Type: Keynote

How Samaaj Impacts the way in Which Sarkaar and Bazaar Work

This is an edited version of a talk Rohini Nilekani gave at the offices of the eGovernments Foundation on how samaaj impacts the way in which sarkaar and bazaar work, and the role of samaaj in eGov’s mission.

The Continuum of Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar

Since the past 25 years, I’ve been deeply involved in the civil society sector of India, which is very thriving and diverse. From listening to people, especially at the grassroots level, reading a lot, talking to people, and observing what’s happening around us from the lens of Indian society, I have tried to create a certain philosophy for myself through which I can do my work and see the world. 

So, the theory is fairly simple – that there is a continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar. But we must understand that Samaaj is the foundation, Samaaj is the pillar, Samaaj is the first sector, not the third sector, as people sometimes call it. And over centuries, Sarkaar and Bazaar developed in the service of the Samaaj. The Bazaar and Sarkaar evolved as responses to the needs of diverse societies.

We are citizens first, not consumers or subjects of states and kingdoms. The Bazaar and the Sarkaar are set up and are expected to be accountable to the larger needs of Samaaj. So this is the starting point of all my philanthropic work which embeds itself in Samaaj and actors of Samaaj. eGovernments Foundation (eGov) is a Samaaj actor that is working with the Sarkaar and the Bazaar. 

Over time, this dynamic between Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar obviously keeps evolving and shifting, and there have been many tugs. At the heart of everything is always power and power structures. So depending on how power structures are playing out, the fluidity, roles, responsibilities, and strength of these three sectors can keep changing. For example, my lessons from the last century is that both Bazaar and Sarkaar became very powerful and extremely oppressive in many parts of the world. With examples like Mao and Stalin, we have seen how the state began to get very powerful and took over people’s lives, oppressing the Samaaj they should be serving. Post-World War II, as reconstruction was taking place all over the world, capitalism began to advance and make substantial inroads, to the point of even dismantling the Soviet Empire. The markets began to gain an increasing amount of power, which we can see even today. Back then, they called it the military-industrial complex, but the fact is that the market had acquired a lot of power even on the consumer side, affecting the Samaaj. Today we know what is being discussed –  how a clutch of transnational corporations, tech companies who represent the market, have pretty much decided how we should think.

An Age of Extremes

The pendulum has swung too far that in many cases during the last century, we have observed the market and the state colluding. When that happens, Samaaj must remain happy with crumbs. So this is really dangerous for Samaaj. And remember, Samaaj is not one homogenous unit. By Samaaj, I mean all the identities. Social identities that we hold, the human identities that we hold, the groupings that we hold, the institutions of society that exist – that’s what I mean by Samaaj.

But today, we are finding that individuals in the Samaaj sector are really subject to enormous forces of the state and the Bazaar. In 25 years, with the Internet and the mobile phone revolution, we saw individual liberties being stretched so far as well. Anybody can do anything they want from anywhere, at any time, and that includes the ability to spew hate and encourage violence, without any accountability. So from Samaaj side there are issues as well.

On the Samaaj side, we have begun to see a response to this kind of accumulation of power, which strangely enough gave individual liberty one last run in these last 25 years. I feel that we are in the middle of a huge societal correction, where we will see some new societal norms being formed around this notion of individual liberty, market power, and state authoritarianism in a digital age. I don’t know where this will lead, but I can see the corrections happening, they look like upheavals right now. Recent advances in technology have led to the fear of the capture of our days, and our hearts, and our minds by the power of the Bazaar through technology and the surveillance state.

Now, while all of this is going on, a lot of other things are happening that are very positive as well. I really don’t believe in black and whites unless I’m fighting with my husband, in which case I always do. But otherwise, a lot of very interesting things are happening in the Samaaj sector in response to this accumulation of power. Because when power accumulates, there’s always a responsive force that tries to pull it back and maintain a dynamic balance. And so you’re seeing the emergence of many civil society actors around the globe who are responding to this accumulation of power by the state and the market. And that is the interesting space in which I work.

Seeing Like a State

This brings me to the reason why this understanding is so crucial when thinking about organizations like eGovernments. I think eGov has done a fantastic job of working on the supply side for urban areas, which was so broken and almost non-existent before. The pioneering teams here did a successful job of coming from good intentions, and were able to gain the trust of the state at all its levels.

eGov was able to understand the political economy and work with the state’s institutions, bureaucrats, administrators, and officials to ensure more transparency, efficiency and accountability. But this was done from inside, behind the walls of the state. In James Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State, he talks about how the state needs to look after equity, since the market is naturally interested in profit. The main responsibility for maintaining equity on behalf of the Samaaj, falls to the state. However, while the state is mandated with the idea of equity, it often is more comfortable with efficiency. This is because efficiency is easy to measure, it is easy to design for, and it is a placeholder for equity. You feel like you’re moving somewhere good when you try to put efficient systems in place. So that’s what James Scott calls “seeing like a state.”

Here, the state looks to organize citizens and issues in a way that is efficient and convenient to deal with. So, you try to create visibility for the state, and not so much for the people. Scott describes many experiments, including Le Corbusier’s work, the collectivization of the farms in China, and similar land experiments in the Soviet Union. He talks about the redesign of agricultural places like Tanzania and scientific forestry in Germany as examples of actions that were designed to create efficiency for the state, but did not always translate into public benefit. Even with the best of intentions, the way the state sees us is very different from how we would like the state to see us. So when eGov is sitting on this side, we have to always keep in mind the original intention of eGov is to genuinely make the state more accountable to the public good in the best way it can. So no matter what all we do from the supply side, if we don’t hold this as a principal value of the design of whatever supply-side work we do, you may end up with unintended consequences.

For example, the Grievance Redressal mechanism, even if it’s designed efficiently, unless it actually works on the ground for citizens, it cannot be called a success. It may function beautifully from the state’s point of view, and it makes bureaucrats work more efficiently, since they can process 1,000 complaints at a time instead of just one. So while it brings efficiency, it may not bring equity, it may not bring well-being on the other side. This is why the lens of the Samaaj is crucial for eGov because you have come very far with bringing supply-side to some point where it understands its accountability, it understands the need for transparency, it understands how technology can transform the needs of the citizen.

So, now we need to identify the actors within Samaaj who can work with eGov to make sure that all the amazing groundwork they’ve been doing for 16 years gets translated into real public good. This might mean going back to the drawing board, to rethink the designs of some systems that are already in place. From the citizen’s side, what are the challenges for them and how can we redesign to their benefit. When we want efficiency, standardizing systems is the most convenient thing to do, but in reality these need to serve a diverse group of people. And if we’re trying to look at Societal Platform Thinking, where the goal is to address complex societal problems, one of the principles of this is to hold on to and cater to that diversity. This applies to the context of eGov as well. Diversity is at the heart of resilience, so if we want to respect and understand the importance of diversity, especially in a place like India, then we have to be willing to design for that diversity at scale.

Diversity At Scale

When we think of designing for diversity at scale, the challenge is figuring out how to standardize change. Cookie cutter standard mechanisms will kill diversity, but if you believe in diversity as a fundamental principle of good design, then you have to design for diversity at scale. Within the Grievance Redressal mechanism, for instance, the diversity of language has been taken care of, but there may be other contextual, cultural things which we might need to redesign for, to make it effective for both state and citizen.

This is what we’ve tried to do at Pratham Books, where we decided it was time an Indian publisher was able to distribute and democratize the joy of reading. We kept this principle of diversity at scale, to unlock the potential of ordinary people who created a whole reading movement for the children of this country. There are 250 million children in India, the total population of many other countries. So how do we unlock the potential of parents, teachers, writers, illustrators, translators, editors, and storytellers, in order to make a movement of people? We did this by creating an open platform, a Creative Commons platform, which allowed everybody to participate, putting a book or a story in every child’s hand.

Since I have left, the next team has done even better. Sometimes you have to leave so that the next creativity can come into an institution. And the next platform, called StoryWeaver, allows anybody, anywhere in the world to write and publish a story, to translate somebody else’s story, and to illustrate somebody else’s story. Of course, the original has to be acknowledged. You can print other people’s stories, you can sell other people’s stories, because once you take greed off the table, once you take certain power ideas off the table, you can unleash public good and creativity. So, tens of millions of children around the world have benefited by unleashing the imaginations of writers, artists, mothers, fathers, and teachers. But all of this comes from the philosophy that the Samaaj must form the base, and the Sarkaar and Bazaar should not oppress them. Instead, they should unleash the potential of Samaaj.

When we think about organizations like eGov, the time has come to shift to the Samaaj side and look at eGov’s work from that lens. We need to strive to not see like a state, but see like a citizen.

Bangalore’s Shapeshifts: A Personal Journey

This is an edited version of a talk Rohini Nilekani gave as part of a curated series called ‘Speaking of the City,’ curated by Bangalore’s World-Famous Semi-Deluxe Writing Program at Shoonya. Rohini talks about the city’s role in her work as a philanthropist and social innovator.

 

 

An Accidental Bangalorean

It’s been 35 years since our arrival in Bangalore in 1984. That’s three and a half decades, most of my life, and certainly more than I spent in Mumbai, the town I was born and grew up in. So clearly, I am a Bangalorean now, there’s no two ways about it. But we weren’t the first to arrive in Bangalore. Infosys and Wipro were the third wave, but it was the public sector institutions that came in the ‘50s and ‘60s that brought in new kinds of migrants to the city. After the public institutions like BEL, HMT, ITI, etc. entered the picture, they brought with them a lot of new people and a new culture to Bangalore. Then in the ‘70s there was a phase of government factories as well as the hardware industries that were being set up in the city. It was only in the ‘80s that the IT revolution truly began here. The government itself decided to set up Electronic City, and brought in a lot of companies, Infosys, very clearly a major one among them.

That’s what really began our journey to Bangalore. For Nandan, who was born there, it was like a homecoming, but it was new to me – and the Infosys story was new to everyone. The story of Infosys captured media attention in the early ‘90s, as India’s first software company to set up its own five-acre premises in Electronic City. In 1993, the IPO meant it would be a public company that was an emblem for this new narrative: middle class professionals who wanted to beat the dynastic capitalists at their own game. It reflected the idea that you could remain true to your values and could still ethically create real wealth and an institution to be proud of. For us, the story of Infosys has been running like a thread through our own lives.

When we first moved to Bangalore, we lived in a house in 4th T Block, Jayanagar, with D. Linge Gowda as our landlord. He had just run an unsuccessful election campaign as a Congress candidate against Ramakrishna Hegde of the Janata Party in a Kanakapura by-election, and had lost. It was great to be living close to the Gowdas. Every day, in the evenings, I would sit with his wife for half an hour on the steps going up to our little flat and she would help me learn Kannada. Thanks to her, I was able to get a bit of a grounding in Kannada and also learn about the local food, since she used to call me down to her kitchen to have “akki” roti and other snacks. With that foundation, I was confident enough to make full public speeches in Kannada, and I always hoped that my enthusiasm would make up for my poor grammar. I made many mistakes along the way, but I found the Kannada people were always supportive to somebody who was trying to learn the language.

We brought up our children here, in this beautiful city, and I outsourced a lot of parenting to Valley School. With its 100 acres for the children to play in and Krishnamurti’s philosophy of “no reward, no punishment,” the children were as happy going to school as they were to come home. We also did a lot of ‘bussing’ in those days, taking two, three buses to go to Malleshwaram, work, etc. My father-in-law, particularly, was a great supporter of anything to do with the public sector, and he taught me how to get around the city using public transport.

As a journalist I used to write for local papers, and one of the earliest things I remember was marching with an organisation called Vimochana, which worked with women’s rights. We used to have placards outside people’s houses where there had been dowry deaths. I went there partly as a participant activist and partly as a reporter and sometimes the police would come and crack down on the protests. I used to go to report stories at the BBMP office, and one of my biggest goof-ups was when the officer I had gone to meet was not in his seat, and I asked his colleagues, “Lanchake hogidaara?” I learnt much later that that was not the smartest thing to say. Then, of course, there were the same old haunts that everyone used to go to, like Koshy’s, Vidyarthi Bhavan, MTR, Lalbagh, Cubbon Park – we did all the things that most Bangloreans used to do then. I even went through a phase of wanting to do Urdu shayari, and I took lessons from a gentleman called Khalil Ur Rehman, who was a DIG Intelligence officer who gave up his evenings to teach me Urdu. These are the kinds of people you meet in this city, who are willing to give so much of themselves to help someone else.

Writing In The City

Since I moved to Bangalore in ‘84, I was writing for several papers, including India Today and local papers as well. In ‘87, Vir Sanghvi had taken over as Editor of the Sunday Magazine, so it was an easy decision to join the magazine. With Gauri Lankesh as my predecessor, I was in excellent company though I couldn’t stay there for too long. I was also writing scripts for documentaries, and doing a lot of children’s writing at the time, to keep myself busy. Then I wrote my first novel, ‘Still Born,’ which was definitely inspired by the city.

The story follows Poorva Pandit, a journalist who lived in Basavanagudi, but it was also about a Bangalore that was growing into new media, that was growing into buildings of glass and concrete; where Basavanagudi itself was changing. I’ve just recently learned that Basavanagudi is one of the oldest settlements of this new city we call Bangalore. It was set up in 1895 as a refuge for people who were escaping the plague. So the city was very much at the background of my novel, and in the story, Poorva actually uses technology to solve her problems.

One of the inspirations for that was Atul Chitnis, who was really the pioneer of the open source movement in Bangalore. So the characters of the city also found their way into the novel, including Dr. Sudarshan, who has been working for decades in the BR hills with the Soliga tribals there, where the story is also partly based. My second book, ‘Uncommon Ground’ was based on a television series I did, where I interviewed corporate and social leaders together. I got Anand Mahindra to speak to Medha Patkar; I got Aruna Roy to speak to Sunil Mittal and so on, as a series. I thought it needed to be documented into a book which was called by the same name, ‘Uncommon Ground.’

When I think about the possibility of a third book, my inspiration would have to come from the many city writers that I have been meeting over the last so many decades, including Vivek Shanbagh, Anita Nair, and so many others. Shashi Deshpande, with whom I have had the honour to interact and learn from, on how to have a deep commitment to writing. And I’m always grateful to have been able to get Girish Karnad’s blessings on things like Ratnam Books. It’s a great time to remember, that even if Girish is no more, his work will always continue to live with us and be in our hearts.

A Space For Philanthropy

My philanthropy would have been very different if I had lived anywhere else, because this is a city of reformers. I keep joking that there are more reformers per square inch in Bangalore than in any other place in the country. It’s like a landmine of reformers – you have to be very careful, you can trip over them anytime. The kind of passion, open-mindedness, and commitment that I see here has convinced me that there’s no city in India quite like Bangalore. So living here is a dream for someone who has suddenly accumulated far too much wealth and wants to give it away. There is a cornucopia of choices for Nandan and I in Bangalore, which I’m very grateful for, because over the years I’ve learnt a lot, there’s been time and space to experiment, and passionate individuals to work alongside.

Early on, I set up an organisation called Nagrik, after one of my very dear friends had been killed in a horrible accident. Kiran Mazumdar, Jagdish Raja, Muralidhar Rao, and many others came together with me, to start Nagrik for safer roads. But it was a bit of a disaster, with a steep learning curve for us. We didn’t have any clue how to do proper institution-building. But we spent a lot of time at the city’s 32,000 junctions, trying to streamline the movement around that. That experience taught me a lot about how to actually engage in public life, and helped me with the other institutions that I supported or started.

In 1999, I was lucky enough to be invited to join Akshara Foundation. Its goal was to get every single child in Bangalore in school and learning by 2003. Well, it’s 2019, and I think we did a pretty good job of mobilising the government and the citizens to make sure that all the public schools were doing better than they were before. We were also able to set up more than 1,000 preschool centres that we call “Balwadis” as part of the Pratham network. The Akshara Foundation really taught me about the city, in a way that all the buses and walks around Lalbagh could not. We set up preschool centres wherever there was a community need for one, including a lot of slum areas across the city, and worked with government schools to set up remedial education centres. These initiatives, however, needed citizen volunteers to run. We needed people who believed in the idea and were willing to volunteer their time, because they weren’t going to earn a fortune by joining us. We used to give a very minimal stipend. So for the princely sum of Rs. 500 or Rs. 750, and we tried to get volunteers.

Hundreds of people came forward to set up Balwadis in their own homes, bringing in 20-30 children from the neighbourhood and spending three to four hours trying to teach them. It soon became a movement, and I’m proud to say that for several years, we were able to sustain it. That’s when I got to see how the people at the margins of the city live, and how their courage, risk-taking ability, and absolute can-do attitude meant that they would do anything for their children’s future, and that education was going to be a very important part of it.
The kind of support that we got was astounding. I remember young Muslim women who came forward, in the hundreds, to become teachers and volunteers, setting up classes in their own home. Some of them would not have had been allowed to work outside of their homes, but this was seen as a safe space for them to go and engage in teaching young children. I’m so grateful the Akshara Foundation is still thriving and continuing their work across many states. Ashok Kamath who just became the Namma Bangalore Achiever was the Chairman and continues to do splendid work.

I also got the chance to set up Pratham Books as well because I was part of Pratham’s network all over India. We were creating many eager new learners. But they had nothing to read, except the textbooks that were sent home to them from school. It’s a tragedy that there were very few children’s books that were attractive, engaging and written in different languages for children to read. So we set up Pratham Books. I took on the responsibility to set it up in Bangalore, together with Ashok Kamath, who did most of the running of the institution. The goal was a book in every child’s hand, and in its 15-year journey, I’m proud to say, I was there for 10 years. Now Suzanne Singh continues to take it to newer heights, and we have reached tens of millions of children – not just in this city, but throughout the country. I think a mark of a good institution is when the founder can move on, and the institution can do better. And I must say, all the institutions I have left have done far better after my leaving them than when I was still there, so I must be a very good founder.

Arghyam came up first as my idea of experimenting with philanthropy, because we came into money suddenly when we participated in the American Depositary motif that we did at Infosys. I personally came into 100 crores. I didn’t need 100 crores for my own life, and we were doing reasonably well. So I decided to put it all into the foundation. But I didn’t know what to do with it, so I first decided to learn some philanthropy heavy-lifting. We saved many children’s lives by helping them get to a respirator in time, we set up yoga centres, and we did some air pollution monitoring.

But in April 2005 I realised that if one wants to be strategic and long term and solve a real problem in society, it would have to be water. So from then on, Arghyam focused on the issue of water in India. For the last 14 years we’ve been working all around the country with various organizations, and hopefully, I’ve made some impact in the water sector. Most of Arghyam’s work is in fact outside Bangalore, except for some peripheral work I’ve been able to do with our lake-saving communities. The last thing we set up ourselves was EkStep. Nandan and I began to work together for the first time in 2014, however we had very different approaches and I didn’t know if this partnership would last, but it’s been almost five years now, and we’ve been able to change the game, bringing learning opportunities to 200 million children, which is our goal for 2020.

But apart from these institutions that we were able to fund ourselves, we were also able to support marvellous people setting up their own institutions. Whether it was BIC, ATREE, or Takshashila; new think tanks and ideas like IIHS (Indian Institute for Human Settlements), each of these institutions was set up by fiery, committed, intelligent people who were able to build both teams and institutions, and Nandan and I have been really lucky to be able to support some of them.

On the arts and culture side, it was also exciting to find entrepreneurs like Arundhati Nag at Ranga Shankara. Bangalore needed to revive its cultural spaces, and she worked so hard at it, but one day she felt that she just couldn’t go on. So she called us we realised that she was almost there, she just needed this one infusion. The next morning, I went with a check of 50 lakhs, and within a few weeks Ranga Shankara was up and running. Today she has so much support, and they do 300+ plays every year. They have completely revived the cultural space of the city. So I feel very proud to be a small part of that. Similarly many other opportunities to enrich the community came to us like the Devnandan Ubhayaker Yuva Sangeet Utsav, a small festival that has provided a big space for young Hindustani musical talent to showcase itself. All these ventures need some philanthropic capital, and it’s good to see that Bangaloreans do come forward.

In fact, India is learning how to crowdfund, and Bangalore is a huge part of this movement. It’s not just the billionaires who can save this country. In fact, billionaire funding for social movements should be a very small part of anything that happens in the country. We just did a report on everyday giving, and Bangaloreans actually account for a huge chunk of India’s growing small-giving. That’s why I love being a part of the city, because the people here are highly engaged as citizens.

When we moved to Koramangala, I got to be part of the RWA, and that’s something that most people are frightened of because they have strict rules. If you park on the wrong side of the road, woe befall you. Somebody will come and move your car. But I’m very proud to see how democracy functions at this basic level. We call civil society the third sector, but I think that’s ludicrous. It is the first sector and it begins where we live, and how we engage with public issues there. So I consider myself very lucky to live in the third block, Koramangala, with all its feisty civic activism. It’s also taught me to question how we protect our commons. How do we prioritize whose needs to be prioritized? Our road is called “billionaires road” because Rajeev Chandrasekhar is on one side, and Pradeep Khar is on another side. But two lanes beyond me, there are people who don’t get as much water as we do, which leads me straight into 2014.

The 2014 election is very sharp in my mind, though the 2019 one is already blurred away. In the heat of that awful April, March, we were all campaigning. Nandan was on the Congress party ticket against the most invincible Ananth Kumar, and we already know how that movie ended. But it was really the most gruelling time I’ve had in the city, with a very rapid learning curve, because politics is the most difficult profession of them all. I don’t think any other profession in this world comes close. It is 24/7 and the kind of demands to come at you all the time are impossible to manage. My respect for politicians went up by 500% in those few months, even though I wouldn’t exactly want to emulate most of their practices.

We listened to people all day long, what they hoped for, what they wanted, what they expected. And we learned exactly what keeps this dysfunctional law, equilibrium politics in place – it is nothing but a system of patronage and brokerage, because nobody wants to solve it. It suits everybody at some level. But it has been allowed to continue like this for so long, which is partly why we have the city that we do.

Looking Forward

Sometimes I feel that this city used to be one city, but now it is many cities. In these 35 years, it has become many cities. From eight million people, it has become 13.5 million people. It’s a city I no longer know, because in some ways, our lives have also expanded with it. Though my political ideology was groomed in Mumbai, my political sensibilities were very much developed here – in this city of ideas and reformers, this city of curiosity, the diverse cosmopolitan city of many, many cultures.

But I also never expected, no matter how it grew and how dysfunctional it became, that it would ever be a city where Gauri Lankesh could be shot outside her own home, and where trolls could actually say good things about a man like Girish Karnad dying. No matter how much the city becomes unfamiliar, all of us have a lot of work to do to keep that original idea of the city alive. This is one of the oldest human settlements in India, constructed on the basis of diversity, of mutual respect, of a cultural exploration, of looking forward, not back. There’s miles to do, lots of work to continue doing as citizens of this utterly marvellous city to which I now belong.

Gender Equity – Including Young Men and Boys | 12th Dr. Lalita Iyer Memorial Lecture

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s speech, “Gender Equity – Including Young Men and Boys” at the 12th Dr. Lalita Iyer Memorial Lecture at IIM, Ahmedabad on April 13, 2019 at IIM, Ahmedabad.

When Nandan and I became wealthy, the responsibility of that wealth sat heavy on our shoulders, but the duty to give it away became something that we realised was not only important, but joyful. Over my 25 years working in the non-profit sector, I’ve been active in issues around education, micro-finance, ecology, arts and culture, independent media, governance, and water equity. This has given me a window into the work of grassroots organizations around the country, working in especially hard geographies and social situations. Through Nandan, I’ve also had an inside seat to corporate culture, and thanks to the Aadhaar experience, a small peek into how the government functions. It is this Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar continuum that I was able to witness, that gives me a lot of deep perspective. It’s from that perspective that I want to tackle the subject of gender equity, especially relating to the young men and boys of this country.

Snapshots of Reality

There are a few images and interactions with young men and boys that have stayed in my mind. One was in Ramanagara, Karnataka, when I saw a young boy crying in a public space, and stopped to ask him what had happened. He was with his sister and he was crying because he had done very well in his 10th standard examination, wanted to study further but the same morning, his father had informed him that he had got him a job in the local STC and that he would have to join the government. There was no question of his studying further.

Another was when our car was stopped on a busy highway by a group of fairly young men wielding lathis. They were stopping traffic to protest against a local accident but their faces were flushed with excitement and a sense of raw power. The youngest among them could not have been more than 10 or 11 years old. The last was the scene of an employment queue, where dozens of young men were waiting, praying for jobs. These were jobs like security guards, sales and service agents, or others that would barely offer subsistence wages. From their eyes, I could see equal parts of hope and despair. These snapshots assemble like a gallery for me, portraying the reality faced by 200 million young men in this country, between the ages of 13 -25, who lack opportunity, employment, and dignity.

This is why I started working towards gender equity, specifically by working with young men and boys. In the past 40 years, India has made great strides to reduce the stark gender inequalities, in terms of legal rights, economic opportunities, personal empowerment, etc. We now have specific laws to protect women and help them to advance, and have created wonderful institutions like the powerful self-help groups that 70 million women are participating in, that enable them to have access to credit, various forms of state support, and more. Most young girls and young teenagers are in school, and most have access to health services. We have included, by quota, women in local government. India has the unique pride of having more than one million women serve as elected representatives, especially across local government. We have also made serious progress in terms of maternal child health.
However, we still have a long way to go. Our newspapers report atrocities almost daily, where women are being violated and abused in shocking ways. It makes me wonder whether we are missing something here. While we work towards empowering women, which is crucial, are we actually ignoring the other half of the problem? Perhaps we need to pay more attention to the 200 million young men in this country.

Expectations, Insecurities, and Violence

As a society we force so many ideas on men – they have to be strong, bread-winners, successful, protect and bring honour to their family, and uphold the rights of women. But millions of young men simply cannot live up to these expectations. We see this even on a global scale, with ILO calling the young men of today a scarred generation. Too many of them are under-educated, underemployed and in fact, unemployable because they lack the new skills valued by the current economy, while traditional livelihoods like farming have lost their appeal.

Their expectations from women, especially, no longer coincide with what liberated women want or need. With no outlets to express themselves and perhaps no examples of how to be sensitive towards women, it’s easier to be in a gang, eve teasing women on the street, than approach them earnestly. The gender skew in this country, with 20 million missing women from female foeticide, actively hampers the life of young men. Finally, we constantly re-enforce the cultural separation of spheres between men and women. On all fronts, young men find their aspirations rising dramatically, but cannot seem to be able to realize their dreams. In her book, “Dreamers,” Snigdha Poonam profiles some of these young people and their aspirations and frustrations, and we see that what’s more difficult for men is that they watch their sisters, wives, or girlfriends move ahead while they are left behind.

The current reality is that too many young men are afraid and extremely insecure. They feel like they have no control over their future, but are not able to cry or share their fears. They lack male role models or people to talk to. Even within their peer groups, they can only re-enforce the archetypal macho image and pretend that everything is fine. We know what happens when there are millions of young people who feel this way, in any nation or society. It means that these young and restless men can turn inwards or turn outwards possibly in violence. Michael Reichert, the author of “How To Raise A Boy,” says there are three types of male violence – violence against women, violence against other men, and violence against themselves, and these three are all deeply interwoven.

India is a country with 600 million, half its population, under the age of 25. There are 230 million young men between the ages of 18-30. Some surveys show that 50% of Indian males think it’s alright or excusable to beat a woman who is disobedient. That means 115 million young men are at risk of being subject to norms that dictate violence against women. Does this explain some of the new atrocities that we hear about, or tell us why we are seeing the rise of male vigilantism? Perhaps we can’t say this for sure, but I do know that if we want an equitable country, we need to pay more attention to these young men.

They deserve to be listened to and cared for, to be educated and empowered as human beings. They deserve to fulfil their own potential, not just to support their families but for themselves. Boys need opportunities to express themselves and realise their identities as human beings first, rather than just as husbands, fathers, or sons. Yet, we don’t seem to focus enough on this demographic, and gender equity will never fully be realised until we do. For example, our legal framework treats one gender differently than the other, and since laws are a tool that reflects power structures, this becomes a real barrier towards gender equity and promotes a limited norm of male identity. In the recently struck down section 497 of the IPC, adultery was criminalised only for men. The corollary was that it treated women as property and that men could file criminal complaints against other men.

While things are in the process of changing, I feel that not enough of us are agitated about these issues. Statistics show that men are incarcerated far more than women, and men under 30 more than older men. We need to be careful about over-criminalizing young people, because there is enough data to show that it makes for repeat offenders and vicious cycles set in. There is very little public policy directed at young males, and both the state and civil society lags behind on this. When I was trying to start a portfolio on philanthropy, I found almost no programs working at any scale with this cohort. In fact, I found only six or seven organizations that I have begun to support like Equal Community Foundation, Seguim, CORO, Swayan, and Pradan.

These are but tiny little specks in the ocean. When Equal Community Foundation went to West Bengal to look at expanding their work, they spoke to 100 organizations. None had any gender-specific programs for boys, though they had many for girls. The philanthropy community also needs to step up in this regard. Even the biggest European agencies are giving only 5% of their budgets to this issue, because even though people understand the problem, they don’t know what to do and where to invest. So there’s a huge gap here, and young men are the ones losing out on resources and opportunities to better themselves.

Working Towards True Equity Through Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar

I think we now need to ask ourselves this – as we continue to work for women’s empowerment, can we also creatively face this challenge of young men’s empowerment? Can we innovate safe, shared spaces so that boys can talk to each other without ridicule and fear? Can we imagine social structures where young men can organize around financial and other needs? Can we make time for boys to learn about arts, sports, painting, music, and encourage them to pursue things that help them grow as human beings? One of the major issues with young men who are unemployed is the amount of idle time they have. This can be easily manipulated by political parties or religious organisations to encourage identity-based groupings and vigilantism, which is not good for them or society at large. We know now that people are not born with pre-formed repertoires of aggressive behaviour. These behaviours must be learnt, and the problem begins with how we socialise boys right from the day they are born or perhaps even before that.

Therefore it is important for us to question this idea of masculinity, for the sake of men and women. When empowered women enter into disempowered situations, they face a real backlash, because their new freedoms are actively challenged. In those cases, they have two choices – either they can rebel and suffer the cost of that rebellion, or they can give in which means they are moving backwards again. So empowered women need empowered men. We need to ensure that men are happy, healthy, and supportive partners to women who are also healthy, educated, and free to pursue their dreams. This is not a zero sum game because we need to work with men and women simultaneously. Change like this happens slowly in society, but we have to start somewhere, and the most effective method would be a combination of efforts from the Samaaj, Bazaar and Sarkaar.
When it comes to Sarkaar, we need policy changes, public financing of affordable shelter, better transport, identity-based access to finance, better wages, skill training, and more relevant learn-ability education. We need better facilities for sports, music, and every other life-enhancing practice, and we need better laws in place. When it comes to Bazaar, in the workplace, factories, and offices, there needs to be much more mentoring and creation of spaces to discuss aggressive competition and its impact. We’re seeing the corporate world changing itself, with companies doing work to advance society as well as turn profits. This is important, because we’re talking about equity and sustainability, not just “Quarter Se Quarter Tak” kind of profits. So this is a new opportunity to draw young professionals, especially men, away from the competitive, aggressive, masculine mentality that has occupied the stage of global capitalism. Therefore the corporate sector has a really important role to play in reimagining and reinventing spaces for the young men that it employs.

The Samaaj sector, of course, has a big role as well. Young men need safe, shared platforms where they can explore sensitive questions about everything from their politics, their patriarchal identities, their sexuality, and whether they feel trapped in them. They need good role models and structured activities, some empathy and mentoring. They need to build up their self-esteem, and become less afraid and insecure. This change starts with small steps, with each and every one of us. We need to open up these conversations in our own homes, at the dinner table or when families spend time together. We need to talk and listen to our young boys to make sure they don’t feel so alone and alienated. We may fail at first, but we can open up our minds and hearts and the power of intent will show through.

This is a creative challenge for all of us, and it’s also an urgent one, to help these young people live their lives with dignity. I’ve met so many young men who want to get into the social sector or get into the corporate sector to change the way capitalism works, and I feel so fortunate to meet people with such strong ideals. This generation is one that is on the move. Tens of millions of these young boys are moving onwards and outwards from where they were born or where they were stuck, to try to make something more of themselves. But they need society’s help. Even if they’ve been brought up with certain traditional values, they are open to new norms, especially on gender issues, and like young people everywhere, they are experimenting. If we support them, we can make it happen sooner than we think, and the whole nation’s future depends on how we engage with them.

Forty years ago we couldn’t have even imagined the kind of freedom that today’s young women have in small towns across India. I believe we can uplift young men’s lives in the same way, and create a vision of a kinder society for all. Mahatma Gandhi said, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” Non-violence as a political tool is only beginning. A country of angry young men need not to be our destiny. We could not have foreseen what happened with the freedom of women, and I believe we will be surprised by what we can do if we focus on true gender equity as a matter of national urgency. So let’s commit to a more humane, kind, and prosperous society where all our young men and women can be the best that they can be.

Embracing Risk: Solving our Societal Challenges

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s keynote talk on Embracing Risk: Solving our Societal Challenges at Dasra Philanthropy Week 2019 in Mumbai. Rohini talks about how we can take greater risks, both individually and collectively, how we can embrace failure as an opportunity, and how we can mitigate the downsides.

 

We’ve come a long way in the philanthropy sector in India. Apart from the older, well-known philanthropists, we are seeing the arrival of so many new and seriously committed philanthropists to the sector. But no matter which sector we are engaged in, as civil society institutions, corporate CSR agencies, or philanthropists, the problems seem to rush ahead faster than our approach. Despite our solutions, we don’t quite seem to get there in time. Even after decades of work in the education sector by so many civil society organisations, this year’s ASER report makes one feel as if we’ve failed our children who, even now, cannot do simple math in class five.

Collaboration Is Essential

It’s important for us to understand why we haven’t achieved as much as we would like to, though we have put in the work. I believe in the power of intent, so I think we are going to do better, but societal problems are very complex, and none of us — individually or as sectors like philanthropy, civil society, markets, or state — can achieve those things on our own. We know that. Real, far-reaching change requires the whole continuum of samaaj, bazaar, and sarkaar, i.e. civil society, markets, and the state, to work together to actually solve these complex societal issues. This is why collaborative action is absolutely essential, because different actors in these sectors offer different skill sets, and have different contexts from which to come at a problem.

Luckily, there is a lot more opportunity today to create these collaborative platforms, like Dasra, Co-Impact, and India Philanthropy Initiative, etc. To target an area like independent media, some of us have set up a collaborative giving platform called IPSMF. Another area for collaboration is climate change, for which The India Climate Collaborative has been set up with the help of the Tata trust, with the goal of driving climate change action among philanthropy and CSR communities. In other words, there’s tremendous opportunity right now to create models based on collaboration, which is essential. In our work, my husband Nandan and I, have begun to see how we can create a framework around collaboration, that we’re calling Societal Platform Thinking.

The Importance of Trust

But collaboration is easier to talk about than to actually carry out. There’s a lot of friction to collaborate, and maybe two reasons why we cannot achieve our intended outcomes is that we are not able to take enough risk, and that we are not able to really embrace risk. We don’t know how to trust, how to let go, how to get out of our comfort zones and do things that we know might fail. So embracing risk is a lot about failure and the ability to trust. When I say trust, I mean that if you are a philanthropist, you have to be able to trust your grantee partners, give them enough flexibility to change what they’re doing based on context, and not expect them to give you ridiculous amounts of reporting, just so you can feel like you’re doing all right as a philanthropist.

You have to be able to lead with trust, and in my 30 year journey in this space, I’ve found that the more I’m able to trust, the better I can lead. Of course, there are some caveats to whom you work with. You should be able to work with trustworthy partners, but once you start off with a relationship based on trust, magic happens. It’s the key thing if you want to achieve social outcomes. Embracing risk and allowing ourselves to trust really opens up our minds and creates space for us to act. We have to be prepared when we embrace risk, to embrace failure as well. Once you say, “I’m willing to fail,” it allows you to go where you have not gone before, with much more confidence.

For example, as our economy is growing, and as our government is able to do much more social spending, there’s a lot of attention being paid to how we can implement government programs better. Certainly, CSR has become even better at doing that over the last few years. There are many civil society organizations that have helped the government achieve its own mandate better at the implementation level. But there are so many areas of society that don’t get enough attention, where the government isn’t necessarily doing enough, and where we, as philanthropists and civil society organizations, need to do much more. Issues like mental health, disability work, access to justice, environmental concerns, are all areas that need our attention. If philanthropists and CSO organisations were to embrace risk and not fear failure, we could innovate solutions that could get us out of the usual rut of our societal problems.

We keep saying that the social sector doesn’t scale. However, if personal and corporate philanthropists were to say, “I’m going to go into slightly risky areas such as justice, and allow people to innovate, to fail a little perhaps, but then to understand why they fail in trying new things,” that might change the game entirely. I really believe that 10 years later, when we look at what’s happened during this new age of Indian philanthropy, we will be able to show something new, that perhaps had never been tried before. Sometimes I wonder if we are suffering from a lack of imagination. When Vinoba Bhave started Bhoodan and Mahatma Gandhi started the Salt Satyagraha, they were thinking at a universal human level of change. But now, when we talk about one district or even 10 districts at a time, perhaps it’s not enough. We need to go beyond just measuring things incrementally, and that means looking at a much larger scale.

How can we bring change at the population scale? There is a method to achieving that. Intent is not enough and the collaborative frameworks that we need to design for that scale is a crucial factor.

Lessons Learned

I don’t think we talk enough about failure in the sector. Failure can lead to a lot of interesting outcomes. Certainly, in 30 years, I have failed repeatedly in the work that I do. In an article I recently wrote, I was thinking about how Gandhi actually failed as a lawyer here. He just couldn’t get his practice together, and then he embraced risk and set off in a boat to South Africa. Look at what one failure led to — the transformation of humanity in some sense. So we should not be afraid to fail, but be immediately ready thereafter, to embrace risk and set out to sail to shores yet unseen.

In the last 30 years of working in the social sector, I feel like I’ve learned three concrete lessons. In 1992, when we started Nagrik for safer roads, for example, I think we didn’t understand the root cause of why our roads are unsafe. When you don’t go deep enough to analyze the problem you’re working on, you tend to come up with band-aid solutions, and the whole thing collapses under its own weight. The second lesson I understood when I worked with the Akshara Foundation, Pratham Books, Arghyam, and now EkStep, is that you need to clearly demarcate the role of samaaj, bazaar, and sarkaar and not confuse them. Allow the three sectors to do what they do best. But if you force bazaar to go below the line of profitability, if you expect sarkaar to do what citizens should be doing, or if you expect citizens to take on the ownership of what sarkaar should be doing, it tends to create confusion and not achieve the societal outcome you need.

The last thing I learned was that if you really want societal level transformation, you need to recognise that none of us have all the answers. But there are people who have answers in their own context. So the question becomes how we should distribute the ability to solve? A very key way to distribute the ability to solve, instead of pushing one solution down the pipe, is to open things up. We need to create platforms and allow public goods to be created from the work that we do. So for example, with Pratham Books, once we realized that we were to open up the creation, distribution, sales, translation work, i.e. once we created a Creative Commons platform where everybody could do what they do best, we were able to scale to tens of millions of children. So this is a very important lesson. When philanthropic capital is being used, that capital in the hands of government would otherwise be taxed. We owe it to the work that we do and to the ambitions that we have, to deliberately work to create open, digital public goods, so that other people can build and innovate on a platform that we help to support as philanthropists.

As we begin this new age of Indian philanthropy and re-dedicate ourselves, let us decide that we will commit to not just working incrementally, but in terms of societal transformation, and we will do that through collaboration, by embracing risk, and without the fear of failure.

Samaaj and Bazaar: Congruence over Divergence

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s keynote talk on Samaaj and Bazaar: Congruence over Divergence at Dasra Philanthropy Week 2019 in Mumbai. We often set up Civil Society (Samaaj) and Markets (Bazaar) as opposing binaries. In this talk, Rohini proposes that they have more in common and more to gain, collectively, in collaborating to uphold the Rule of Law.

We’ve all come a long way in the philanthropy sector in India. Apart from the older, very well-known philanthropists, we are seeing the arrival of so many new and committed philanthropists to the sector getting engaged. And yet as we look around, we see that no matter which sector we are engaged in – as civil society institutions, corporate CSR agencies, or as philanthropists – the problem seems to rush ahead faster than our approach, our solution, and we don’t seem to quite get there. 

Even today, after so many people and civil society organizations working in the area of education and most of the philanthropic capital having gone to the education sector, if you look at this year’s ASER report, it feels like we might have failed our children. Even now, so many of them cannot do division and multiplication in class five. Where are they going to land later, we know that.

So it’s very important for us to understand why we have not achieved as much as we would like to, though we have done so much. And I really believe in the power of intent. So I do think that we are going to do better, but societal problems are very complex and none of us individually or even as sectors (like philanthropists, civil society, markets, or the state) can achieve those things on our own. 

It really requires the whole continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar – civil society, markets, and the state – to work together with reduced friction to actually solve complex societal issues. Which is why we come to collaboration, which is absolutely essential as we need to account for the role of different actors in these sectors, the varied skill sets, and the different context from which to come at a problem from multiple angles. 

Luckily, there is a lot more opportunity today to be on collaborative platforms such as Dasra, Co-Impact, the India Philanthropy Initiative, and others. Some of us also got together to look at an area like independent media, and have set up a collaborative giving platform called IPSFM [the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation]. A very new and exciting area that we’re looking at in collaboration is climate change. Led by the Tata Trust, some of us have founded The India Climate Collaborative. It has fairly ambitious goals to spur the ecosystem around working on climate change. So there’s a tremendous opportunity right now to think of collaboration.

In our work over the last four years, my husband Nandan and I have begun to see how we can create a framework around collaboration. We are calling it Societal Platform Thinking. But I acknowledge that collaboration is easier to talk about than to actually do. There’s a lot of friction to collaborate, and maybe two reasons that we cannot achieve the outcomes that would come only through collaboration is that we are not able to really embrace risk and that we don’t know perhaps how to trust, how to let go, how to get out of our comfort zones and do things that we know might fail. So, embracing risk is a lot about failure and the ability to trust. When I say trust, it means that if you are a philanthropist, you have to be able to trust your grantee partners. That means you give them enough flexibility to change what they’re doing based on context and not asking them to give ridiculous amounts of reporting, just so that you feel you are doing all right as a philanthropist.

You have to be able to lead with trust. Through my 30 year journey in this space, I’ve found that once you start off with a relationship of trust, magic happens. Of course, there are some caveats to whom you work with. You should be able to work with trustworthy partners. But I just wanted to highlight that trust is key if you want to achieve social outcomes. By embracing risk and allowing ourselves to trust, we open up our minds and spaces for us to act in. We have to be prepared when we embrace risk, of course, to embrace failure. And once you say, “I’m willing to fail”, it allows you to go where you have not gone before with much more confidence.

So today, for example, as our economy is growing and as our government is able to do much more social spending, there’s a lot of attention being paid to how we can implement government programs better. Certainly CSR has become better at doing that over the last few years. There are many civil society organizations that have helped the government achieve its own mandate at the implementation level. But there are so many areas of society that don’t get looked at enough, where the government is not necessarily doing enough, and where we as philanthropists and civil society organizations need to do much more. Look at issues like mental health, disability, access to justice, environment, and livelihoods. If we were to embrace the risk and not fear failure, we would go into those areas as philanthropists and as new CSO organizations and innovate solutions that could get us out of the usual rot of our societal problems.

Sometimes, I wonder if we are suffering from a lack of imagination. When Vinoba Bhave started ‘Bhoodan’ and Mahatma Gandhi started the ‘Salt Satyagraha’, they were thinking at a universal human level of change. Now when we talk about one district or even 10 districts at a time, that is not enough. At least some of us should be able to say that we will go beyond just doing incremental things and look at achieving a population scale. There is a method to achieving that, and here, intent is not enough. We will need collaborative frameworks that are designed for scale.  

I want to talk a bit more about failure. Failure can lead to a lot of very interesting stuff. Certainly in 30 years, we have failed repeatedly in the work that I do. And in an article I recently wrote, I was thinking of how Gandhi actually failed as a lawyer. He just couldn’t get his practice together, and then he embraced risk and set off in a boat to South Africa. And look what that one failure led to – the transformation of humanity. So we should not be afraid to fail, but then immediately thereafter, to embrace risk and set out to sail to shores yet unseen.

I feel there are three lessons from all the failures that I was able to embrace in 30 years of working in the social sector. The first lesson is from when we started Nagarik for safer roads in 1992. We didn’t understand the root cause of why our roads are not safer. And when you don’t go deep enough to analyze an abstract problem you’re working on, you tend to just work on bandaged solutions. Due to this, the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. The second lesson I understood when I worked at Akshara Foundation, Pratham Books, Arghyam and now EkStep. It’s that you need to clearly demarcate the role of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar and not confuse it. Allow Samaaj to do what it does best, allow Sarkaar to do what it does best, and encourage Bazaar to do what it knows how to do best. But if you force Bazaar to go below the line of profitability, if you expect Sarkaar to do what citizens should be doing, if you expect citizens to take on the ownership of what Sarkaar should be doing, it tends to create confusion and not achieve the societal outcome you need.

And the last thing I learned was – and this is very important for philanthropists to really understand – if you want societal level transformation, none of us have the answers. But there are people who have answers in their own context. 

So, how do we distribute the ability to solve? A very key way to distribute the ability to solve, instead of pushing one solution down the pipe, is to open up, to create platforms and to allow public goods to be created from the work that we do. So for example, in Pratham Books, once we created a Creative Commons platform where everybody could do what they do best, we were able to open up the creation, the distribution, the translation, and the sale of books. We were able to scale to tens of millions of children. So this is a very important lesson. 

When philanthropic capital is being used, we owe it to the work that we do and to the ambitions that we have, especially now in the digital age, to create open digital public goods. So that other people can build and innovate on a platform that we support as philanthropists, in areas that perhaps people have not been bold enough to go before.

Dasra’s journey is synonymous with the new age of Indian philanthropy. As we begin this third decade and re-dedicate ourselves, let us all say today, no matter who we are, no matter what work we are doing, that we commit to at least in one area, we will not just do incremental but transformational. And we will do that through collaboration, by embracing risk, and we will do that without fear of failure.

Masculinity and India’s Young Men | Rohini Nilekani’s Address at OTV’s Prerana 2019

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk on Masculinity and India’s Young Men at OTV’s Prerana 2019. With 230 million men below the age of 18 in India, Rohini talks about how we need to start doing the work of questioning our understanding of masculinity and providing safe spaces for boys and men to express themselves.

 

Over the past few decades we’ve seen advancement in the field of women’s empowerment. At least 70 million women are in self-help groups in this country and they’re learning to find ways to make themselves stronger. But it has been a very hard journey and we still have a long way to go. Every day we hear of rapes, we hear of violence, we hear of fear. The MeToo movement has allowed some of these issues to come out.

But if we look at the flipside, there are 230 million young men in this country below the age of 18, and another 80 million men are between the ages of 18 and 25. If you look at the data, millions of these young men are uneducated or under-educated; unemployed or underemployed. Their jobs and livelihoods are at risk because the job scenario is changing very fast. Too many of them don’t have good role models in their house, instead they’re trapped by what we call the ‘patriarchy,’ in unhealthy masculine roles.

We expect our boys and men to behave a certain way, and they feel the pressure of always having to be like that, especially young people. Through my work, I’ve noticed that there is a lot of fear and a lot of insecurity among the men of India today. It’s a global phenomenon as well, because the future of work is not what it used to be. In their houses, they may find that their sisters or mothers or daughters are doing well, while they may not see their own path so clearly. So men in their own right, especially young boys, need some help. They need us all, as women and as citizens of this country, to notice what is happening to this cohort of 200 million young men. Unlike women, they don’t have safe shared spaces to speak about their masculinity, their sexuality, or fears. When do they talk amongst their peer groups, the same message of toxic masculinity gets reinforced. So there is no place for young men to go, young boys to go and ask questions.

My daughter has asked me, “Ma, how come you expect me to be very, very responsible but you don’t expect the same thing of my brother?” It’s true that we don’t expect much from them in the house as we expect from the daughters. But we expect other things, other signs of masculinity that we need to question. Do we always expect them to be the breadwinner of the family? Do we want them to be kind of sensitive along with being strong? They should know that if their wife earns more than them, that doesn’t mean they’re any less of a man. We need to start doing work that questions and allows them to question these narrow ideas of masculinity.

I’ve found that there are very few organizations in India that are doing this work. Many organizations who are working with women need to also start working with this group of young, vulnerable boys. They need to have a space where they can ask questions without being ridiculed. We need to create a society where men do not have to be burdened with old ideas of masculinity. It is 2019, and if women have changed so much, we need to give men the space to change. Otherwise, when an empowered woman enters a disempowering situation at home, she has two bad choices: One is that she can regress, or the second is that she has to rebel. Both are very bad choices. A better option is for those of us who have sons, begin these conversations in our own homes. We need men to be as empowered as we want women to be.

‘Role of Societal Platforms in Education’ at #ItAllAddsUp

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.

Gender Equity: Working with Young Men and Boys | We The Women, Bangalore

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.

Address To India Climate Collaborative

Namaste everyone. I’m so happy at the opportunity to address you however briefly at the beginning of the second convening of the India Climate Collaborative.
I think the time could not be more opportune especially when we are witnessing the human tragedy unfolding around us in the wake of the Kerala and Karnataka floods. But this is a good reminder that these kinds of things are going to happen often and routinely.
Up ’til now, while many things have been done, I think the samaaj sector has not come together with the feeling of urgency and the need to create impact in addressing climate change-related issues. I think this convening is going to be a very important step to say that the samaaj will move forward. The sarkar is already doing things because of its many obligations and its international commitments. The bazaar has been active in doing work on carbon tax and mitigation. It is a really opportune time for the samaaj to come together. If we can find innovative ways to collaborate and to be impactful… To actually do work within our own portfolios which already must have some climate change lens to be added to them and find new areas to work with… I think we would be doing a yeoman service very much required in India right now. I wish your meeting much success and thank you again. Namaste.

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Impact and Failures | Opening Keynote at Impact Failure Conclave, 2018

Rohini’s opening keynote delivered at the Impact Failure Conclave 2018

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.