Rohini Nilekani’s talk on the role of societal platforms in education made at the Akshara Foundation’s event on Maths: #ItAllAddsUp. How can we distribute the ability to solve issues together and restore the agency of every person in the system, so that they can also become part of the solution?
I’ve been at the Akshara Foundation from its inception until 2007. Under Ashok’s leadership, it has continued to grow from strength to strength. Today the Akshara Foundation is not just about itself, but it is about the 200 million children in this country that need serious help. The ASER 2018 has shown us that within the education sector, progress is very slow, in this country, if it is happening at all. Every time we look at ASER, it’s hard to understand how we are managing to let the children of this country down, despite all of the people who are working so hard to avoid this. Why are we not able to fulfil the basic needs of the children, so they can learn better? When you read that only one-third of children in the fifth grade can do basic arithmetic, you really begin to reassess the impact of the work that you’re doing. We need to re-energise ourselves and continue, because when we talk about education, it is a societal mission.
Collective Responsibility
It’s not just the responsibility of teachers, the school system, the government, or the parents to ensure that the young people of this country get a good education. It’s a societal need, a requirement that should concern everyone, that children should be educated, in order to become good citizens and participate fully in this democracy. I’ve always thought of this work as a societal mission, and the samaaj, bazaar, and sarkaar must come together to solve a large, complex societal problem like education.
So if these three bodies – the samaaj (civil society), the bazaar (markets), and the sarkaar (state) – must work in a continuum to solve problems like education, then we need to start thinking of these as a team. How do we make their collaboration easier? How do we reduce the friction between these sectors, so that they can collaborate and give the best of themselves? They all have different talents. Civil society is good at working from the heart, being passionate and forming the grassroot level of projects, as well as innovating and taking risks since they can see the results on the ground. The government has the mandate and the ability to take things to massive scale, and no other entity can compete with the amount of power and effect of the state. Meanwhile, the market is good at identifying spaces that can be financially viable and sustainable. We need all of these aspects, for everybody to work in sync. So the question of reducing friction and collaboration was one that the Societal Platform Team is concerned with. We believe that societal platforms are therefore one way to address these large, complex, socially dynamic, and ever-changing problems.
Part of the Solution
We are more than the sum of our parts. So how can we distribute the ability to solve issues together? How can we restore the agency of every person in the system, so that they can also become part of the solution, and just not remain part of a problem that somebody else has to solve? Restoring people’s agency is incredibly important when we think about designing societal platforms. It’s not just about telling somebody what to do, but igniting their own ability and imagination. This is especially crucial in a country as diverse as India.
The model of one person having a great idea that is implemented across villages and cities, would never work here, where a distance of 100 kilometres may mean a different language and culture. Even within a small village you can have so many kinds of communities and cultures. However, we do need a unified system, because there are some common goals that we all share. So how can you have a unified system, but not a uniform one? How can you allow diversity to play at scale? This was another fundamental design principle that has been occupying us for the last four years that we’ve been talking about this.
The other factor to consider is scale. If I work with one child, it’s wonderful because that’s what I am able to do. But the need is for 300 million children. That’s the scale that at least some of us need to be thinking at, because unless every last child is looked after, we have not solved the problem. Meanwhile, the problem keeps getting more complex. So, if we’re aspiring to solve this issue at scale, we need to keep these principles in mind: to restore agency, distribute the ability to solve, and be unified but not uniform.
Nandan and I realised that we would also need to use technology to our advantage. We are not going to be technology-led but we have to be technology-enabled. So all these marvellous new digital technologies that allow us to WhatsApp recipes and share photos, can also help us to do all kinds of other social good. So we began to think about how we could converge the best of those technologies to allow the kind of scale and participation that we are aiming for.
In the meantime, we started EkStep in pursuit of an answer to some of these questions about how to increase access to learning opportunities for children. Our target is to reach 200 million children, so hopefully in the next couple of years I can talk about how far we’ve come. After 20 years of experience in the field, I think we’re somewhat poised to get to that number. There are a few things that make me very hopeful. Our team has been working very closely with the Government of India, and with several state governments. Some of the infrastructure that we have built, has resulted in the DIKSHA platform, the National Teacher Platform, which now puts a lot of power in the hands of teachers to learn from other teachers directly without a hierarchical system. So they’re able to build content, to use their creative abilities, and to be part of a system that gives them many more abilities that would be impossible without such a platform. So far, there are millions of teachers already on this platform, and our eventual goal is to have 15 million teachers on the DIKSHA platform, learning from each other in a dynamic way.
Meanwhile, we have been working with several governments to put in QR codes in textbooks. Two billion textbooks are published every year in this country. If nothing else, a textbook will find its way into every Indian home. So we can think of textbooks as an entry point, right to families, inside their homes. Unfortunately, a physical thing can only be static. But the minute we add in the QR code, we are able to bridge the physical and digital world. Even if the textbook was published before the latest scientific discoveries were made, students can scan the QR code and find a world of knowledge and possibilities open up to them. If the National Teachers Platform is working as it should, and if the teachers are engaged in providing the information to the children, it would allow children immediate access to evolving knowledge. Again, this intermediated from any hierarchical structures, since a child can directly access this, once the content is uploaded. I think between the QR codes and the National Teachers Platform, all of us in civil society, all of us in government, and even market players, can play a role to support education though these twin pillars.
The Framework of Accountability
In education, when you look at it, we have teachability, learn-ability and accountability. Any of the work you do will fall into these categories. If you want to improve the ability of students to learn (learn-ability), or you want to improve the ability of teachers, parents, or tutors to teach, it has to be within a visible framework of accountability. Otherwise how will we know whether the learners are learning, and the teachers are teaching better? So we do need the accountability framework.
I believe that we now have, through societal platform thinking, a fairly evolved understanding of how to create these pillars, and the continued involvement of civil society actors, i.e. the samaaj sector, is going to be incredibly important to make that happen.
When we have millions of teachers who are engaged with children every day, thousands of good and sincere civil society organizations working directly with children, emerging technologies that can be pulled in to support the work of government and civil society, the education sector will have its best chance to crack some of the problems that have plagued us for so long. When we build up a kind of momentum over time, there will come a tipping point, and we will be able to see the change. Of course, change doesn’t happen overnight, but I sincerely believe that we are at a place where we may see that tipping point in the next five years or so. It’s only by doing the work of distributing the ability to solve, restoring agency to everyone in the system, being unified but not uniform, and ensuring our approaches are not technophobic, that we can amplify and scale the work that we good work that we all aim to do.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Raghu Karnad at We the Women in Bangalore. She talks about why we must engage men as stakeholders and co-beneficiaries in gender equity.
Over the past 20 years of my philanthropic work, we’ve seen a fair amount of advancement with regards to women’s empowerment. Organisations have been working towards bringing and keeping girls in schools, working in microfinance to help women gain independence, and creating spaces for support like the self-help groups that 65 million women in India are a part of. You can really see how transformative this is for women in India, especially rural women, as they’re able to find safe places to share with each other, to get loans, and improve their economic and social lives. Through Arghyam, we’ve worked in the water sector, and have realised how much access to domestic water affects women’s lives. But while I’ve been engaged with this crucial work over the last four years, I’ve started to be concerned by the adolescent boys and young men who are poised to enter the workforce.
The Trap of the Patriarchy
In India, we have 230 million men just under the age of 18, more if we include young men between the ages of 18 and 24. We all know, through reports and surveys, that 50% of men in India seem to think it’s all right to physically reprimand a woman if she angers them, and that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. These are ideas that have no place in 2019, but here we are. What’s more concerning is that 50% of this new generation, of the 230 million young men still to grow up, might also practice these beliefs. So I decided to try and get to the bottom of this, and figure out why young men might think along these lines, and how to curb this kind of behaviour.
As I was reading up on feminist literature are trying to understand this, I realised that these boys are very much trapped in the patriarchal identities that similarly trap women. In the context of India, with our developing economy, these young people are the future, with unrealised aspirations, access to mobile phones and the internet, but undereducated, unemployed, and stuck in geographies where there are no jobs that match their skills. Too often than not, they have poor male role models, broken families and constant uncertainty about the future. There are very few safe spaces for them to talk about their sexuality, their frustration, or their fears. In the last 40 years, the non-profit sector in India has made tremendous strides. We have some fantastic NGOs that work with vulnerable girls and young women, to provide these spaces to talk, to share, to bond, to feel safer. But I believe there is a lacuna, because we have failed to address the same thing when it comes to young men and boys.
When we started looking into which organisations or bodies in India are working with these vulnerable groups of adolescent boys and young men, we found the number was very low. From among the ones we identified, we asked them to conduct a national conversation with NGOs who work with women, and some of whom work with boys, to figure out if they can collaborate on some innovative programs. For example, ECF works with 13 to14-year-old boys. They give them a space to question hierarchies of power, talk about gender and sexuality, and they ask them, “How do you feel about your sister, your mother, your friend?” etc. They give them projects to work on, and opportunities to develop a sense of ethical leadership that moves them towards gender equity. Perhaps more importantly, they get time, and space, and empathy. Men Against Violence and Abuse is another organisation working towards this. We need to encourage these organisations to flourish, and more to start this work, because I really feel there is no way we can achieve the goal of women’s empowerment, unless we also work with this group to make them feel secure about themselves and their future. They need to see that they don’t have to express their masculinity only through abuse, violence, or by generally trying to repress the power of women.
Let’s Talk About Sex
When we think about sex education in this country, it’s also a space that needs work. When we asked around, there were very few places where men could talk about sex. I saw a couple of textbooks with these diagrammatic explanations and I said, “That’s not how I want to learn about sex.” We need to be able to speak about it without shame, to convey that it is natural. But how can we look at sex without the use of power over the other? Along with sex education, we need to also teach people about consent, and what that means for both young men and women. I heard about someone who has started a subscription service, where women and men can privately subscribe and educate themselves, protected by the privacy of their mobile phones, which is a good thing because apparently young men don’t talk to their parents about this. Maybe someday they will be comfortable doing that. We have to eventually be able to talk about sex in a very young country like India, and talk about it with respect, without shame, and with ideas of consent and equity right from the get-go.
Over the past 200 years, feminism has crucially brought forth the issues faced by half of humanity who, until then, did not have the means to express themselves. Now I think we need to look beyond this, to expressing more human values at a time of political polarization, tremendous aggression in the public sphere, and an inability to actually talk to each other. We’ve come to a point where it almost seems as if we’re launching sex wars between genders. The problem with this is that the divide between people grows and we are unable to get together and speak across that divide. Instead, we need to find more common ground to engage in fruitful civil discourse. Those are the next steps that feminism, or humanism, should look to, where we innovate for a better future. This is our next challenge – how do we go beyond these divides?
When I talk about working with young men and boys, and allocating resources to be put into this space, I don’t mean we should take away resources from women. There is far too long a journey to be made to get women to become equal citizens, and achieve their own human potential. It’s not a zero sum game. Working with young men and boys doesn’t mean you lose something on the other side. I’m asking for equal work and creativity on both sides and there’s so much potential to do it, especially now. Gandhi comes to mind, when we talk about these issues of justice. When we are fighting against injustice, we should be careful of the tools we use, that the tools themselves don’t become unjust in the process. If patriarchy is a social problem, then we need to uplift both men and women, to show them that these kinds of toxic masculine traits, that suppresses and oppresses women, are not the only way to be.
New Beginnings
It’s a new journey, and from my work perspective I am very engaged and excited to see what’s happening. With the MeToo movement, I think we’re experiencing a very powerful moment, not just in India but around the world. Power itself is shifting, and when you watch power shifting, it has a domino effect on so many other societal issues, and that is what we are witnessing. There are precedents to this. In America, in the inner cities especially, black men used to mentor young black boys because they knew that that was their community’s only way out of toxic patterns of behaviour. In the Favelas in Latin America, there have been a lot of social experiments, where sports and music were used to offer young boys positive experiences of bonding and community. Other kinds of initiatives include structured classroom and non-classroom mentoring programs, one-on-one and one-to-many modules, developed for empathy creation, gender equity, understanding, experiencing, sharing, reducing fear. So there are examples of these kinds of undertakings, and I hope we can bring some of that here.
As women as well, I hope we can reach out to the young men and boys around us with empathy. At the end of the day, we don’t want women’s empowerment to look like the bad side of male power. So how can we keep the torch light on ourselves to not become that which we are currently against? If we can keep nurturing empathy in ourselves, I hope that our future generations will face a better world than the one we live in now.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s opening keynote delivered at the Impact Failure Conclave 2018.
When we think about failure, the way it’s received by samaaj (society), bazaar (markets), and sarkaar (state) are quite different. In the social sector, we have realised how important it is to recognize, talk about, share, and act upon failure and what we have learnt from it. Since we claim to work in the space of equity, inclusion, and the betterment of society, it’s crucial for us to understand where we are going wrong and to make those corrections.
However, over the years, India has moved from a culture of Swayam Sevaks or volunteers that Mahatma Gandhi and so many others inculcated in us, to a more professional social sector that depends more on donor money than input from citizens. In this new, competitive space, it’s difficult for civil society organisations to show donors their failures. Rare is the donor who agrees to fund an organisation further, after finding out about their failure. The direction the social sector has moved in the last three decades has made it more difficult for organisations to publicly talk about failure, but this is exactly what we must do.
Risk-Taking in the Bazaar, Sarkaar, and Samaaj
If we look at the bazaar, especially in the world of start-ups, failure is glorified rather than hidden away. There’s a ‘do-fail-do’ kind of mantra that people follow, claiming they are not failing fast, but failing forward. But from what I’ve observed in the social impact sector, this model does not leave enough time for introspection between those cycles. Perhaps not enough is understood about what failed. Before we can understand whether it was the idea, or the institutional arrangement, the market linkages, or something else that failed, the next cycle is ready to start. When it comes to the bazaar, there’s far too much emphasis on one form of failure and one measure of success, which is purely monetary. What happens when you only look at that first bottom line, is that the many other failures outside the activity of the bazaar remain hidden, and the cost can be externalized very badly to society. This is something that never gets discussed with regards to this cycle of investment and risk taking. It leads me to what Sir Nicholas Stern said, that “Climate change is the result of the greatest market failure the world has seen.”
In the sarkaar sector, there is almost no room for open debate on failure, instead failures have to be hidden or glossed over. Failed schemes and projects are replaced by shiny, new schemes and projects. When those also fail, the blame game begins. It is rare to find politicians and bureaucrats sitting together, hammering out exactly what failed and why. This is because in the government sector, personal positive action is so risky that people prefer to fail in smaller ways, than to be bold and take a bigger risk that might fail enormously or succeed tremendously. So they’re caught in this kind of conundrum, and when failure finally is recognized, it is recognized too late. It is recognized by auditory agencies much later, by which time the damage is already done.
Learning From My Failures
In all three sectors, failure can take different forms and be dealt with differently. But it’s important for us to talk about failure, because it means we can face it and try to overcome it, as a collective whole. Once we go beyond the fear of failure, so many possibilities open up. As with everybody else, failure has been my friend, my shame, my shadow, my guide, and my teacher.
I joined the Akshara Foundation in 2000, and chaired it until 2007. Akshara was set up with a vision of ensuring that “Every child is schooled in Bangalore by 2003” and although we’ve done a lot of work over the years, we have not yet achieved that goal. In retrospect, we were too ambitious, and we went too fast, too soon. We opened up activities simultaneously in 300 slums. We set up close to a 1000 small Balwadis, and we just could not manage the quality issue that arose from that. So we had to pull back and restart. When we did, we had learnt to take things much slower, and break our goal up into achievable milestones.
When I co-founded Pratham Books in 2004, we made the same sort of mistakes. We were innovating our hybrid model, and punching way above our weight. We were a small children’s publisher with a very big goal of delivering a book in every child’s hand. The organisation was wearing too many hats – we functioned as start-up, a platform, a market player, an NGO, and we were in a big hurry. We had realised that distribution was our biggest problem. In India, children simply don’t have access to books. Only the government had figured out how to put a book in every home, and that was a school text book. But for children to have access books outside of the school curriculum remains a difficult project. We tried different ways to overcome the hurdle of distribution. We even thought of sending books with SELCO’s agents into the field. When the solar panels were set-up, children were chasing the agents for books.
But this was under-capitalized, and opportunistic rather than strategic. We had to learn to let go of our control, and with the help of key team members like Gautam John and others, we set-up a completely open creative common platform for children’s writing. This meant that anybody could write, read, print, download, share, and even sell our books. We were able to open this platform up to millions of children. Pratham Books taught me about spending time on careful thought and design, when we’re trying to achieve larger societal goals.
As a donor agency, we have the ability to afford to take a lot more risks, so in the 13 years I spent working on the water crisis, I’ve experienced all manner of failures. Early when I started working on this, the government had started a scheme called Suvarna Jala, which involved implementing rain water harvesting in all the schools of the state. We partnered with them, and when we looked into it, we found a lot of data about why the scheme is not working. When we realised that, we stopped the second instalment of the scheme and saved a lot of money in the process, but we still didn’t get safe drinking water to the children. So we learnt that when working with the government, you must try to get in as early as possible, at the design stage itself. We went in to do too little, too late.
Another example is from EkStep, which Nandan and I are working on together. It’s an educational platform aimed at helping the 200 million children in this country who need access to better tools to learn. We wanted to put something in their own hands that would help them get there. We thought that personalised learning tools would help, but within one year we realised that was not the way to go and we returned to the basic lesson that we learnt at Pratham Books – let everybody do what they do best on a shared infrastructure.
The Ethics of Failure
I don’t want to glorify failure, because every failure we experienced did have a real social cost. But I think it’s important say, “Yes, we failed because we didn’t understand enough, wait long enough, think enough, or deploy the resources at the right time, in the right way.” Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon whose book, “Being Mortal” is on the New York Times bestseller list, had this famous checklist manifesto for improving processes in hospitals or medical centres. He tried a pilot in Karnataka, and they were able to achieve behavioural change, but were not able to move the needle on infant and maternal mortality. This world famous surgeon was the first one to acknowledge his failure, go back to the drawing board and figure out what is not working here. When people who are respected, speak up openly about failure and course-correcting, it’s both humbling and inspiring for the rest of us.
Gandhiji, who remains a beacon for so many of us, spoke about how often he failed in excruciating details sometimes. Gandhiji had actually failed as a lawyer when his brother sent him to Mumbai to practice. Apparently, in his very first case, he couldn’t even open his mouth to make his statement. He realised that he had this burden of debt to pay off as his family had spent a lot of money to send him to train in England. So he took the first opportunity he got, and set off to South Africa because he knew those debts had to be repaid. What a wonderful failure that was, which launched an adventure that encompassed all of humanity. He also felt very strongly towards the end of his life that he had failed to convince people about non-violence. He strongly believed that the philosophy was right and non-violence was the most important tool for social impact. But he felt personally defeated and the last few months of his life.
Yet that sense of personal failure left a rich legacy of movements of non-violence all around the world. So perhaps sometimes we can misread the signs of failure. What appears as personal failures in this life can evolve into success over time and generations. So understanding and introspecting correctly on failure is very important. High risk taking is considered almost heroic, so failure should also be talked about without shame. What should concern us more is when organizations or individuals grow, and start hesitating to talk about and share their failures.
Our culture is one where people are expected to talk about their own achievements and glorify success. So when things go wrong, each person keeps their failure quiet, and thereby creates a huge organizational risk, because it’s only when you catch failure early that you can correct it. Therefore organizations must learn to build a culture of admitting failure, not just in the start-up phase, but as they begin to mature and grow.
Sometimes it is critical to learn from our failure, and figure out whether it’s best to abandon a particular course of action. Otherwise there is a danger of what is known as an escalation of commitment. People double down on their actions, with the assumption that this time they will succeed. By doing that, we might even lose sight of our original goal, continuing to fail because we’re too scared to turn back and start again. We should remember that all failures are not equal. Some are very clearly a breach of ethics and they cannot be absorbed easily or glorified at all. A very recent example of this is Facebook and the congressional hearings with Mark Zuckerberg. We have to differentiate between failure from inabilities, and failure from an ethical framework gone wrong.
Risks and Rewards
What will come after failure? Resilience. I think resilience is a very key institutional metric that we should include in our self-assessment. Resilience needs a kind of leadership that allows people to take calculated risks and learn from what does not work, but also the leadership to convert failure into a springboard for setting more audacious goals.
Looking back at the 100 years of civil society institutions and leadership in India, we should be proud of the kind of risk-taking imagination at work, from the Independence Movement, and the Satyagraha Movement, to the Sampoorna Kranthi, and even the Green Revolution. The imagination of these civic movements was almost at population scale. It makes me wonder whether the last three decades has seen the imagination of Indian civil society shrink. As our population has grown, as our civil society institutions have much to do, it seems as if we are afraid to think about solutions at the scale of the problems. Perhaps that is what we are failing at, so we need to ask ourselves, why we are scared of scale. In the words of my mentor, Ralph Fernandez, “India is not a pyramid. It’s more like a broad diamond. And there are 300 million people at the bottom of that diamond. If we don’t think of things in those numbers, if we keep thinking on a small scale, in our little district, in our little block, in our little panchayat or city, how will those 300 million people get what they deserve?” It’s time to open ourselves up to the idea of scale.
Perhaps one of the reasons we have not been able to do this yet, is because the social sector has stayed away from the technology revolution. However, India’s young population is maturing in a digital age. This has many implications on the idea of citizenship, equality, and inclusion. The role of civil society in the digital age has assumed critical importance. So when and how will India’s striving civil society respond to the challenges of the digital age? There are many opportunities to achieve the societal missions that drives CSOs. The digital world allows civil society institutions to scale like never before. It allows for platforms to find physically distant affinity groups, build trust networks, expand to new geographies, and monitor and evaluate through instant data tools. The digital world is now largely mediated by corporations and is increasingly under government survey since there are many potential dangers as well. Which is more reason for checks and balances to come from civil society institutions.
Recent research has shown that one of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our own personality. In her book, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,” Carol Dweck talks about fixed mindsets and growth mindsets. Individuals can be placed on a continuum according to their implicit views of where their ability comes from. Some believe that their success is based on the innate inability. They are said to have a fixed theory of intelligence or of a fixed mindset. Others, who believe their success is based on hard-work, learning, failing and doggedness, are said to have a “growth” or an “incremental” theory of intelligence which is known as the growth mindset. We may not be aware of our own mindset, but our mindset is discerned based on how we behave and this is especially evident in our reaction to failure.
Fixed mindset individuals dread failure because it is a negative statement on their basic abilities. On the other hand, growth mindset individuals don’t mind or fear failure as much because they realise that their performance can be improved, and learning can come from failure. These two mindsets play an important role in all aspects of individual and institutional life. At the heart of the growth mindset is a passion for learning, rather than a hunger for approval. It’s hallmarked as a conviction that human qualities like intelligence, creativity, relational capacities like love and friendship can be cultivated through effort and deliberate practice. People with this mindset are not discouraged by failure but they see themselves as learning. I hope that we can inculcate a growth mindset for ourselves and for our organizations, because the kind of work India’s social sector does going forward will be critical to the future of this country.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk on how philanthropy can enhance social good given at CSDS, New Delhi. According to Credit Suisse, India’s richest 1% own 58% of the country’s wealth. Structural inequity is historically embedded in India, but it seems to be worsening. With this in mind, what is the public responsibility of private wealth in such a scenario? How can private resources be better harnessed for the public good?
In the past three decades, it feels as though the super wealthy have pulled far ahead from the rest of the world, and we’re acutely aware of this today. So it is imperative that we start thinking about how this happens and what kind of a responsibility those few have to the many. How do Finite Resources and the Public Interest collide, and what are the implications to the larger social fabric?
The New Class of Wealth
We know that globally, the richest 1% own something like 50% of the global wealth. Credit Suisse has also reported that 70% of all money generated is used up by a very small percentage of human beings. We can see the proof of this everywhere, as the so-called middle classes that were evolving have started to stagnate. Since the early ‘80s in India, we have been able to pull a significant number of people out from absolute poverty, but our middle class itself is not much of a middle class. Instead, we have an unattainable class of the super-rich. Since the days of fabled emperors and kings, we have not seen a super class that is quite as distinctly separate from the rest, until now. And when people get rich fast, it makes our society stop and think about what it all means. What is the responsibility of that wealth created in private hands? My theory is that modern nation states allow such rapid private wealth creation with an optimistic premise, that wealth in private hands will be as useful to society as if it had been taxed by government.
Now, is that optimism belied or is it working? It’s still unclear, but let us go with the premise that it is optimism which allow this kind of wealth creation. There are obviously other reasons involved that are structural, like the over-financialization of the global economy, a buccaneer-style globalisation, rapid technological innovation in a winner takes all format, and poor taxation regimes. All these things together has resulted in a kind of wealth accumulation we’ve never seen before. Of course, we’ve also witnessed pushback, with Occupy Wall Street, Tardif Springs, the Tea Party movement, etc. Recent movements in India also suggest a backlash again this new class of elites that seems to be separate from the rest of us.
One outcome of this super wealthy generation has been extreme philanthropy, at a scale we’ve never seen before. This philanthropy is separate from the kind of philanthropy that most people in the world do when they have a little excess. This kind of big, large-scale giving is quite separate from the normal charity or giving that most other people or institutions are set up to do.
Of course, this isn’t entirely new. Thinkers like Galileo and da Vinci were supported by the Medicis, as a kind of philanthropic contribution to institutionalization of their thinking. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Carnegies and Rockefellers set up their large philanthropic arms as early as 1905 to 1930, and the Tatas were already doing a lot of work. Sir Ratan Tata was channelling money to Gandhi in South Africa, and then IISC was set up in 1911. So it’s been more than 120 years now that big philanthropy has existed. In 1936, the Rockefeller foundation was set up. All these organizations have created institutional reforms, and tried to affect public policy.
For example, without the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the Green Revolution would not have happened. So many of these big philanthropic arms, that were set up a long time ago, did have a vast vision of improving society in whichever way their ideology saw fit.
But in the last 30 years, something very different has happened. The new wealth that has been created in this gold rush of the last three decades has yielded entrepreneurs who are older, more audacious, and willing to give away a lot of their wealth. Whether we agree with the way they give away their wealth or not, the fact is that today, if you have a Ferrari, you better have a foundation. If you’re wealthy, there is no way you can avoid being generous. Through my work, I happen to travel and meet a lot of the super wealthy, and I’m surprised by many of them, and their willingness to die without anything in their pockets. They really do subscribe to what Carnegie said, “To die wealthy is to die disgraced.” So we are seeing a very new kind of philanthropy, enabled and rocket-fuelled by the tech entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and other parts of the world who seem to have a rather different way of looking at the world.
The numbers we are talking about are truly staggering. The Bill Gates foundation has to spend $5 billion a year. It’s not easy to spend $5 billion a year. There’s The Giving Pledge, which Warren Buffett and the Gates started a few years ago, to which there are 172 signatories, including Nandan and I, along with three other Indians. The pledge is for signatories to promise that we will give away at least half our wealth, hopefully during our lifetime. If you look at the net worth of those people, it’s at least a trillion dollars and growing, which means that they have publicly committed to give away half a trillion dollars, and that money is on the table for societal good. That’s how much wealth is sloshing around in this big philanthropy bucket today.
So where is it all going? It’s going to all the traditional channels that there used to be, but it’s also going into very audacious things. One of stated goals of the Gates Foundation is to “stop child deaths,” i.e. prevent as many child deaths around the world as possible, by eradicating diseases and providing medical care around the world. Michael Bloomberg, who gives away billions of dollars, wants to stop global traffic deaths, and to stop coal plants from firing up around the world. Depending on where their heart is, these super wealthy philanthropists are taking really big bets and assembling actors to be able to move the needle on issues of their choice. In India too, we are seeing the rise of big philanthropy recently. Apart from the Tatas, who have been doing this for a very long time, Azim Premji, some of the Infosys founders and many of the new tech companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and the old industrialists have publicly committed to spending crores of rupees annually on societal good.
A recent report by Bain claims that, at this stage of the country’s economy, India’s wealthy are being more philanthropic than others were at the same economic stage. These philanthropists are talking to each other and learning how to do their philanthropy better, by continuing to take risks to solve some of the most vexing problems we’re facing. We know that education and healthcare problems are complex and ever-changing, and yet these philanthropists are committed to solving them. At the same time, the state seems less competent and less imaginative in the way they are solving these increasingly complex problems to do with climate change, emerging pandemics, and new job creation. So while we’re working on these new issues of scarcity of water, clean air, and clean energy, our civil society is also facing tremendous new challenges.
When the state is reducing its capacity and its budgets to solve these complex, and inter-connected problems, and civil society is facing its own new challenges, this new group of philanthropists are emerging in new institutional and societal mechanisms to address these problems. I know that there are a lot of risks to allowing the accumulation of both market power and philanthropic power in a few hands, and I think that society is also becoming very aware of this. So if you want to simply ask, “Is philanthropy a force for social good?” I think the answer would have to be “Maybe,” because the jury is still out. Is it really about generosity and innovation alone or is it about acquiring power by other means and in more and more anti-Democratic ways?
The Need for Checks and Balances
I appreciate the position taken by some, who say that big money can’t really create equality. Donor-driven agendas cannot replace a watermarked, participatory, democratic, civil-society-based approach to resolving social problems. But increasingly, we are seeing that these large organizations formed by big philanthropists are able to move public policy more rapidly than civil society organizations. For example, the Polk Brothers have consistently worked to support the gun lobby or to support the Tea Party. George Soros, whom I admire for many reasons, has spent billions of dollars and decades trying to work behind the Iron Curtain to create what he calls “open societies.”
Depending where you are on the political spectrum, you might see this as encouragement for your vision of society or an absolute threat. The fact is the money of these big philanthropists is the thing that is making these public policy needles move. Of course, other donors also share the blame for public policy. We know how the Rockefeller Foundation’s work on The Green Revolution looked very good at one stage, and today we realize that we need a much greener revolution, and that we have to pay the cost for the first Green Revolution. Nothing is a permanent solution, and some solutions often create another set of problems. But we are seeing these new, big philanthropists try to shape public policy at high levels, including the ability of governments to tax them.
So we can seriously say that the accumulation of this kind of influence over public policy must be taken seriously. Even if they’re only supporting art and culture institutions, those are the birthplace of ideas, and ideas rule over our public sphere. We must question whether the funding of museums and public sphere places should be privatised in a democratic society. There are risks, and many of these philanthropists may be the first to acknowledge that. It is up to civil society to help create new checks and balances on big philanthropy and its increasing power.
The future holds a lot of possibilities. People are talking about colonizing space, and preventing climate change through technological fixes. While I think these are bold, innovative ideas that deserve a chance, we also need new checks and balances on this power. Because I do believe that neither sarkaar nor bazaar nor the super wealthy should be allowed to undermine the basic building blocks of successful society – which is samaaj-based. This means the right to collective action, individual freedoms, public discourse, control over local resources, the ability and agency to solve one’s own problems, and the ability to hold the local government accountable for its public policy for the larger public interest. Governments should be able to speak for most of their citizens and not just for the privileged few.
There are checks and balances that can be put on private power, even on the power of giving. For example, just raising taxes on the wealthy may reduce their need to be super philanthropic in the first place. India’s tax GDP ratio could certainly do with the change. The great philanthropic foundations could be asked to be much more transparent, so that people have more data on what these organizations are doing. When people’s donations are going towards philanthropic causes and not the government, they have the right to know what impact their having and the societal benefit they are receiving from it.
There also needs to be a larger media focus on what the wealthy are doing, and what the responsibility of wealthy classes are to society. Civil society groups need to take this much more seriously because we are coming into a digital age for which I believe civil society is completely unprepared. We’re living in a technology-based world, and civil society needs to not only enter that age on its own terms, but it also needs to be able to develop the capacity to influence how the digital world benefits samaaj more than sarkaar and bazaar. That’s a long journey, and there’s a rapid learning curve.
All these things will form the kind of checks and balances that we are talking about. Having said that, I think philanthropy can be a beautiful thing. I think most philanthropy comes from love of humankind, the love of wanting to do something better for society, to leave the world a better place than you found it. Many of the super wealthy, including myself, feel a great responsibility because of this wealth. We believe that we are lucky, and a lot of things have to come together before the wealthy can realise that they are mostly owed back as Gandhi-ji would say, in a form of trusteeship. We need big philanthropy when government and civil society are struggling to be able to bear the extreme high risk for innovation in every sphere of society. Whether it is fighting disease, doing research, building the thousands of new institutions that the developing and developed world need in today’s circumstances, taking risks and innovating is crucial to finding a solution.
Even when it comes to climate change, if disasters should arise, we need the kind of philanthropic actors who will take action because governments will not be able to rise to the challenge rapidly enough. While we talk about the risks, philanthropy is voluntary and very diverse. It’s not concentrated in bulk, so the risk is less. There are people who follow every idea from every part of the political spectrum and deploy it.
Sometimes I fear that civil society movements are getting reduced to more identity-based groupings. The broad universalist, humanist utterances of Ambedkar and Gandhi are heard mostly in the sphere of religion and spirituality, from the Dalai Lama and the Pope, rather than from civil society leaders. Meanwhile, these super wealthy people that I meet are articulating universalist goals and putting their minds, their hearts and their pockets behind them. I believe very strongly in the power of intent, and for that reason alone we need to give big philanthropy a chance. There’s always good and bad in everything. I see a lot of good and potential in the ability of people to say, “I don’t need to keep everything that I earn because society’s allowed me to earn it. I need to give it away.” Taking on that responsibility is not an easy task. So three cheers to the power of that intent. We need to give it a chance while, as civil society members, all of us, improve the checks and balances on that power.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s comments on the “Digital Dependencies” panel at Digital Impact Mumbai Conference presented by the Stanford PACS on Feb 7, 2018. The panel discussion on “Digital Dependencies” was conducted by Lucy Bernholz, Director, Digital Civil Society Lab, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. They discussed ways that digital data and infrastructure create new possibilities for working across sectors and the new demands of these relationships – including governance challenges, challenges to the social contract, and the need for new institutional capacities.
I’m so glad this conference is happening because it’s a very critical question that we are discussing about digital dependencies. India’s very young population is going to mature in this new digital age, and I think it opens up questions for society. And especially for civil society and how it is going to react and create a whole new era of functioning in a democracy. I think from what I’ve seen of India’s civil society organizations, some of them have quickly learnt and joined this digital universe very effectively, but the bulk of the organizations probably are just waking up to its immense potential. And there are some organizations that are almost technophobic, and I think we need to address the fears that some of them have about participating in a digital universe that is controlled by large corporations or perhaps they fear surveillance by the government. So how do we bring them to the discourse table?
One of the things I do believe is that the same technologies that allow for surveillance equally allow for participation and sousveillance, which means looking at power structures from below. We really need to see how we can employ that potential in civil society’s work. I think that in the continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkar, i.e. society, the markets, and the state, it is going to be very important to understand that we can not hide too much from this digital world and therefore how can civil society organizations also act as a check and balance on this potential of technology to amplify everything, both bad and good? And how can we think of a new design for civil society itself?
Let me give you a small example from the work that we have been doing in Arghyam, which is the foundation I set up for water and sanitation back in 2005. When we developed the India Water Portal, which was envisaged as a knowledge platform on water, it was born in an area where some of these fascinating new technologies were not being deployed. So it is sort of an old fashion idea of a digital presence. And you can’t take something that was designed then and retrofit it. So we now have to rethink it completely.
On the other hand, EkStep, which is the learning platform that my husband Nandan, Shankar Maruwada, and I set up two and a half years ago, is already born in an age where so many digital technologies have converged and combined. So, the way this organization is born is very different. And we have had a sharp learning curve from our earlier work, my husband and I. So, I think this organization is developed as a new child of the digital age and incorporates a value structure which I believe is dear to my heart and very important to articulate — that this platform will be open, it will not hide behind proprietary walls, it will have many shareable structures. It has simple-to-use toolkits. It allows many actors to talk to each other. It is mobile-friendly.
We are talking about things like offline internet for those with poor access to the internet. We are also talking about creating three layers, a shared digital infrastructure, and toolkits co-created by many of the actors in that sector, and then an amplification layer. So, I think there’s so much tremendous potential for civil society organizations to scale their work, to find new partners across geographies, to de-risk from any local conditions, and to pull in the power of collaboration and co-creation. I hope we can enable India’s thriving civil society to participate more fully in this inevitable digital universe.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk on the peripheral status of men and boys in discussions on gender and the need for inclusive gender empowerment, at The Bridge Talks.
I have worked in the nonprofit sector for the past 20 years, and through my philanthropy, I’ve been active in issues of education, microfinance, ecology, arts and culture, and governance. Through my foundation, Arghyam, we support work in 23 states to help communities have better water. This has given me a window into grassroots organisations all around the country, working in especially hard geographies and social conditions. I’ve also had a ring-side seat the last 35 years, thanks to my husband Nandan Nilekani, at the amphitheatre of the corporate world, and have glimpsed at the innards of government. So my perspective comes from both the samaaj, bazaar, and sarkaar.
Has the Pendulum Swung Too Far?
Over the years, a few images have stayed stark in my mind. One is the huge yellowing eyes of a 12-year-old Musahari boy, from a small island in the Koshi river where no government services were available. He was suffering from kala-azar, was barely literate, and was waiting to be transported to a hospital. I also remember the copious tears of a young boy I met on a roadside with his sister. Although he had done well in his board exams, his father had said, “There’s no way you can study further, I’ve got you a job in a government organisation, and that’s what you’re going to do.”
I can’t forget the body language of both hope and despair of dozens of young men in an employment queue, armed with their school or college degrees, waiting and praying for a job that will barely hold their body and soul together, as a security guard or as a sales person. I remember the resigned look on the face of a very raw and freshly scrubbed pani-puri vendor in Bangalore, who had to hand over a bribe to a sub-inspector. Then I remember the macho threatening behavior of a group of angry young men who had stopped cars on a highway because there had been an accident and one of their friends had been injured. To me, these are snapshots that assemble a portrait, a gallery of the reality faced by 200 million boys and young men between the ages of 13 and 25 in this country, probably the largest such cohort in the world.
India has made great strides to reduce the inequality between men and women in terms of legal rights, economic opportunities, and personal empowerment. We have several laws to protect women and help them advance. One of the greatest institutions that we have supported over the last 30 years has been the development of self-help groups. There are 70 million women in self-help groups around the country, and that enables them to access credit, state support, and much more. We’ve included women by quota in local government, and India has the unique pride of having more than one million women as elected representatives across governments in the country. We also have several policies to support the education of the girl child and a special drive for maternal and child health.
But what is beginning to worry me greatly is whether we have swung the pendulum too far. Where is similar support for these 200 million young men? They also have rights, needs, and burdens, especially coming from the strong patriarchal structure that India has been living with for centuries. They are restricted by gender stereotypes, and by not conforming, they can be subject to merciless bullying. The concept of masculinity is very conditional — you cannot be masculine if you’re emotional, sensitive, or compassionate. We know how hard it is to escape these social beliefs, even though masculinity is being redefined in the 21st century. This is excluding all the added challenges of being a young male of a lower caste, lower economic class, or different sexual orientation. I’m talking about the burden of being a young man with hormones no doubt raging, with no kind of stable relationships perhaps, locked into predetermined notions of how to be a man.
The Gaps in the State and Civil Society
Over the last few decades, this conversation has opened up around the world but we have not been able to address it in India. Unless we are prepared to see that men are also trapped, I don’t believe we can make much progress towards true empowerment or gender equality. Often, people talk of men as the ones who need to change so that women can be better off, not what they need in their own right. Can we go beyond that thinking to analyse its root causes? Can we look into the faces of those millions of men, with their fears and insecurities, lack of access to good education and skilling, and the lack of jobs and secure relationships, and creatively confront the challenge to make a positive change? Where are the safe platforms like the SHGs for men, where they can share their questions about sexuality, the patriarchy, masculinity, and the burden of being male? Do we have structured activities anywhere in the country that are secular, not necessarily political party-based or religion-based, that get young men together to play sports, to learn music, to do theater, or bird watching or anything at all? Are there enough state-sponsored programs for adolescent, low income, urban boys? The answer to all is mostly no, no, and only a few.
If we look at our legal frameworks, law making in India can be pretty shoddy at times, and some laws might have gone too far to protect women, leaving men in a fairly precarious state. The Anti-Dowry Act is a rather vexed case, that has engaged both men and women activists alike. For one, I don’t think it has achieved its social goal of eliminating dowry. On the other hand, there has been some abuse of the law to the point where staunchly feminist organisations that I work with and know, have been thinking of relooking at some of its provisions. The Supreme Court in one case said, “As noted above, the object is to strike at the roots of dowry menace, but by misuse of the provision, a new legal terrorism can be unleashed. The provision is intended to be used as a shield and not an assassin’s weapon.” When non-bailable offences are created, the police need to be extra careful to screen complaints and to make sure that the accused can be justifiably arrested for the alleged crime.
Not enough of us are agitated about these issues, I believe, because we think that these things will not happen to the men we know. Take the case of Naseema Begum who in 1995, filed a case against a young man who forcibly kissed her, causing some injury to her lip and no doubt a lot of injury to her soul. The criminal case was settled in 2012, awarding the accused a sentence of six months imprisonment. An appeal to Sessions Court was denied, the appellant had argued that the accused was a juvenile at the time of the incident and should have been protected under the law that was then in force, which should have sent him to a Juvenile Justice Board and not a criminal court. But the court sent him to prison for six months, 18 years after the crime was committed, when both the woman and the man had settled into different marriages, and had children. The court had this to say, “In the instant case, as the appellant has committed a heinous crime and with the social condition prevailing in the society, the modesty of a woman has to be strongly guarded, and as the appellant behaved like a roadside Romeo, we do not think it is a fit case, where the benefit of the 1958 Act, leniency in sentencing for juvenile offenders should be given to the appellant.” When the law says that the modesty of a woman has to be strongly guarded, does that really serve men or women? I believe that it instead comes from the same strong patriarchal framework that we need to confront and possibly reject.
The state lags behind, but so does civil society. Through my research, I have not been able to find any kind of work at any scale, that focuses on working with young men or boys. There are two exceptions – one is MAVA, which is based in Pune and has done some stellar work to sensitise men, get them together, and allow them to talk. The second is the Equal Community Foundation, based in Mumbai. They do structured work with young people and create safe spaces for boys to discuss things that bother them, and to help with skilling. Apart from these, there are organisations like NOVO, Shadhika, and Oxfam. But these are just tiny specks in the ocean.
When the Equal Community Foundation went to West Bengal to see if they could expand their work, they spoke to 100 organisations and none of them had any specific programs for boys, even though they had many for girls. The philanthropy community is doing very little, and even the biggest European agencies working in this space gave only 5% of their budgets to this cause. One reason may be that while funders agree with the need for this, they don’t know what to fund. So we have a huge opportunity for young men to realise their rights, achieve their better selves, and be gainfully employed.
A Creative Challenge For Us All
In terms of employment, some progress has been made. Manish Sabharwal who runs India’s largest staffing company, TeamLease, says that today the problem is less of jobs than of wages. Ten years ago, the young people, who used to come to TeamLease asked for any job that was available, five years ago that changed to asking for good jobs. Now they ask for jobs that will pay them at least Rs.10,000 a month. Even that amount is barely enough to keep young men fed, with a roof over their head, and supporting their families back home. In Mumbai, employers get away with paying meager salaries, because most of the applicants stay in their own homes. But this means that employees from other parts of India are at a disadvantage. If we look at UP and Bihar, almost one out of every two children born in India will be from these two states. This forecloses their options in cities like Mumbai, where much of the economic growth is happening.
There are 150 million people who migrate within the country every year in search of work, and most of them are young men, Yet TeamLease has 10,000 open positions every day that they cannot fill. Something here is not adding up. Young men are desperately looking for good jobs and not able to find them. They have high aspirations and will not work without adequate pay and dignity. Imagine what it means for a country and society to have millions of idle, restless men, armed with educational degrees, and with no prospect of living the life they believe they deserve. If we look at the case of Nirbhaya, what was the trajectory of her life versus the people who committed such violence against her? Nobody wants to be a farmer anymore, which is understandable because it’s not very remunerative. The jobs that are available in logistics or in security don’t offer much satisfaction either. There are nine million security guards in India, where they stand at a post for 12 hours a day for meagre wages in a city with exorbitant prices.
200 million young men are stuck in low level equilibrium. What can we do about this? Firstly, they need better laws and policies. This is a challenge for lawmakers. There needs to be better public financing for affordable shelters, public transport, and identity-based access to finance. They need skilling and education, which should also be a concern for policy makers. They need platforms where they can safely explore sensitive questions, good role models, structured activities, and ways to build up empathy and self-esteem. This needs to be addressed by civil society institutions. They need all of us to partake in the civilisational goal of nurturing better human beings. We need to believe that everyone can change for the better, and those of us who can, should support the few organisations working in this space.
I believe that this is a creative challenge for all of us, and an urgent one. We have created solid legal frameworks and support programs for women. We need to recognise that we may have overcorrected for historical injustice. In their own right, young men need us to do more for them in our society, give them safe spaces to speak out, and different programs that help them get a boot up. We need to do this for men in their own right as well, for women to be more empowered. It’s now time to take this issue seriously.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk on Understanding and Resolving Water Conflicts, organised jointly by the Forum for Water Conflicts in India, TERI, and ATREE on October 5, 2016
One of the most important questions in the country and possibly around the world, is the management of conflicts around this key resource – water. My first disclaimer is that I am not an expert. 12 years ago, I set up a foundation called Arghyam through which I have been engaged with the water sector. I knew nothing about it before, I know something about it now, but every day I learn more. I have also been involved in a lot of civil society activities over the last 20 years and supported the work of amazing NGOs that do incredible work all around the country. My husband, Nandan Nilekani, has been in the corporate sector for the last 35 years, and that has given me a ringside seat to see how different fora in the world interact on issues like resource management and how the business community is responding to challenges.
So, today I bring you from a perspective from outside, trying to see upstream, non-water sector linkages to how they also impact the conflicts that you are going to be diving deep into, and perhaps to see if we can come at it from many different lenses.
Conflicts Are Opportunities I think all of us can agree that conflicts are opportunities. Sustainable shifts of paradigm can happen, can emerge from deep conflicts. For example, World War II with its tens of millions of casualties and a deep realignment of world politics, did allow for one thing to happen, which is the engagement of women in the workforce. In the last eight decades, women have taken back more and more space in the world to improve their own economic opportunities. So, I always think of this as one positive example, though it came out of one of the worst conflicts in human history. Of course, this does not mean that we should create conflicts deliberately just to yield beneficial side effects. But we need to acknowledge that conflicts can yield a lot of information about resources, competition, mismanagement, power structures, and latent demand.
So, looking at these conflicts dispassionately with a partly academic, and very humane perspective can really be the first step towards reducing or preventing conflict. Analyzing them and devising taxonomy and typology becomes extremely useful in terms of creating a whole basket of approaches for resolving current conflicts and trying to prevent future ones. It’s useful in this sector to have a Big Hairy Audacious Goal or BHAG, like one day there will be no more conflict around water. If we keep that as a faraway vision and then work systematically towards it, who knows what will happen one day. We have a long way to go though.
Over the past 12 years I’ve seen that sometimes those of us who engage in the water sector often come from a water mindset, and that could limit opportunities to look for solutions. I urge people working on these issues to sometimes step outside the sector and look upstream at linkages elsewhere that could help you with your own work. Broadly speaking, the two main reasons why there are conflicts are due to quality and quantity issues. We can immediately see how many externalities exist in the question of both quantity and quality. Agriculture, industry, culture, personal choices, and climate change are some of the many determinants of water conflicts. So, to prevent conflicts or reduce their negative impact in India, we need to start officially moving towards a low water economy.
In India, we have some history and tradition of being a low water society. Coming from a perspective of ecological and intergenerational justice, people have always thought of water as a valued resource that should not be wasted. So in a sense, we have a lot of rich tradition of being a low water society. Can we then also become a low water economy? As our governments draw us into the narrative of a high growth economy to lift people out of poverty, can we simultaneously look at being a low growth water economy? Can we design systems and improve processes so that they use less water? How can we look across the supply chains of agriculture, industry, and urbanization? When we design the next 7,000 towns that need to be updated with public infrastructure, how can we rethink water infrastructure so that the towns reduce their water footprint? What would this require?This will require immense data collection, analysis, and dissemination, but in a very transparent manner, so that all stakeholders can monitor the progress.
Farmers, corporations, and city managers need to have an idea of what their water footprint is, and then be able to set ambitious goals for reducing it. We must keep an eye out for all the amazing new technologies that make it possible to bring this data together from diverse sources, which may include crowd-sourcing, sourcing through research, sourcing through government data, primary data, or secondary data. There are many new technologies that have made it easier to do all of these things, and other technologies that enable us to create better visualizations of this data so that people can understand it easily.
Leveraging Technology Recently I met Alejandro Iñárritu, an Oscar-winning director. He’s very concerned about the issue of migrants, refugees, and immigration around the world. So his next movie is going to be a partial documentary using virtual reality. When I asked him why he was doing that, he said, “When you can allow people to immerse themselves in the situation of a refugee on a boat coming from Syria, for example, then you help people to improve their empathy.” So, unless we begin to exercise our empathy muscle I can’t imagine reducing any kinds of conflict, including the water conflict.
Technologies like virtual reality or augmented reality might be a way to create water consciousness in people by directly letting them experience things like the plight of people in the Bihar floods or the Cauvery basin situation. Imagine immersing yourself in Vidarbha or Marathwada or in Orissa where the Mahanadi issues are coming up. What will that mean in terms of moving dialogues and discourses forward? The water practitioner community has a role to play in feeding the creative imagination of people who are going to create such multimedia efforts. I don’t think we should knock this because it’s the way the world is moving, and we have to learn to move with them.
There is a game my son pointed me to called ‘Fate of the World’. It is meant for ordinary citizens to begin to address the extraordinarily complex problems we are facing today. For example, how on earth are we going to address climate change? Fate of the World allows you to actually immerse yourself in a global game, where you get to be a policy maker and figure out how to resolve things. What would you do about climate change? What policies would you think of? These are simple things that may trigger people to think more critically about their own choices. We have a sophisticated basket of technologies, at the back-end of these very serious gaming techniques. We have machine learning, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and as these emerge, all of us in the water sector have to keep an eye out to see how we can use these technologies to achieve our common societal goals.
Ways to Minimize Water Conflicts People have started talking about the world already being at peak water. Unlike peak oil, peak water seems to be quite a contestable idea because water is on an annual renewable cycle. However, it’s important for us to think of it this way, because what it essentially means is that we are using up our fossil water. We are taking all our renewable water for human use and starving the ecological needs of the planet. When we talk about peak water, we’re really talking about reaching the physical, environmental, and economic limits on meeting human demands for water and the subsequent decline of availability. But as I mentioned earlier, conflicts are always opportunities.
What happens when you hit peak water? Look at what’s happening in oil or other commodity prices around the world as we reach peak levels of commodity use, availability, or economic viability. In some parts of the world, we seem to have already reached peak water demand. To quote Peter Gleick from the Pacific Institute, the latest data (released in 2014) shows the continuation and acceleration of a stunning trend. US water withdrawals for all purposes are declining, not growing. The world’s largest economies, China and the US, are coming to grips with their water situation and rapidly innovating their way out of excess water use.
In five years, mark my words, you will see similar data coming out of China. They are working very aggressively to reduce their water footprint. India is at that cusp. Per capita consumption in some parts of the world is also going down, with more efficiencies built into taps, pumps, pipes, and shower heads. European cities are moving their norms of liter per capita per day (LPCD) downwards, from 135 to 100 LPCD. They did this because they have found that we don’t need more than 100 liters per person per day in an urban environment, due to all the efficiencies they’ve generated through reuse and making the cycles of water use smaller. So that’s interesting to us in India as we look at how we should develop our next 8,000 towns and cities. Can we take the 135 LPCD norm that we have today down to 100? Multiply that by the number of people, and you get significant water savings.
People’s eating choices are also making a difference. A recent study attempts to deepen the understanding of the impact of diets on resource use by analyzing the effects of changes in diet on consumptive water use at a country level and at a global level. It first analyzed the impact of modifying diets to fulfill the Dietary Guidelines by the WHO, and then the effect of shifting from animal-based food products like meat to more plant-based diets. In both analyses, the diet composition was kept as close as possible to the traditional and culturally acceptable food composition. The study found that by reducing animal product consumption, global green water use would be reduced by 21%. The effect on blue water use in food production would be about 14%. Now to think about this, the less meat people eat, and the more they care about local, organic, artisanal produce, what impact could it have on water futures? India’s people and their changing food habits will impact global green water use quite significantly. And one way to minimize future water conflicts in India would definitely be to include a national information campaign. We need a national information campaign on both nutrition and embedded water, and its impact and reflection on how we produce food in this country. In agriculture around the world, people are trying to produce more crops per drop, and to respond to climate change-driven changes in rainfall, both in terms of location and quantity. Farmers in the US are relooking at dry land farming. They’ve had so much drought in the last few years that they are rethinking how to have rainfed agriculture, but with much more innovation through technology. If we start thinking like that, the whole scenario of water availability begins to change. They have understood that it is less about maximizing this year’s crop, and more about protecting the crops of future years because they can see the patterns now.
Sometimes I feel that we have not yet caught up in the technological race in India. That may be to our advantage because now, we can perhaps retain some of our water wisdom, while bringing in new technology so that we don’t go the wasteful way of the West. We have the capability to look at diverse perspectives and data sources to build out models for future water use in India. The key is for us to keep pushing for data to be democratically collected, kept on open platforms, and shared transparently. When you put relevant data, democratically gathered, in the hands of people and communities, they are much more likely to devise their own creative social protocols, restrained practices, right price signaling, and other incentives that are required to manage water more equitably and perhaps a little more sustainably. The work that Arghyam and its partners have done in Participatory Groundwater Management over the last six years has proven this to us.
The Third Age of Water Industry is completely incentivised right now. It’s under extreme duress and needs to use less water throughout its production processes. Small factories in India probably suffer the most. Recently, a garment factory in Bellary had to quarter its production because there was simply no water. Similarly large companies like Mahindra and Mahindra had to shut down a plant in Maharashtra because they could not get water. Industry is very sensitive to the question of water, and most large corporations can’t get away with bad practices. They are responding and the government is also responding. In April, the Environment Minister, Javadekar, said that “India will aim to reduce industrial water usage by half in the next five years by using the latest technologies to reuse, recover, and recycle water.” These are things worth holding government to. We talk of surveyance and worry about surveyance, but there is such a thing as sousveillance, which means looking up from below. And that can create a very powerful push on the supply side to change behavior and be more publicly accountable. Never forget the power of sousveillance.
Meanwhile, bigger corporations around the world are signing on to a global campaign for water disclosure. This would mean disclosing how much water they are using, both in the factories, inside their fence, and throughout their supply chain. From beverage companies and info-tech to hospitality, automotive, and agro-companies, they are really trying to get more efficiency from their water. Often for economic reasons and because of public pressure, it’s getting harder for them to get the water they need, whether from the utilities, the ground, or the rain. Companies that achieve zero discharge, reduce their pollution, or improve their water efficiency are getting recognised around the world. This is one of the drivers for industry. There are many rogue sectors like energy and mining that are not caught up with this at all, but that gives us an opportunity to pressure them, when other sectors are leading the way.
Additionally, there’s an increasing sensitivity about wastewater reuse. The good news is that in India, we are so bad at it that the only way is up. After 20 years or so, we may actually have contained the global, and hopefully the Indian, demand for more fresh water. To me, that is a really positive way of looking at reducing or preventing conflict. Peter Gleick has said that, “the first stage of water was when human civilization had barely begun. Water was just something we took from the natural environment where we needed it. But as populations grew, as civilization expanded, and as cities developed, we outgrew our local water resources, and started to develop the second age of water. This was when science and technology began to play a role in helping us understand what we were doing to our water resources and how to access the water we needed in a much more concentrated, intense way. So we started to build dams, irrigation systems, water treatment plants, and massive distribution systems that characterize water use today. But the second age of water is also ending. We are moving into a time when the manipulations of the second age also are not enough. They have massive contamination, overdraft, and unsustainable use of water. We have contamination of water resources and water related diseases, and we need a new way of thinking about water.This is where the third age comes in. The third age is ultimately going to have to be a sustainable water management system. We will have to learn to live within our means. We will have to realize that ecosystems are a critical component of our water cycle — that it’s not just humans alone. That it’s humans and the natural environment together. The third age ultimately is going to have to be a sustainable age.”
It is absolutely critical to keep learning in order to solve the current conflicts that India is experiencing today. You will need to learn more about people, the environment, about sharing, power structures, cultures, and about the painstaking nitty-gritty of getting people to sit across in dialogue and hammer out solutions. We also need to keep our minds open to new ideas and to believe in the human capacity to innovate. If we take desalination as an example, most people’s hair stands on end because we’ve been trained to think of it as a horrible thing. It seems ecologically and financially unsound. But what if I stepped into the mind of a techno-optimist? What if we figured out a much cheaper, less energy embedded way to desalinate? What if we figured out what to do with the effluents and how to not impact the pH balance of the coastal areas? We have to keep our minds and hearts open, as we look into the future, as we look into the deeper and more politically complicated issues of issues like the Kaveri and Mahanadi basins, or even the conflicts around the local aquifer or local tap.
As we look at how to address water conflicts, we must be self aware, have a self-critique, and be open to different scenarios from different perspectives. Is it better to work with the politicians or is it better to work with the farmers? Is it better to go to industry or is it better to help people change their eating behavior? How will we, based on our priorities and our passion, focus our work so that we really get the best returns and we can reduce the human and the ecological damage from unnecessary water conflicts?
Those of you who are working in this sector are going to be the most important people in this country, along with our many leaders – because water management, reducing conflict, thinking of future generations, thinking of our fragile ecosystem is going to be the most important work. You cannot have economic growth without doing that. You can not bring prosperity without doing that. You cannot have peace without doing that.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s opening address on Collaborative Giving and the Path Ahead for Indian Philanthropy, on Philanthropy Day at DPW, 2016.
This is a really exciting point in the history of Indian philanthropy, where almost anything seems possible. It’s also a point where we need to be thinking about collaboration in philanthropy more deeply. Collaboration for collaboration’s sake does not mean much, and there are many philanthropists who operate very effectively on their own. Similarly, there are thousands of nonprofits in India who work in niche areas and work closely with communities in ways that you could not otherwise replicate at a different scale. That kind of individual passion and innovation has led India to have the most thriving and diverse social sector, perhaps anywhere in the world. However, I think we have reached a stage now where nonprofits and philanthropists are maturing and realising that no individual entity has all the answers. We need to be truly creative because we are living in complex times, where the problems seem to always run ahead of the solutions. If we put our heads together, perhaps we could innovate in a different way.
The Power of Collaboration
I was very lucky when I started out as a philanthropist in 1999. Before that, I used to dabble in philanthropy without calling it as such. We just gave forward because we had some surplus and we thought it was our moral obligation and strategic imperative as citizens to do so. So I was very lucky that my first activist-philanthropist role came in the form of Pratham network, which at the get-go was about collaboration and skill. There were already multiple nonprofit institutions within it and multiple donors, so I came into a platform where collaboration was built into the design. That was very useful to experience, including some of the chaos and mess, because sometimes everyone was pulling in different directions, and yet we had to combine to achieve our singular goal of “every child in school and learning well.”
It is incredibly helpful to have one big, banner vision that everyone can align with, because it means that even though people may have different pathways to that goal, they come together and work towards it. My multiple-year experience in the Pratham network started out as chair of the Akshara Foundation, and then as the founder of Pratham Books which I helped to steer for 10 years. I was also with the Pratham board itself. Through that time, I saw how strong leadership combined with genuine collaboration can build up one of the world’s largest and most effective nonprofits.
Of course, collaboration is not always easy. All of us have our egos and want to have our imprint on what we do, especially new philanthropists who think that the only way to solve a problem is on their own. After having been through the Pratham network, I also felt like I had to try something on my own. I set up Arghyam, a foundation that has been working on water and sanitation across India for the past 12 years. We have made many early mistakes, however now we have consolidated around two big programs on water quality, and three big programs on the water quality of groundwater — one of the biggest issues that we need to focus on in India. At first, I found it much easier to run my own foundation with my own money, since I didn’t have to worry about collaboration which involves institutional overheads, time, and compromises. It worked well for five years, but I found that as soon as you get deep into the heart of any problem, you realise that the problem cannot be solved by just one person. Collaboration becomes the essence of solution finding, regardless of the space you are working in.
Over the years, Arghyam has built many collaborations to come at the issue from different angles. We’ve created several networks, where multiple nonprofits have come together, like in our participatory groundwater management program and water quality networks. We have also started an India-wide springs initiative, where we are looking at India’s springs which are the source of water for millions of people. These water sources are disappearing by the day because we are not looking at the catchments and the quality of water. In order to take on a huge challenge like that, you essentially need to design collaborative frameworks, both of the people who are going to do the implementation and people who are going to bring in the resources.
So I was very quickly humbled at Arghyam, and we realised that we didn’t have all the answers nor the required skills in our own team to really solve this problem. Arghyam is now partnering with the Tata Trust as well as the Bill Gates Foundation and several other small donors to do this kind of work all around the country. Eventually you have to collaborate, but first you need to reach that point and maturity to be able to do so. The idea is not to collaborate because you are expected to, but because you are convinced that it is the way forward, to get results and outcomes that would be beneficial to all.
Five Models of Collaboration
There are five kinds of collaboration that I think are possible in the Indian social sector today. One is where you fund an existing organisation. That requires the least amount of collaboration because all you have to do is write cheques and be updated about their progress. There are many examples of this kind of collaboration, where an existing organisation has multiple donors that they stay in touch with, who help strengthen the organisation and make it better. Most of the large, traditional Indian nonprofits have followed this model. The second model is where one donor comes in and starts an institution, and invites other donors to join. There are many institutions like that in India, including the Azim Premji Foundation. They set up the organisation with their own goals and ideas on education, but USAID and other donors came in to support their work in the early days.
The third example is when donors come together to co-create a whole new model. Several knowledge institutions have come together in this way. Some of us have set up the India Philanthropy Initiative together under Azim Premji’s leadership, where we committed a lot of our own wealth to doing work together in certain areas. Ashoka University was similarly set up by a group of four donors who came together with the idea of building a world-class global university, and consequently managed to get 60 other donors to come in and sign on to their idea.
The fourth model is an interesting one to me, at this stage in my work. It is when one donor or a set of donors come together to create a platform in any one sector, which other donors can come in and utilise. The platform enables different actors to do whatever they want on that platform. Nandan and I have started something like this with EkStep, a technology-based platform. Through it, we hope to help 200 million children achieve their basic education outcomes. Our aim is to put this platform out in the public domain, so that others can build on it with whatever content or apps that they want to create. It’s a fascinating new idea in Indian philanthropy, and I hope in many sectors people will come forward to build out similar platforms. Going forward, I believe that technology-enabled platforms will allow other philanthropists and nonprofits to build and innovate on both sides of that hourglass structure.
The fifth and final model for collaboration is what the state does itself. The oldest idea that we have not forgotten, is the Green Revolution when the state invited Norman Borlaug and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations to support their initiative. Another example is NCAER, and more recently, the Bharat Rural Livelihoods Foundation (BRLF) where the government has put in some capital along with other donors like the Tata Trust. This foundation is an autonomous independent institution which is now going to work on rural livelihoods in the most backward states of India. So that’s a huge idea for collaboration as well.
We need to find the collaborative structure that works best for us, as we learn the ropes of giving forward. To me, what matters is that we are inspired and are doing this for the right reasons. We have a society where there’s so much inequity that we must feel the connections out there. So the most important thing is to follow your passion to make change happen, accept help from different avenues, and innovate as much as you can. Intent matters, and if you want something to change, it surely will.
This is an edited version of Rohini and Nandan Nilekani’s talk, The Next Big Thing — Quadrum Presents QED.
As Nandan and I travel, we try to watch out for new trends around the world. Even now, the world is divided into countries like ours, where half the population is still in the 19th or 20th century, in terms of their lifestyles and consumption patterns, and the other half comprising very developed countries. What we are seeing in the latter is that societies have now become post-accumulation and post-consumption. This interests me because in our own country’s past, we were also in a similar place. Now, in India and China we are more concerned with accelerating GDP and growth, while in Europe and some parts of America they’re talking about sustainable de-growth.
Collaborative Consumption May Be The Future
When we have these two attitudes, it’s interesting to see what social changes emerge from there. The collaborative consumption model or the shared economies are about a world in which we understand that there are limited resources. So you harness technology to innovate ways in which we can distribute and replenish those resources. For example, Adam Werbach is a young environmentalist who works with corporations to drive their sustainability work. He has set up something called Yerdle, where people can donate household items or things that they would otherwise throw out to people who need it and would have otherwise gone out to buy it. There is no monetary transaction involved in this though. Instead you get credits which can be used in creative ways to benefit the community. So people are moving towards a post-money world, which is an interesting thing to think about when we try to envision the future.
We are seeing examples of collaborative consumption across industries, with companies like Airbnb and Uber — instead of building new hotel rooms, we can use existing real estate; instead of having a million new cars, we use the extra time on individual cars which then serve as public transport. We did a small iteration of this at Pratham Books by creating a collaborative platform. We put out our books in the Creative Commons, another growing movement in the world. Instead of all the IP being locked in and only creating value for one organisation and its shareholders, this offers a possibility to open it out to the world. Our books are free for anybody to take, reuse, retell, remix, share, download, translate, and even to sell. The minute we take greed off of the table and think of these projects as something that can be beneficial to all of society, it allows us the opportunity to innovate without worrying about the bottom line. We would never have been able to create the distribution platform we did, if we had gone the normal route. And because of this, today our books are all read around the world.
There are so many areas where a collaborative consumption model would be beneficial, and one of these is the healthcare sector. Today India is the capital of TB, with pharmaceutical companies struggling to produce drugs that will work against TB resistant strains. But imagine how much quicker it would be if we had a common, open-source platform for drug discovery? Of course, the entity who produces it will have some economic benefits, but the point is not to lock up all value inside private spaces. This is a trend that I think we will see increasing in the future.
The Effects of the Technological Revolution
We are also going to see the rise of digital citizens. My 2-year-old granddaughter is so much more comfortable with the iPad than me. Now imagine 3 billion digital citizens, who may have devices worn on their bodies or in their hands, who will be able to access the internet and all that it offers. The possibilities that this offers are endless. On the flip side, I have noticed that the same technology that allows you to connect with people all over the world, may also lock you in a bubble where you may not know your own neighbour. These are the trends that we must watch for, bringing with it both the positive and the negative. We are seeing examples of this across the globe, with the Arab spring uprising happening alongside a rise in fundamentalism and the spectre of ISIS. All of these changes however, are fuelled by the technological revolution we are going through.
Despite this, when it comes to thinking about India I don’t think we can ignore the fact that half our population is still waiting for the basics. So those of us who can, must harness these trends and innovate solutions to create an equitable society. We cannot have a world where half the population has progressed, but the other half remains far behind. This disparity is not sustainable, especially when everything is so interconnected. I see it as an opportunity for us to use these new technological developments for the betterment of society.
As Nandan notes, every industry, business model, and delivery channel is getting disrupted, so within this chaos if organisations are able to spot the right opportunity, there is money to be made while also helping society progress. For example, one of the projects that we are looking at is how to address the challenge of applied literacy and numeracy. In India today, we have a few hundred million children who can’t read, write, or do basic arithmetic. If there is a way to address that using the available tools, it’s possible to create business opportunities around this as well as nonprofits. If we look at healthcare, it’s going to change dramatically in the next few years. With variable computing there will be hundreds of healthcare solutions available off mobile phones, wristwatches, headbands, Fitbits, etc. So it’s a great time for entrepreneurship and it’s also a great time to give money away. We can’t wait till we’re 80-years-old and say, “Okay, I’m done with my own consumption patterns, now let me give it away.” Of course, you have to look after yourself and your family first, but many of us have excess money that we need to start thinking about differently. Neuroscience tells us that we are wired for altruism — it actually gives us joy, in a similar way to the dopamine release after a long run. There is joy in giving, in whatever way you can, whether it is financial giving, or donating your time and energy.
We are seeing old power structures get undermined by technology, whether it’s healthcare, education, media – everywhere we look. There are many innovative social entrepreneurs who also need support. So if people begin investing in social impact companies, they will be able to make money as well as give back to communities. This is a great time to start philanthropy in innovative ways, especially if you’re young. It’s almost as if we are in a glass bowl, but there are so many who are outside of it looking in. It’s time we break those walls, and we will achieve this by encouraging young people to take up any cause they like and start their journey of giving. There are so many interesting ideas that just need a bit of support. This doesn’t mean that people must give up their personal pleasures or sacrifice something, but rather make that special time to give.
The Responsibility of Wealth Creators
Nandan likes to say he’s an accidental entrepreneur. Thanks to him being a successful accidental entrepreneur, I have become an accidental philanthropist. But even if he hadn’t, I’m sure we would have still ended up in the philanthropy space. To us, social challenges are the biggest and most complex issues we are facing, which makes them the most interesting to help solve. We learned through hands-on experience. The first phase was to give randomly, however we soon began the second phase of getting more strategic, assessing issues like education, water, and sanitation. The third phase of philanthropy consists of supporting the people and institutions involved in bettering governance, independent media, and environmental issues. I don’t believe that societies will allow runaway wealth creation by individuals, unless the wealthy use it responsibly for social good. They may be able to keep their wealth for some time, but it will not last. Public pressure will build up.
I often wonder why the government allows us to have such fantastic taxation rates. Many people disagree with me but I think our top 30% rate is extremely reasonable. Governments do that because they hope that those who make money and keep the excess will use it for social good, and use it more effectively than if that money had gone to the government. There is true responsibility that comes with wealth and wealth creation. Both Nandan and I feel very strongly that we have that responsibility and we must execute it. For example, Nandan believes that human capital i.e. people are what keeps societies going. Initially, he was doing a lot of work in higher education, like co-funding a thousand room hostel in IIT Bombay. IIT was not taking more students only because of a lack of hostel rooms, so they built a thousand room hostel and that took the IIT capacity from 2000 to 3000 students. That means that many more bright kids are getting opportunities. So that’s one kind of leverage that the wealthy have.
Similarly, we are funding a new institute for urbanisation because we think that India’s biggest challenge in the next 40 years is going to be urbanisation. India has 300 million people living in cities and in 30 years we’ll have 600-700 million people living there. Unless we can build sustainable cities, it’s not going to be stable. So we thought, unless we have people who understand sustainable urbanisation in the future, we won’t be able to get there. Therefore we are funding a university for urbanisation. We must be strategic in this way, by looking at where there’s a multi-tiered effect that we can bring on different challenges and provide funding for that.
Getting to the Root of the Problem
In a way, we have to do a root cause analysis. I can keep feeding hungry people, but that will not solve the problem of hunger, nutrition, or poverty. Many societies have succeeded in getting most of their population out of poverty or created enough public infrastructure so that private infrastructure is unnecessary, like good roads, electricity, and accessible water resources. We need to do a root cause analysis in any of the fields that we are interested in and support the alleviation of those things that have gone wrong there. Rather than putting in money to give people water filters or taps and pipes, we need to look at the larger issue of how to use our water resources sustainably.
If you want to clean the Ganga, you have to start at the Gangotri. Similarly, if we don’t do that in our philanthropy, we will only be providing band-aid solutions. It’s not wrong to give money to someone in need, and of course we should not stop doing that. But if we want to eradicate these issues from our society, we have to look at the root causes and try to address the imbalance of power. A lot of this happens because power is unevenly distributed in society, so I believe our work is also political in nature. I mean ‘political’ in the best sense of the word — to change the balance of unequal power. If more people had a voice, to become part of their own solution rather than just look like the problem, then the dynamics of the samaaj would change. That’s the kind of work that many philanthropists did in America and Europe, and we’re seeing the results in those societies today.
One of the simplest and most visceral joys for me is watching a child read one of our books. Children who have never had access to colourful books ask “Really, is this my book?” It’s a very powerful moment, when they realise that it is theirs. In a similar way, when you are able to help a community with an issue they are facing, it’s a visceral connection. For example, a tribal community in Andhra Pradesh was having serious water pollution issues. It was a hilly, tribal area in Maoist country, and the government system didn’t reach them at all. But with a little philanthropic help and technological assistance to people on the ground who were working on the issue, the community was able to solve its own problem. Today they have revived their own streams and created water filters. In fact, people from other communities have started to visit so that they can learn from them.
With a little bit of sympathy, it’s easy to see how much impact individuals can have on communities. As Nandan mentions, it’s not just about financial assistance, but rather whether you give yourself over to an issue. The more you give of yourself, the more happiness comes your way.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk, ‘Giving Away A Billion Books’, delivered at a TEDx Gateway event. Rohini Nilekani was the Founder-Chairperson of Pratham Books, a charitable trust which seeks to put “A book in every child’s hand.”
When I was a child, I learned a skill that I believe has given me the greatest joy of my life. Peering over my older sister’s shoulders, I learned how to read long before I was officially taught at school. Noddy was my first book friend, and he came to us in wonderful hardbound books that my sister used to borrow from the nearby lending library. He was so strange and unfamiliar, yet something about Noddy’s frailty and creativity allowed me to identify with him. That was the moment I was hooked on books. I was always reading, to a point where my mother had to drag me out from under the bed where I was reading, so that I could do my daily duties around the house. To this day, I read three or four books at any given time. I hope that this story resonates with many people, despite the myriad distractions we have now. I hope that many people know the feeling of curling up with a good book, being winged away to imaginary lands, and living vicariously through characters.
Decades later, I realised how much that kind of childhood was a privilege that only some enjoyed. For more than 12 years now, I have been involved with the nonprofit sector in India, working with Pratham, which aims to put every child in school and learning well. Through this network, tens of thousands of children in every part of the country were able to learn how to read, but we realised that they did not have any books to practice their new skills with. First generation learners, whose parents did not know how to read, did not have access to any books that weren’t school textbooks, which are not exactly reader-friendly. So this was the problem that we wanted to address.
A Book in Every Child’s Hand
India is a young nation, with 300 million children who need good books to read, year after year. Books get devoured easily, so more have to be produced all the time. However, approximately 25,000 children’s books get published every year. Further compounding our problem is that the majority of these books are only written in English and Hindi, in a country where dialects, and sometimes even languages, change every 100 kilometres. If we look at the United Kingdom, they have a population of about 12 million children. They produce 72,000 books every year, which means they have six books for every child. In comparison, in India one book has to be shared between 20 children, if those children have access to the book in the first place.While there are many publishers in India who put out fantastic books in India, unfortunately they are not able to reach many children. As a way of tackling this problem, on a cold January morning in 2004 we set up Pratham Books, with the bold vision of “a book in every child’s hand.”
Our goal was to create high quality content that was local and relevant, in a variety of Indian languages, and at accessible prices. This was the task we set for ourselves, which was easier said than done. We were complete novices at the art of publishing, and we quickly realised that we could not do this in a business-as-usual format. If we are talking about reaching millions of children, we could not use the usual retail model. Instead, we would have to innovate and catalyse the ecosystem itself. It meant that we would have to partner, collaborate, influence, and disrupt the system. Since we were a nonprofit, we didn’t have to get cramped by the idea of financial sustainability. Although we live in a world where markets seem to be the solution for almost everything, I don’t believe social problems can be solved by any one narrow model. So we set ourselves up with some philanthropic capital. Along with generous donations funding the foundation, we also had many volunteers, publishers, writers, and illustrators, who gave us their time and talent. For a societal mission on this scale, everyone would have to pitch in, and that’s exactly what happened.
Our plan was to innovate, ride every distribution channel that we could find, and try some unorthodox methods. For instance, there used to be Unilever Shakti Ammas who used to go door to door selling Fair & Lovely sachets. We sent our books out with them, which worked very well for a while. People who were selling solar lanterns also carried our books, to a point where the salesmen would be met by the village children running to them asking “Where are the books?” We have also been working closely with governments. The government of Bihar helped us to put our books into every one of the 72,000 schools in the state. Those books are still there, one of the few things to have survived the floods in the area, because they were laminated. We have also worked with railway stations and post offices —anything to open up and innovate the distribution model. The result is that in the last eight years, Pratham Books has produced 245 original titles translated in different languages for a total of 1,573 books. 10.3 million books are now out there in the hands of children. 10 million story cards have been produced, small sachet books priced as low as two rupees. And because our books are being shared, we believe that we’ve had a readership of about 25 million children so far.
The Power of Stories
It’s amazing to watch a young child experience their first book. I’ve seen how they clutch it in disbelief, because it’s such a novel experience for them. In North Karnataka, a school had been set up in a small town for the children of nomadic soothsayers who had never stayed in one place before. We had helped to set up a library there, and I’ll never forget the nine-year-old child read one of our Kannada books aloud in front of his whole class. He stopped everyone from clapping so that he could read the story again, but in English which he had also just learned. I think that’s the power of a great story — it inspires you to learn more. Of course, in India there are always many challenges. There are so many more children to reach and we can’t do it alone. We have to think differently and publish more books in different languages. But we also need a platform which is open-sourced, and which other people can build on. To this end, we have put 300 of our books out under the Creative Commons license, which allows knowledge to be created and to be shared without proprietary walls, copyrights, or patents. Our books under Creative Commons can be read online, shared, printed, and distributed. India is getting increasingly connected, through technology and the internet, so our driving motive was to get these books to children in whatever way we can.
The response we have gotten has been incredibly encouraging. Our online books have been read 500,000 times. Our texts and pages have been looked at more than two lakh times on Facebook, Twitter, Scribd, and Flickr. We have seen the power of creative collaboration, as people from around the world take our books and translate them. We have had translations in French, Spanish, German, Assamese, and an internet language called Lojban. There’s also the power of collaborative creation, which means we put our text and visuals out and encourage people to reimagine those stories. Collaboration is a must if we want to get children across the country to have access to stories. As an experiment, on International Literacy Day last September, we decided to put a book out and see whether our volunteers around the country would be able to share it with children in every state.
The book we chose was ‘Susheela’s Kolams’, a story about a young girl who keeps drawing rangoli-like designs everywhere. The results of our experiment were stupendous, with our online communities creating an offline storm. Our book was printed in five languages, and read out in nine languages including sign language. There were 419 storytellings and almost 20,000 children got to share that book in one day. Every single state responded and children all over the country got to read and learn about Susheela and her kolams. This is the power of the collective.
There are many problems in India, but there are also ways to cut through barriers and make each one of us part of the solution, not part of the problem. The future of India’s children depends of course on many things. It depends on their access to safe water, nutritious food, critical health care, and a good education. But that future also depends on a child getting a great book in their hands to give wings to their imagination. At a time when knowledge is power and creativity can mean freedom, children deserve the opportunity to cut out of the reality of their daily life.
