. Barely a kilometre away from the gate that the forest department controls is a buffer zone, dotted with many hamlets. The little children living there watch us all coming out onto the road. We look so alien, so aspirational, as we take off in our Jeeps while they can only wave to us from the roadside. Sometimes I take storybooks for them, especially this year as they have suffered because of the school closures. They take the books happily, but they plead with me, saying that they also want to go on safari. The villagers have extricated some livelihood opportunities related to tourism, but they themselves cannot get in, to marvel at the forest which they help to conserve. Ironically, the opposite is true of the tribal communities who live even closer to the forest, sometimes inside the forest, and have access to its resources such as honey or gooseberries. They cannot experience other basic conveniences that we take for granted outside the forest, like running water or a choice of cuisine.

All this has forced me to rethink my priorities for my environmental philanthropy. Recently, I signed an MoU with Nagarhole Conservation Foundation to start giving forward to Kabini and its people a small portion of what I have so blessedly received. I feel as though I have been exposed to all the wisdoms locked in all the self-help books in the world all at once, and now I must dedicate myself to internalising those lessons better.

People ask, what happens if and when I meet Blacky at last? The truth is that I do not know. I meet many people in the forest who keep chasing Blacky, no matter how often they have seen him. Maybe my journey will follow their path from ‘ase’ which is hope to ‘nirase’ which is disappointment and back to ‘ase’ again, and then to ‘durase’, which is greed. Kariya may call again and again, and I may respond again and again. But as the classic ‘Charlotte’s Web’ by E. B. White reminds us, “We are constrained by lifespans. Time is draining away on both sides of this equation of no name.” I do hope I can meet my mystery friend soon, but if I do not, I salute him. He has enriched my life beyond measure. I will redouble my efforts to help secure ecosystems that support the diversity of life, especially in India. After all, as Leo Tolstoy put it, “One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.” This is so true in this year of the pandemic with the zoonotic diseases that we have begun to understand. And why is this even a story worth telling? Because somewhere in it I hope there is the same redeeming quality that describes so much of literature.

There is the sense of a better future because it is so good to know that all of us together  have nurtured a space for a vulnerable animal like Blacky, who has to work so hard to camouflage himself from prey and predator. He has a fighting chance to live out his full life. John Muir, the founder of the US-based conservation NGO, the Sierra Club famously said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” It’s often quoted, but remains my go-to quote always. More than ever, we need to immerse ourselves, in our own way, in the deep mystery of this interconnectedness of all living beings. After all, Blacky, Kariya is only a symbol. We are the possibility. 

Keynote address at TiE Global Summit 2020: Scaling fast – Social Entrepreneurship in India

Rohini’s speech at the TiE Summit 2020 where she talks about Societal Platform Thinking, and the need for restoring agency to create a more resilient Samaaj.

 

 

Namaste, everyone. Thank you to the TiE team for inviting me to deliver this keynote. TiE does amazing work at binding the energy of entrepreneurship to the spirit of service and I am so glad to be able to address you all today, though, sadly, only virtually.

I want to use my ten-twelve minutes to talk of how we can together achieve more impact at scale, with speed and sustainability, a phrase my husband Nandan often uses. 

Scale – because the response has to be at the size of the problem itself. Speed – because there is an urgency to some of society’s problems that will escalate if not solved soon. And while I am not a big fan of speed for the thrill of it, and we need to focus on the what and the how of scale, the fact is that this pandemic has made humans fall so far back on our commonly agreed to SDGs, that we have to run a little faster to catch up and surge ahead. And Sustainability – so that we aim for resilience among people and institutions to cope with new issues as they arise.

The last ten months has been a testament to the need for such an approach, and many people are experimenting globally on how to achieve this.  Our teams have put together what we call Societal Platform Thinking or SPT. It is an attempt to help reduce the friction to collaborate between samaaj, bazaar and sarkaar, or society, markets and the state. Its goal is to engage all three sectors in addressing complex issues by allowing all stakeholders to have agency to innovate in their own context.

SPT keeps some important questions on the table. How can we create a more holistic approach to addressing societal issues as they constantly evolve? How can we work together? How can we discover and deploy people’s own talent? How can we give people choice and freedom to innovate? How can we ensure that India’s huge diversity is put to good use to solve problems in their own context? How can we use technology in the service of these goals? 

Let me give you an example of societal platform thinking from the education sector, an area that has been globally hit very hard in this year of the virus. 

In 2015, my husband Nandan, Shankar Maruwada and I set up the EkStep Foundation to increase access to learning opportunities for 200 million children by 2020. We believed then is using emerging digital technologies to fuel our mission Little did we know then that the pandemic would make our work more relevant than ever before. 

As in many countries, India still faces challenges in getting every learner to be where she needs to be. In the past three decades, tremendous work has been done, and the country HAS shown progress, as surveys ASER shows year on year. But it is still not enough. We have a long way to go to ensure that every child is learning well. And now we know we have to ensure this regardless of whether children are physically present in school.

Something that we learned in our journey in education is that we need to be able to leverage existing infrastructure and meet the system where it is rather than expect the system to come to where we are.

With EkStep, we had to learn and iterate over the years to arrive at something that would work. Based on Nandan and Shankar’s work on India’s unique ID system, Aadhaar, and based on my work at Pratham Books to put a book in every child’s hand, we knew that to achieve anything at scale, you have to unleash local innovation. You have to design in such a way that people can get anywhere, anytime access to a service or product. You have to put the grammar to the power of your intent of inclusion and equity.

This led us to work with the government to help them build the digital infrastructure for learning now called DIKSHA. Diksha is the government’s national teacher platform for India’s nearly 3 million teachers. It was designed keeping in mind the DNA of the public education system, which has many layers. Diksha kept evolving as an open, public digital good, to empower many people to participate in the societal mission of improving learning.

The platform serves as a bridge between the online and the offline world. Through QR codes embedded in existing textbooks, hundreds of millions of children have gained access to quality curated content. On Diksha, teachers can avail of just in time bite sized training; they can connect with each other, they can curate special content for their classrooms, and much more. They can learn digitally to improve their teaching physically. 

Diksha also allows parents to be more involved and engaged in the learning that their children partake. It allows communities to be involved; civil society organizations to be a part of improving access to learning. Importantly, it also creates space for markets to play, whether it’s the tuition teacher or the afterschool program to all build off the same public infrastructure. 

Diksha has really taken off as an incubator for innovation. Everywhere, people have come up with ingenious ways to use digital to bridge the digital divide itself. For example, there’s the story of teacher Revati, who has been active on the digital platform. She talked about struggling with low engagement and poor reading levels in her classroom. DIKSHA allowed her to curate high quality content online, customize it to her offline context, and then feed her lessons back into a knowledge common of a peer group of teachers. 

DIKSHA currently supports 35 States in India, across 33 languages with over 90,000 pieces of co-created content. The usage numbers really speak for themselves. There have been cumulatively over 3 billion page views and 275 million content views.

The platform really came to the rescue of the education system during the pandemic, with its massive school closures, and frustrated students. This year, on Diksha, there were 1 billion training sessions for teachers and over the last 60 days there have been close to 700 million learning sessions across pretty much all States in India. These mind-boggling numbers show what becomes possible when digital infrastructure is animated with human intent, when we build technology that works for society.

But the real credit goes to the teachers, the students and the parents who bravely adopted unfamiliar digital technologies and pedagogies. And our teams learnt that once individuals and communities feel empowered with new tools, they quickly create the enabling environment in which change can be scaled up.

The example of Diksha shows how sarkaar can embark on creating a societal platform together with samaaj. The infrastructure is now in place to invite in the bazaar as well.

All this work embodies the lessons that Nandan and I have learnt in our respective journeys over the last three decades as active participants in samaaj, bazaar and sarkaar. It is not something that we believe is unique or new to us. It’s a distillation of things that many of you have already learned and worked on over the last few over the last decade. The biggest pivot around which we built the idea of this type of platform ecosystem thinking is on the importance of restoring agency and choice. 

Societal platform thinking hinges on four fundamental design principles. Let’s design for diversity at scale so that every actor can create solutions for their own contexts. This requires a unified but not uniform structure because the solutions that work in Karnataka are different from the solutions that work in Assam. Instead of pushing A solution down a pipeline, let’s distribute the ability to solve. This is how we bring resilience into our samaaj. For all this, we must use all emerging technologies, but we must be careful to be technology enabled, not technology led. Technology is only a tool, and amplifies intent, both good and bad. I care most deeply that we should build an ecosystem of platforms that are in service of society. Platforms that allow our expressions as citizens rather than as subjects of the state or as consumers of the market. 

If we want to achieve greater impact as social entrepreneurs, this thinking is one way, though not the only way, to move ahead together. We invite more discussion around these goals and themes. 2020 has shown us how one event, or one tiny virus can affect us globally and personally. It has invited us to understand just how interconnected we are, and to design for more inclusion, more access, more agency, so that more of us can become part of the solution and not remain part of the problem. The next time around, we will be better prepared. Through greatly enhanced co-operation, we are all learning, how to scale our responses with urgency, and towards resilience, with empathy, and last but not least with renewed humility.

Thank you and namaste.

 

Keynote address at the Belongg Library Network Launch Event

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s Keynote Address at the Belongg Library Network Launch Event.

Belongg Library’s vision for inclusion and diversity is very welcome and timely. We need to find spaces and tools for people to be able to explore beyond their narrow horizons. People must be allowed the luxury of moving beyond blind certainty through blurry doubt to finally emerge in the dazzling sunshine and the humble knowledge that there is always more to learn, and a well-stocked library can enable just that. Libraries have always stood for something that is very important and close to my heart. My childhood was spent between the pages of books, where I would lose myself in stories with incredible characters who were so different from me but whose aspirations and adventures felt strangely familiar.

Back then, we didn’t have TVs or mobile phones to distract us, so books became my first glimpse of a larger world. To a young person, there is such a thrill in finding a bigger, wonderful universe that exists outside your small space. Books allowed me to enlarge my imagination and satisfy a deep curiosity that all children have and books continue to exert a hold over me – that is the involved nature of reading that makes them such a powerful tool for shaping the mind. For this reason, it is important that children and adults have access to a diverse range of books, because it helps us see beyond the binaries of black and white, and lean in to occupy the rich hues of grey that actually describe all our lives. These nuances can help children to be sensitive, empathetic, and critical thinking adults, but unfortunately, despite the advances made in the last 15 years, many children are still growing up without proper access to books.

In India, there is still only one book for every five children in urban India and one for every 10 in rural India, compared to countries like the UK where there are six or more books per child. And in our linguistically rich country, with 22 constitutional languages and 150 million people speaking in hundreds of other languages, most of our books are only printed in English and Hindi. This was the problem that some of us decided to tackle in 2004. Through the Pratham network, we had created so many readers who had nothing to read, so we felt that we had to do something to address this. We founded Pratham books then, with the mission of a book in every child’s hands, to truly democratise the joy of reading that so many of us have experienced ourselves. We wanted children from every corner of India to get good books in their own languages that were affordable, attractive, and inspiring. They needed to be stories and characters that were culturally approachable for them, but also ones that introduced children to the diversity of India, with people who may live differently, love differently, or think differently than them.

At Pratham, we learned the nuts and bolts of the publishing industry and soon we had dozens of books for young children, all simultaneously printed in up to 12 languages, which was a huge breakthrough. Since we were a non-profit, we could afford to subsidize the books, but we hope that this will create new opportunities for the entire publishing industry for children in India. We took a risk in trying out things that hadn’t been done before, and fortunately we succeeded in quickly becoming India’s largest children’s publisher. We realised the importance of innovating various new models, especially if we wanted to achieve our goals, so in 2008 we put all our books online under the Open Source Creative Commons license, and suddenly lots of books in many different languages became available to parents, children and teachers, completely free. It created a whole ecosystem, unleashing illustrators, writers, and translators from every corner of the country, collaborating to put out great stories for children to enjoy. Today, Pratham books has continued to innovate, taking the digital idea much further with Storyweaver, which I hope will be an important resource for the Belongg Library Network as well, providing incredibly diverse books in hundreds of languages free to access with just a click of a button.

But when it comes to digital, there’s often the concern that our beloved bookstores or libraries will become a thing of the past. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Research shows that we should not worry too much about readers accessing digital material, and that children who are able to access both digital and physical books are able to sustain their reading habits better than others. Increasing access to books through online mediums creates more readers, which is good for everybody including writers and publishers. Of course, we have to be vigilant about screen time and must not lose what Maryanne Wolf describes as our ‘deep reading brain’, which has evolved over millennia to help us decode, reconstruct meaning, and stay with something till the end.

Libraries do play a vital role in that respect, and in my work with both Pratham books and Akshara Foundation, we have invested a lot of time in creating and activating libraries in the classroom as well as community libraries. For example at Pratham books, classrooms received small, portable bookshelves, which could be kept at a low level so children can easily access them. Similarly, Akshara had a classroom library initiative which provided classrooms with foldable bookcases, each holding 122 age-appropriate books in multiple languages, and the number of books borrowed and the reading levels were recorded. This infrastructure is needed, not just in schools, but also outside in society, as gateways to knowledge and culture. Libraries play a fundamental role and the resources and services they offer create opportunities to support not just literacy and education, but also to shape new ideas and perspectives that are central to creative thinking and innovative society.

According to the 2011 census, India only has one rural library for 11,500 people and one urban library for 80,000 people. Moreover, there is no precise information on the functionality and the level of service capabilities of these libraries. Per capita expenditure on the development of public libraries is 7 paisa. Contrast this with the country like the US, where the public library system provides services to 95.6% of the total population, and they spend $35.96 per capita annually. I have to acknowledge my own personal debt to the public library system of America. Right after I got married in 1982 until 1989, my husband and I would often travel to America because Infosys used to do a lot of on-site software projects. I spent those years in different cities with really not much money to sustain us. It was the free public library system that came to my rescue, especially in the cold dark winters where you couldn’t do much else. In some ways, I believe that my support for Pratham books, Akshara Foundation, and other educational initiatives like Ekstep, is my effort to repay a part of this huge debt.

The important thing to note here is that funding for libraries in many Western countries is primarily local. In the US and Europe, 80% of funding comes from local councils rather than national funds. This is really something for us to think about in this country, especially in urban India. Out of India’s 29 states and seven union territories, 19 states have passed State Library legislation, but only five of them have the provision of a library cess or levy, and even when there is a cess level it may not reach the library system at all. I remember in Janaagraha, we did a public citizen budgeting exercise and we realised as we did the research that the municipality of Bangalore owes lakhs and lakhs of rupees to the public library system, but nobody knows how to extract this.

In this dysfunctionality, efforts like Belongg have a really valuable role to play to just enhance the public culture of supporting libraries. Decentralised initiatives are terribly important, not just from a resourcing perspective but because libraries are not just to our houses for books, they are spaces to build community around, where people can create a common vision for the kind of society they want to build, and this works best at the local level. It will help in advancing inclusion, reducing the terrible polarisation we are witnessing, and strengthening our democratic processes. These ideas of inclusion and diversity should not end up making Belongg an island or silo, but should be mainstreamed, and the work folded into a larger, growing, evolving philosophy and practice of making our societies the best they can be for everyone.

How Citizens and Communities Shape our Cities

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s keynote address at eGovernments Foundation’s Connect For Impact Webinar on how citizens and communities can shape our cities.

Recently, I have been travelling from Bengaluru to Kabini a lot in these last few months, and every time I return from the forest to this megacity, Bengaluru, I’m able to see my home city from a new perspective, with fresh eyes. The overwhelming impression I get is of a city undergoing a painful renewal, masses of threatening concrete overhead, piles of rubble underneath, and with all manner of dangerous spikes poking outward. Through this grey canvas, hapless citizens can be seen as dots of colour, doing their best to head on through traffic without signposts or proper visibility, and navigating through large trucks and haulers, past moody traffic signals or perplexing roundabouts.

It seems as if this city, like many other towns and cities in the country, is actually testing its residents. The unfinished infrastructure is a poster promise of a better future at the far horizon, and the city demands patience, faith, and hope. The residents, on the other hand, experience resignation, weariness, and a kind of lasting numbness. When I finally get home, I enter an urban version of the forest that I left behind because my neighbourhood in Koramangala has a dense canopy of trees with a mix of mammals and avian diversity. But Bengaluru is not at all homogeneous. It has a criss-cross of diverse identities and designs. It has layers upon layers, like all cities, of privilege on top and tears of disenfranchisement below, yet the dysfunctionality of the city is a perverse equaliser. It brings an end to the secession of the elite. Our bubble breaks with the chaos of the traffic, the pervasive pollution, and the squeezing of personal spaces. But it’s these visible cracks that have left us with an opening and there are now new opportunities to engage with our city’s future.

Many groups are engaging citizens to reimagine the city and make it their own. The question has moved from whether the city will grow and change to how it should grow and change, and who should participate in the change making. In his 1960 classic, ‘The Image of the City’, Kevin Lynch says that the metropolitan region is now the functional unit of our environment, and it is desirable that this functional unit should be identified and structured by its inhabitants. The good news is that many new citizens-based nodes are challenging the supremacy of the state in urban futures. Whether it is the thriving RWAs in the city or the many new dynamic CSOs and non-profits, there seems to be a growing determination to take back the city. These new efforts are building on many movements in Bengaluru that began in the ’80s with the aim of improving the governance of the city.
I always joke that there are more urban reformers per square foot in Bengaluru than anywhere else in the world. And these efforts were made both on the supply side and the demand side. BATF was set up in the SM Krishna administration to bridge the demand side to the supply side and make the supply side more coordinated. Then Janaagraha came along to broaden the scope and ambition of citizen engagement in the governance of the city. eGov Foundation came along to help the government use technology more effectively to collect and analyse data, to create better access to its various services. These are only three out of dozens of examples, and today’s Samaaj is evolving even further. Our present technologies can enable mass participation in civic design for the first time ever and the better delivery of public services.

This is happening in all the major metropolitan areas of the country, and it’s now extending beyond. For example, sometimes, even the simplest data is not available to the public and RTIs need to be filed for even the simplest of information. So when the lockdown was announced, Yugantar in Hyderabad filed an RTI to get the total number of slums and their population in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation. That data was shared with local non-profits, who started to target relief and health work in those areas. Another example is Haiyya in Delhi, which addresses the issue of access to sexual and reproductive health services, especially for unmarried girls. They did a campaign called Health Over Stigma, spearheaded by young women. Haiyya helped to hold service providers accountable for giving safe and non-judgmental sexual and reproductive health services. As a result, the Delhi Medical Council has committed to providing these services throughout the New Delhi region.

Reap Benefit has developed an open civic platform that comprises a WhatsApp chatbot, a web app, and a civic forum, to guide first-time users with simple steps using a variety of civic challenges that are fun and engaging. Through decentralisation and communitisation, as they call it, many people can now get better access through WhatsApp. So if you see a pothole on the road, you can type that into the chatbot and send a photo, and then have a discussion on what you should do about it. So that agitation and anxiety can turn into real action. During COVID they were able to reach more than a million people with direct relief using this sort of decentralised community model. Jhatkaa also uses mobilisation and awareness building to aggregate citizen voices. Last year, they organised one of the biggest climate strikes in Bengaluru with 1,500 people, and created a lot of awareness videos which got three million views, and 14,000 people signed their petition for cleaner air. On the other hand, Civis looks at environmental legislation, which is usually so technical that regular citizens or civil services find it difficult to understand, even though we are impacted by what those laws are framing. So in March 2020, they put up a simpler version of the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification, and they received more than 400 comments which will hopefully be taken into consideration when the final rules come out. We must applaud and encourage all these Samaaj-based efforts, but more importantly, each of us has to find a way to participate in these attempts. We need a broader collective action of the Samaaj because urban design is not a spectator sport. Good governance is not an entitlement – we have to co-create it. No matter who you are, you are a citizen first.

For years now, my work has been devoted to the premise that it is only the Samaaj and institutions of the Samaaj that can hold the state and markets accountable to the larger public interest, and can uphold our individual rights and freedoms. This is where we can creatively work together on the most complex problems that we are facing as a society. Luckily, today’s new technologies do allow us to participate more effectively with relative ease. But I’m not talking about clicktivism. I’m talking about Societal Platform Thinking i.e. how a technology-enabled social ecosystem can create discoverability of solutions. It can create better access to services because we are all engaged in making the whole system better, and it can improve our ability to make meaningful choices. We need civil society itself to get much more digital in this inevitable digital age, so that a digital Samaaj can keep tech corporations from amassing unconscionable power and from creating tools and products that distort the political and democratic processes as we are beginning to see.

It’s more important than ever that organisations like eGov and other civil society organisations work together from the demand side and the supply side to strengthen societies’ own interactions and interfaces with the Samaaj. Of course, we have to be careful that we prevent technologies from amassing power that will reduce individual or collective agency and strip meaning from social connection. This is not ideal speculation, and the time has come for us to persevere patiently but creatively and challenge any technology future that is more of a dystopia than a solution to our current problems. So this battle has to be engaged in by the Samaaj, and hopefully represented by civil society organisations so that technology can be an enabler of our common intent for a good society. I think we’re at a very exciting inflection point where urban spaces are going to be reimagined and redesigned.

This year of the virus has forced us to speed up our thinking on what cities can look like in the future. This is not the last pandemic we shall see, and it is only the beginning of climate change, so how are we going to adopt urban resilience? Technology and civil society will play a huge role in this, but moreover, every single one of us has to believe that we can participate and therefore we will. We must start thinking about how each of us can build on this momentum and build back a better, new normal. We must create cities that we are proud of belonging to, and cities where our children can breathe.

Booked & Hooked: Bringing Stories to Every Child | Keynote Address at Neev Book Award 2020 Special

Rohini Nilekani’s Keynote Address at the Neev Book Award 2020 Special. The title of her talk is “Booked & Hooked: Bringing Stories to Every Child”

Namaste and good morning, book lovers. It is truly a pleasure and an honour to be giving this keynote address at the Neev Literature Festival, and to be taking part in the award ceremony as well. Thank you, Kavita, thank you Neev, for this opportunity. This festival, with the beautiful title Imaginary Lines is a very important signpost in the journey to ensure that all of India’s children get a chance to immerse in good books. As a society, we need to do many more things that are focused on the intellectual and cultural development of our 300 million children. It is no exaggeration to say that it will determine the very future of this country. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. A reading nation is a thinking nation. Which is just so important to lift us out of the multiple predicaments we face as a society today.

Today, I will speak to you about my journey as a reader, a writer, a publisher and then back again to being a writer and a reader.

I started my love of books very early, learning to read long before I was formally taught in school. I would peer over my sister’s shoulder as she read the fun books borrowed from the nearby library. My entire childhood was spent between the pages of hundreds of books. My mother had to wrench me away from the book I was clutching so that I could do my daily chores, such as helping to set the table.

Thank God for all those authors and illustrators who carried me off into a world of make-believe, letting me entwine myself into the lives of strange and wonderful characters to whom I could talk, whose stories I could extend, and who would always be my secret friends.

What an innocent time it was.

No TV, no computers, no Internet and no mobile phones. It was so much fun to walk down to the library, choose our books, pay the few paise of reading charges from the pocket money that our mother gave us, and come home to read, read and read. If we were lucky, we were allowed to buy a crunchy snack to add to the enjoyment. It was sheer bliss.

I started out with the Noddy Books of Enid Blyton. Noddy was this strange little creature with whom I could still identify with for the scrapes he kept getting himself into. Toyland became a magical place for me, and I kept returning to the books again and again. By the age of six, I was reading the Malory Towers series, and all the other Enid Blyton books I could lay my hands on. I also read the William books and of course Winnie the Pooh.

One of my biggest regrets is that I did not read much in our own languages. Not even in my mother tongue, Marathi. Not even when my own mother was a Marathi and Sanskrit scholar. My mother wanted us to be fluent in English, the upwardly mobile language. Also, it was not so easy to find books and stories for young children in Marathi or Hindi. We did get to read comics – from Vikram Betaal and the Panchatantras to Akbar and Birbal. Occasionally, I would see them in Marathi at my cousin’s home. But unfortunately, I did not sustain my reading in Marathi. I now realize just how important it is to read in many languages, especially in a country like ours. It may be the glue that will keep the many threads of our social fabric from unravelling in the future.

Luckily for me, that did not prevent me from getting stories in Marathi. Thanks to my beloved grandmother, Atya, as we called her, I got thousands of stories, mostly about the bhakti saints of Maharashtra. She was an amazing storyteller. Till today, my eyes can water remembering her tales of the difficult life of the orphaned Sant Dnyaneshwar and his siblings. Atya truly taught me the power of a story to inspire, to evoke empathy and to capture the imagination. I try to repay that debt by channeling Atya while reading and telling stories to my 3-year-old grandson.

Millions of children have grandmothers like mine to tell them stories. Ours has been an oral society, a nation of storytellers, passing the epics down from generation to generation.
But we cannot say the same thing for books and for reading.

If, like me, you were surrounded by books, you were fortunate. The sad truth is, that even now, even after the strides we have made in the past two decades, a good book is a rare thing for children to access. Look at the numbers. In the UK, there are 4 books available for every child. In India, there is one book for every 5 children in urban India and one book for every ten children in rural India. Worse, in a country where we have 22 constitutional languages, and hundreds of other languages, most of the books are in only two languages. English leads by a huge margin, followed by Hindi.

This was exactly the problem some of us decided to tackle, way back in 2004. Through the Pratham network, we had helped thousands and thousands of children to read more fluently. But then they had very little to practice their newfound skills on. The only book that truly reaches every household in India is the school textbook, and you can hardly curl up with one of those. When we started libraries, we could find only a few books in a few languages other than English. And we decided something had to be done.
That’s when I cofounded Pratham Books, with the mission of A Book in Every Child’s hand. We wanted to truly democratize the joy of reading. We wanted children from each corner of the country to get good books, in their own languages, that were affordable, and attractive and inspiring. If that meant we had to become publishers ourselves, so be it. We learnt the nuts and bolts from scratch. Soon we had dozens of books for young children, each simultaneously printed in up to 12 languages. Because we were a non-for–profit organization, we could subsidize the books. Because we were unafraid, we could try things no one had before.

We had to think big. We had to disrupt. We had to be creative. We had to be bold. We had to be fast.

Within a few years, Pratham Books became the largest publisher of children’s books in India. We published hundreds of books across many languages. We reached out to every writer, illustrator and translator we could find. We used every channel of distribution we could think of. We partnered with samaaj, bazaar and sarkaar. With other publishers, with government, with other NGOs. We wanted to reach just as many children as we could.

We succeeded beyond our expectations. Millions of children got to own their very first book thanks to Pratham Books. Millions of children got to read stories in their own languages, about situations like their own, children like themselves. These were Indian stories, indigenous tales, freshly written. They were true to the many cultures of the country. To be honest, we were more focused on diversity than on quality, in the early days. We wanted stories from every geography, every community. We wanted to showcase Indian motifs, art and culture. Books that could help children understand and enjoy the diversity of this country. Its geography and climate, its people and cultures, its flora and its fauna,

Books that could help children engage with ethical issues. Children may begin with binaries of black and white but good books help them move into the grays, where all the rich nuances of life are. Books can help kids move beyond blind certainty towards a blurry doubt and then on to a dazzling yet humbling knowledge of how much more there is to learn. We wanted to offer them all that.

In fact, to fill in the gaps, some of us began to write books ourselves!

And my innings as a writer began. Over the years, I wrote several books for Pratham Books. I tried my best to come up with unusual stories, interesting characters. Sringeri Srinivas the farmer was born. Annual Haircut Day was the first in a series of six. It is not at all easy to write good books for young children. Many famous authors I approached told me they would love to help us but were nervous to write for children! I could understand why. It would take days and months to make those 500 words just so. Sometimes, one succeeds. Often, one doesn’t.

But the process is most absorbing and enjoyable.

And to know that we were creating something for so many first-generation readers was soul satisfying.

And nothing has ever given me more joy in my work than the sight of a child happily reading one of our books!

I believe we need to create story-writing courses so that we can have a whole new generation of young authors who could write for children, especially young children.

Because there is still a long way to go before we can declare that there are have enough books for India’s 300 million children.

At Pratham Books we soon realized that if we really wanted to get closer to achieving our mission, we would have to think differently. There was no way we could create enough physical books to reach every child. Nor would it be environmentally sustainable, even if one could.

That’s when we cracked open the model. We went digital. We put up our books in the Creative Commons. Our books could then be freely read online, downloaded, printed, shared, even sold! Our goal was not to monopolize the market, but to create wide access. We went from being a publisher to a platform. We still produced physical books. But to reach the unreached child, we had to go virtual too.

And it worked! We helped build a vibrant new community of writers and illustrators, translators and editors. We unlocked the door to books for parents and children. We were inching closer to our dream.

When I retired from Pratham Books after 10 adventurous years, the team took the organization to new heights. They pushed forward on the digital journey. Under the new name Storyweaver, they made the space for hundreds more books by hundreds of new writers in hundreds of languages to reach millions more children.

The numbers speak for themselves. Hats off to the Storyweaver team for what has been achieved. My books too were lifted by the tide. People read them and translated them and even retold them in their own ways. It is a whole new world!

I continue to write. In fact, I hope you will permit me a little promo. My latest book, this time from Juggernaut Books will be out next month. My grandson was the inspiration, but I so hope little children all over the world will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

With my grandson, my biggest competitor now is the online version of Masha and the Bear. He has fixed quotas of screen time, and eagerly waits to see the next episode. His absorption is complete, his attention riveted to the ipad. He can’t even SEE me then.

It is really tough to parent children in this digital age.

So many questions arise. How much screen time should a child have? Is it ok to read books online? How does one keep the child interested in physical books?

There is a lot of research that tells us that children are not well served by too much screen time. Your recent guest – Dr Maryanne Wolfe talks about the deep reading brain and the perils of digital reading. She believes that digital mediums tend to push us towards skim-reading or browsing, and that skimming is bad for the brain.

This study by the National Literacy Trust (UK) on children and e-reading finds data to support Wolf’s theory that skim reading is bad But it also gives a sense of how one can move forward, by showing that it is digital alone that is bad – mixed medium reading ends up being good. The takeaway here is that to cultivate a reader, you need some physical books. But to sustain the reading habit, a mix works just as well.

Which brings me to an important point. We know that the digital age is here to stay. Today’s generation are digital natives, compared to their parents, who were digital migrants. So it is useless to fight against the myriads screens in their lives. Instead, how can the whole community of experts come together with the communities of creative artists to design a new digital pedagogy ? How can we de-risk from fractured attention? How can we protect children from digital addiction? How can we challenge the algorithms based on artificial intelligence that keep children glued to the screen? How can we bring in a new code of ethics? How can we help parents to better understand how to find the good stuff online? At the same time, how can we help them not to fear technology and its ill effects? After all, these are ancient problems. Parents and educators had the same issues with TV too. Groucho Marx famously said – “ I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” It illustrates the same issues we face today. How can we all engage in making technology work better for us all?

That is the real challenge before us. It is a call to action, which will require creative collaboration and perseverance. I do hope there will be much more of a discourse around this, and literature festivals may be one place to begin.

Meanwhile, we must continue our efforts to surround children with good physical books.

The earlier the better. Now that so much more is known about how children learn, and how quickly they start to map their world, I believe we need a new societal mission – ‘A book in every baby’s hand’.

And not just A book. As Thomas Aquinas said so long ago – ‘Beware of the person of one book.’

Let children read many, many books, all kinds of books, the more diverse the better. I am so grateful that my grandson now has so many Indian books from so many publishers that help him understand other lives. If we have to counter the polarisation that is threatening democracy all over the world, we need to start with good books for young children. After all, as Ray Bradbury said, “ You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” We simply cannot afford that for our country. We need a generation of children who are open-minded, curious, empathetic and capable of critical analysis. All these qualities can be nurtured by reading through a library of good books. Truly, to give the gift of a reading life is the best gift of all to hand over to future citizens.

The Indian publishing industry has come a long way in a short time to rise to the challenge of producing good literature rooted in the country’s diverse cultures. Literature festivals and book awards are pathways to spread the joy of reading those books to every child in this country. So, thank you, Neev, and thank you to every single caring adult who brings a child to the magical moment at which, as Marcel Proust so wisely says, the end of the author’s wisdom appears to us at but the beginning of ours.

Rohini’s Comments at SVP, Bangalore All Partners Meet

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.

Rohini Nilekani: On my journey as a philanthropist

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.

Closing Keynote | Strategic Non-Profit Management India | 2019

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.