Type: Keynote

Giving Away A Billion Books: Rohini Nilekani at TEDxGateway

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk, ‘Giving Away A Billion Books’, delivered at a TEDx Gateway event. Rohini Nilekani was the Founder-Chairperson of Pratham Books, a charitable trust which seeks to put “A book in every child’s hand.”

When I was a child, I learned a skill that I believe has given me the greatest joy of my life. Peering over my older sister’s shoulders, I learned how to read long before I was officially taught at school. Noddy was my first book friend, and he came to us in wonderful hardbound books that my sister used to borrow from the nearby lending library. He was so strange and unfamiliar, yet something about Noddy’s frailty and creativity allowed me to identify with him. That was the moment I was hooked on books. I was always reading, to a point where my mother had to drag me out from under the bed where I was reading, so that I could do my daily duties around the house. To this day, I read three or four books at any given time. I hope that this story resonates with many people, despite the myriad distractions we have now. I hope that many people know the feeling of curling up with a good book, being winged away to imaginary lands, and living vicariously through characters.

Decades later, I realised how much that kind of childhood was a privilege that only some enjoyed. For more than 12 years now, I have been involved with the nonprofit sector in India, working with Pratham, which aims to put every child in school and learning well. Through this network, tens of thousands of children in every part of the country were able to learn how to read, but we realised that they did not have any books to practice their new skills with. First generation learners, whose parents did not know how to read, did not have access to any books that weren’t school textbooks, which are not exactly reader-friendly. So this was the problem that we wanted to address.

A Book in Every Child’s Hand

India is a young nation, with 300 million children who need good books to read, year after year. Books get devoured easily, so more have to be produced all the time. However, approximately 25,000 children’s books get published every year. Further compounding our problem is that the majority of these books are only written in English and Hindi, in a country where dialects, and sometimes even languages, change every 100 kilometres. If we look at the United Kingdom, they have a population of about 12 million children. They produce 72,000 books every year, which means they have six books for every child. In comparison, in India one book has to be shared between 20 children, if those children have access to the book in the first place.While there are many publishers in India who put out fantastic books in India, unfortunately they are not able to reach many children. As a way of tackling this problem, on a cold January morning in 2004 we set up Pratham Books, with the bold vision of “a book in every child’s hand.”

Our goal was to create high quality content that was local and relevant, in a variety of Indian languages, and at accessible prices. This was the task we set for ourselves, which was easier said than done. We were complete novices at the art of publishing, and we quickly realised that we could not do this in a business-as-usual format. If we are talking about reaching millions of children, we could not use the usual retail model. Instead, we would have to innovate and catalyse the ecosystem itself. It meant that we would have to partner, collaborate, influence, and disrupt the system. Since we were a nonprofit, we didn’t have to get cramped by the idea of financial sustainability. Although we live in a world where markets seem to be the solution for almost everything, I don’t believe social problems can be solved by any one narrow model. So we set ourselves up with some philanthropic capital. Along with generous donations funding the foundation, we also had many volunteers, publishers, writers, and illustrators, who gave us their time and talent. For a societal mission on this scale, everyone would have to pitch in, and that’s exactly what happened.

Our plan was to innovate, ride every distribution channel that we could find, and try some unorthodox methods. For instance, there used to be Unilever Shakti Ammas who used to go door to door selling Fair & Lovely sachets. We sent our books out with them, which worked very well for a while. People who were selling solar lanterns also carried our books, to a point where the salesmen would be met by the village children running to them asking “Where are the books?” We have also been working closely with governments. The government of Bihar helped us to put our books into every one of the 72,000 schools in the state. Those books are still there, one of the few things to have survived the floods in the area, because they were laminated. We have also worked with railway stations and post offices —anything to open up and innovate the distribution model. The result is that in the last eight years, Pratham Books has produced 245 original titles translated in different languages for a total of 1,573 books. 10.3 million books are now out there in the hands of children. 10 million story cards have been produced, small sachet books priced as low as two rupees. And because our books are being shared, we believe that we’ve had a readership of about 25 million children so far.

The Power of Stories

It’s amazing to watch a young child experience their first book. I’ve seen how they clutch it in disbelief, because it’s such a novel experience for them. In North Karnataka, a school had been set up in a small town for the children of nomadic soothsayers who had never stayed in one place before. We had helped to set up a library there, and I’ll never forget the nine-year-old child read one of our Kannada books aloud in front of his whole class. He stopped everyone from clapping so that he could read the story again, but in English which he had also just learned. I think that’s the power of a great story — it inspires you to learn more. Of course, in India there are always many challenges. There are so many more children to reach and we can’t do it alone. We have to think differently and publish more books in different languages. But we also need a platform which is open-sourced, and which other people can build on. To this end, we have put 300 of our books out under the Creative Commons license, which allows knowledge to be created and to be shared without proprietary walls, copyrights, or patents. Our books under Creative Commons can be read online, shared, printed, and distributed. India is getting increasingly connected, through technology and the internet, so our driving motive was to get these books to children in whatever way we can.

The response we have gotten has been incredibly encouraging. Our online books have been read 500,000 times. Our texts and pages have been looked at more than two lakh times on Facebook, Twitter, Scribd, and Flickr. We have seen the power of creative collaboration, as people from around the world take our books and translate them. We have had translations in French, Spanish, German, Assamese, and an internet language called Lojban. There’s also the power of collaborative creation, which means we put our text and visuals out and encourage people to reimagine those stories. Collaboration is a must if we want to get children across the country to have access to stories. As an experiment, on International Literacy Day last September, we decided to put a book out and see whether our volunteers around the country would be able to share it with children in every state.

The book we chose was ‘Susheela’s Kolams’, a story about a young girl who keeps drawing rangoli-like designs everywhere. The results of our experiment were stupendous, with our online communities creating an offline storm. Our book was printed in five languages, and read out in nine languages including sign language. There were 419 storytellings and almost 20,000 children got to share that book in one day. Every single state responded and children all over the country got to read and learn about Susheela and her kolams. This is the power of the collective.
There are many problems in India, but there are also ways to cut through barriers and make each one of us part of the solution, not part of the problem. The future of India’s children depends of course on many things. It depends on their access to safe water, nutritious food, critical health care, and a good education. But that future also depends on a child getting a great book in their hands to give wings to their imagination. At a time when knowledge is power and creativity can mean freedom, children deserve the opportunity to cut out of the reality of their daily life.

An Approach To Integrated Water Management

By Lisa Tsering, Staff Reporter. Dec 03, 2012.

BERKELEY, Calif., United States

Grounded and detail-driven, water activist Rohini Nilekani is committed to helping India solve its water crisis one village at a time. Nilekani, the founder and chair of Arghyam, an NGO based in Bangalore that works to improve water and sanitation in small towns across India, spoke about the reach of her work to a near-capacity audience at UC Berkeley’s Richard C. Blum Hall Oct. 30. Her talk was presented under the aegis of Urban WASH: Paradigms for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for the 21st Century South Asian City, an urban water initiative headquartered at UC Berkeley’s Center for South Asia Studies, and was facilitated by UC Berkeley water specialist Prof. Isha Ray, the lead faculty of this initiative.

If Nilekani’s name sounds familiar, that is because she is probably better known as the founder of Pratham Books (I-W, Oct. 26), a nonprofit publishing house that has provided more than 10 million high-quality, India-centric books to poor children in India. Most of the books are priced at around 25 rupees. Nilekani is a former journalist whose 1981 investment of Rs. 10,000 in her husband Naland Nilekani’s company, Infosys, has now made her one of India’s richest women. Forbes named her one of its “48 Heroes of Philanthropy” in 2010. “I call myself an ‘accidental philanthropist,’” she said at UC Berkeley. “Too many external factors made that money, so it should be shared forward. I feel that the money is not really mine.”

While Pratham Books continues to thrive, Nilekani decided to branch out in another direction. Why water, she was asked at the beginning of her talk. “I wanted to work on something that would have a strategic impact,” explained Nilekani. “I found that people were focused enough on education, but that no one was focusing on lifeline water.” Nilekani started the public charitable foundation Arghyam in 2005, “literally ‘jumping into the deep end,’” she quipped. The word “Arghyam” means “offering” in Sanskrit, she said. Arghyam is a funding agency based in Bangalore which facilitates implementation and research to support evidence-based advocacy and influence policy in cities and towns in 3,000 villages across India — located in mountains, deserts, flood plains and coastal areas. According to Arghyam’s figures, India has around 4,000 billion cubic meters of water, with around 1.86 BCM readily available for use.

Some cities may sit over aquifers yet prefer to get their drinking water from lakes and rivers farther away, which drives up costs and limits access. One key to Arghyam’s success is that the NGO doesn’t preach a methodology to its grantees — instead, its officers listen to the needs and challenges of each microeconomy it encounters on the ground. What works for one small town may not work in another, so Nilekani says it’s vital that Arghyam tailor its approach to each location it touches. In Kerala, it could be an open well designed to recharge levels of rain water. In Karnataka, it could be a fluoride mitigation project. In Bihar, it could mean installing a matka (clay pot) water filter in each home, or composting toilets to keep a community water supply clean.

“We don’t come as a patron,” said Nilekani. “We believe in creating mutual partnerships.” Arghyam is especially proud of one of its most spectacular successes, “The Mulbagal Experience,” which looked at the problems in Mulbagal, a town in Kolar district, 100 kms from Bangalore. Working with a consortium of partners from government, civil society, academic, and other water sector institutions, Arghyam transformed their water system from polluted and diseased to clean. As an added bonus, their work in Mulbagal uncovered an ancient temple tank (kalyani) in the town filled with garbage, weeds and snakes — and enlisted the townspeople to clean it up and bring it back to its ancient glory.

The NGO is also working to change policy both at the grassroots panchayat level and in the Central Government, said Nilekani. Arghyam is aware of the large-scale impact of private companies such as Coca-Cola, which is accused of creating huge water shortages in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu and inciting local activism. “We are in a time of extreme transition,” she said. “People are organizing.” Nilekani’s talk at UC Berkeley was the second in a series of lectures organized by the Sarah Kailath Memorial Lecture Series on the theme of women and leadership (the first speaker in the series was California Attorney General Kamala Harris). The lecture series derives from the Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies, which was established by award-winning Stanford engineering professor and Padma Bhushan Thomas Kailath.

As Nilekani explained, one of the most valuable things Arghyam can give to a community is a new sense that it can find its own water solutions — even a system as small as a single schoolhouse rainwater collecting device. “Sometimes people in deep poverty can get stuck in a cycle of helplessness,” Nilekani explained. “So a small catalyst can really make a difference.”

Address at 10th Anniversary of Akshara Foundation

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s speech on equitable quality education for all children, organised as a part of Akshara’s 10th Anniversary celebrations. Rohini spoke about the breadth and depth available today in the field of education, and pledged for social inclusion, for an equitable dispensation for marginalised and underprivileged children.

 

One decade in a country seems like such a short time, but when it comes to the education sector, so much has happened in 10 years that I feel very privileged to be a part of this sector. In this decade, we have seen the demand for education clearly and  fundamentally established. There are many reasons for that, the first being the government. Over the last few decades, the government has made significant strides. Never before has so much money been put into the education sector by the government, and we are seeing the rollout and the benefit of that. NGOs have stepped up activities in the education sector tremendously, and also deserve credit. The liberalisation of the economy has had an impact on education as well. Our population explosion has meant that people have been pushed out of old livelihoods and farms, and have had to look at new choices. Parents have begun to finally see the end of the education tunnel and what it actually means. And the education sector has opened up to market forces as never before.

In addition to this, we are seeing an explosion of demand, with private sector players asking for their own space in the public sector. The focus has shifted from enrollment to increasing the quality of education. As money flows from the public sector, a lot of opportunities and bipartisan support for the education agenda has cropped up all across the country. All of this has happened in one short decade. In a way, Akshara Foundation’s journey has echoed this, from simple things like enrolling, building the quality of the demand, getting parents to understand, getting children into schools and learning centers, to now doing supplementary work in the education sector, and working inside the system to make systemic improvements. They are also working with the private sector where the schools for the poor are concerned, and looking at technologies and ways to adapt to the changes of this decade.

But as always, in India, every time you say something positive, there’s a flip side to the coin. The fact remains that sometimes, the more things change, the more they remain the same in terms of our problems. This trickle down effect has affected the middle class, but there are still so many people to reach. The other day, I was reminded of this when I met Ganesh, a little boy from Gulbarga whose parents were construction workers. He was an intelligent child who deserved to go to the fifth standard, but the government school did not take him in because of a missing transfer certificate. This is in spite of notifications by the government that no child should be left out of our school system. The reality is that Ganesh is not in a government school or in a private school, but in a learning center in the Akshara compound. Despite all the progress we have seen, Ganesh’s story is repeated across the country every single day. We have 150 million migrants — India is now a mobile republic. But what happens to the children of migrants and their education? 

We have the Right to Education act, but normative structures and questions of quality don’t sit quite so comfortably with questions of social inclusion. There is a real opportunity here for the voluntary sector, and we must use this as a focal point to re-group our energies. We all know that the primary responsibility of education belongs to the state, and there is no dilution of that. Nowhere in the world has it been possible to progress in this sector without the government. We know that the markets have a role to play in this space as well. Today, the dominant paradigm seems to be bringing in the market to complement the state’s effort. There are some things the state can and must do. There are some things the market can do well. But there is a space below that where markets cannot go and where the state unfortunately is extremely ineffective. That is the space where civil society institutions like Akshara and philanthropists have to come together to bridge that gap, that last mile where neither states nor markets are effective.

Today, that space is growing. In the case of the migrant workers, we need to renew our efforts to work with those children who are left out in spite of everything that we have talked about. In the last 100 years, we have seen that most progressive movements have started by voices from civil society demanding and defining human rights. Now, even with the child’s right to education, there are still families who are left out. We need to introspect and push for change. It’s an opportunity for creative people to apply new ideas and explore possibilities. There are people who are interested in education for girls and want to set up hostels so they can stay and learn. Others want to step up sports infrastructure, technological innovations, nutrition, and better uniforms. An entrepreneur came to me saying we are underestimating the problem of what footwear our children wear, why it’s so toxic, and how we can create a low-cost shoe for children. So many people are engaging with questions beyond the curriculum, asking what are the values we want our children to learn and what will anchor them in our society? 

For me, this is extremely exciting because it means that the question of how to engage our young people is occupying a wider set of people. We need to welcome these ideas, whether we’re going to do incremental change or whether we’re trying to achieve disruption, because the societal mission before us, of every child learning well in school, is not yet over. We have some ways to go. We have understood the urgency of what is called the demographic dividend. In 15 years, a population begins to age, so what we do in these next 15 years with our young people, 50% of our population, matters a great deal. What have we equipped them with, in terms of education and values, is going to determine how India looks in 2025. A school is the miniature look into a nation’s future. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole nation to educate the last child. 100 million children are waiting, but we are all ready to get to work. 

 

Emerging Challenges for Civil Society in India

A keynote speech delivered at the 25th Anniversary of Rotary club in 2008

The Indian third sector – as the non-profit sector is sometimes called, is one of the largest and certainly the most diverse in the world. There are civil society organizations in virtually every area of human endeavour, including community bee-keeping!

As for size, a sample survey of the sector showed that there are about 1.2 million organizations in India, which engage more than 6 million people. And this number is growing steadily as new non-profits get registered every other day.

Civil society remains the vehicle of choice for social change. And in fact, we can safely say that civil society organizations have been very effective on many fronts in India. Not only have they filled social services delivery gaps left by the government, they have succeeded in generating awareness, driving new legislation, uncovering scams and malafide intentions and in fact, done everything that the civil sector –as the conscience and the ombudsman of the nation’s agenda is supposed to do.

In the seventies, there was a sudden upsurge in the setting up of NGOs, perhaps echoing the greater community activism that emerged in the West as part of the green movement and the peace movement. Today, many of those organizations, just like your Rotary, are close to their 25th anniversaries. To name a few, Myrada, Development Alternatives, CSE and TERI and the Narmada Bachao Andolan. 

They all emerged out of a sense of dissatisfaction at the way things were going in a state-controlled economy, and which was not catering to our democratic vision of equal opportunity and a decent quality of life for all.

 Each organization founds its own model of resistance to or partnership with the state in order to meet societal objectives. And each has evolved tremendously over the past two decades, though they began with the traditional idea of working in the community and for the community.

 Arguably, the 90’s saw another great push in the number of civil society organizations. This was a new breed of NPO – and they were in a sense reacting to the increasing presence of the private sector in India post economic liberalization.

 The beginning of this century has seen the emergence of yet another kind of non-profit organization – one that is taking advantage of the new media, the new economy and new technology. Akshara Foundation could be an example of this time of organization as could Janaagraha and e-Governments Foundation all home grown right here in Bangalore.

 The hallmark of these kinds of organizations is that they prefer to work with the government where ever possible, prefer to push the ideals of a modern democratic state, see the market as a possible ally and not necessarily an enemy, and are driven by specific goals and desired outcomes. They use modern management techniques, attract professional talent, and pursue scale through the use of modern technology. These organizations are often funded by the new wealth that has been created by the post liberalization economic boom.

 While it may be a little early to judge their overall effectiveness, they have brought about a whiff of fresh air into the third sector and are being watched with great curiousity by observers around the world.

 And yet, with all these thousands of organizations of all shapes and sizes and beliefs and objectives – all working by and large for the goal of an equitable, effective, sustainable society – we have not yet seen that goal actually being realized. If anything, social commentators are lamenting the increase in inequity in India despite good growth and despite an abundance of material wealth creation.

 So what can civil society DO to increase its effectiveness? What are the major challenges before us?

 I think the first challenge is that of enabling good governance. Most problems in this country come out of a lackadaisical attitude towards governance practices. In whatever field the CSO is engaged in, its work will have a multiplier effect if it can understand and rectify governance issues. For example, in education, taking a look at the BMP primary schools, we were able to show, that in spite of a generous per-student budget, municipal schools were completely insufficient even in the provision of simple infrastructure. How then was the money being used? Who was looking at inputs vs outcomes? Who was responsible if the money was not used properly? How were schools involved in a feedback loop to government and decision-makers? By focusing our attention on these issues we were able to achieve a small degree of success. But that experience emboldened us to take issues of input and outcomes to a larger canvas. This past year, in close partnership with the GOK , we launched the KLP to enable learning outcomes in schools. Using technology, such as GIS, using good tools to collect data at the level of every child and every school, we were able to help the government identify exactly which children in the 1400 schools of Bangalore Urban District needed help with their reading skills. And we were able to help school teachers roll out a time-bound goal-oriented reading programme to get those children – about 75,000 of them to become readers.

We think the success of this programme was in no small part because we created the framework of good governance – such as identifying the problem, the actors, the approach and the finances, and finally mapping the outcomes and rewarding good effort.

 If more CSOs could focus on better governance, I think we could all become more effective more quickly.

 Secondly, the challenge of scaling up. In India, we have a million great examples of pilots and models that have succeeded brilliantly as islands of excellent work. But we have before us in India, in the world’s most populous nation bar none, the very real issue that we need to go beyond pilots and good examples to reach the staggering number of 400-500 million people who still do not have a satisfactory quality of life. How do we reach every last citizen in this country? We need to find ways and means to effectively scale up the delivery of social services in all sectors. Civil society can take up these challenges by focusing on what parts of their work are ripe for scaling up and on the partnerships that would be required to bring that scale. At Akshara, we have tried to use good governance practices coupled with technology to enable much-needed scale. If all goes well, we hope in this academic year to take the KLP programme from 1500 to 15000 schools and then eventually to every single school in the state – 50,000 of them, and make sure every primary school child in the state is competent in the basic skills of reading, writing and math. For this, we are working with many partners and would be very happy if Rotary clubs across Karnataka could play a meaningful role as well.

 The third challenge, I think, is creating effective partnerships. Today the civil society sector operates very often in silos or in isolation from others. There is tremendous polarization in the ideologies of organizations working towards a common goal. One very good example is in the water sector – where anti-privatization groups clash routinely with those that are either pro-privatisation or simply interested in getting things done rather than in who is doing them. This leads to tremendous acrimony and a waste of time which in fact allows business as usual to have a longer run than it deserves.

 Now that the whole planet’s sustainability is at stake, we will have to find common platforms where, agreeing to disagree in some areas, we nevertheless can take the agenda forward. And learning to work with the government, which remains the single largest player in the social sector, is one of our best opportunities to create lasting change.

 The fourth challenge, perhaps, is that of the capacity building of the third sector. How can we train ourselves more, equip ourselves with better skills in finance, HR, admin, communications etc that could help us multiply our effectiveness? Today, many CSOs are trying to tackle 21st century problems with 19th century tools. Ramping up our tools, investing in better training, will go a long way to improve our effectiveness.

 The fifth challenge perhaps, is how to unleash the creativity of the civil sector. We are the the very brink of chaos, at the collapse of the natural resources base. We can no longer afford to think in the old ways. Nor can we wait for the state or the market to come up with ideas. We need to harness the passion for change that is the main driver for all civil society organizations and come up with new ideas to solve old problems.

 And last but not least, civil society needs to turn the torchlight inwards, upon itself. That is also a very big challenge. We preach but do we practice? We want the government to be transparent and accountable and give us information on demand. We want business to be accountable to all stakeholders. We want notions of equity to be the base of all decision making everywhere. How could our own mechanisms in our own organizations? Do we have fiscal transparency and accountability? Are we internally democratic? Are we measuring the outcomes of our own work? I think, if we can get our own houses in order, we may better be able to make the difference out there. Be the change you want to see, as Gandhi said.

 I think civil society organizations in India have been the backbone of this country’s democracy. And I think they are very much our hope for the future. As Marianne Williamson said, “In every community there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart there is the power to do it.”