Type: Podcast

The Importance Of Water Data With Peter Gleick & Rohini Nilekani | Dalberg

This is an edited version of an episode on The Water Data Podcast produced by Dalberg Advisors and Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. The hosts, Veena Srinivasan and Nirat Bhatnagar, speak with Peter Gleick from Pacific Institute and Rohini Nilekani about the role and importance of water data, trends in the sector, and how to collaborate to address gaps in the water data ecosystem.

After I had started my vehicle for philanthropy, I began thinking about how to do something more strategic with the endowment when it suddenly came to me that water is the most key resource in India that affected people at large, as well as the economy and so many other things in its wake. This is where my journey began and in 2005 I founded Arghyam, a foundation focusing on water. I am glad we did because at that time, we were the only Indian foundation exclusively focused on water. The importance of data became clear pretty quickly. When we set up the open public resource called the India Water Portal, a knowledge platform where people could contribute, share, and discover knowledge about water, data had a lot to do with it. One of the first things I remember that we imported onto the India Water Portal was the 100 years of metadata on the Indian monsoon. We tried to present it in a more readable format, we experimented with some of that, and it has become one of the most important tools for researchers to use even today. So that was our first brush with data. Unfortunately, I am not a scientist so I come to data from a citizen’s point of view. I like to look at data, as does the team at Arghyam, in terms of how we can use data, especially data as a public good, to serve citizens and society better.

Agreeing, Gleick points out that data can be useful for science but if it is not useful for the public good as well then it is less valuable. He adds that there are many kinds of data – demographic data on population and changes in where people live; hydrologic data on water; climatic data; information on how water is used or the quality of water; or economics i.e. the price and value of water. All of these are critically important in order to address water because it is such a big issue. He gives the example of the debate on whether we can do without building dams – to address this question he started collecting data on the environmental impacts of dams, the water use, the size and power that they generated, the impacts on fisheries, etc. in order to analyze whether big dams were better or worse than a large number of small dams. It turns out that was not the right question, he says. The important question had to do with the impacts on communities and fisheries, and the way that dams were operated from a social and institutional perspective. It was not just the data, but the information that they were trying to get out of the data that was important.

Putting Data in People’s Hands

We know it is very important for people like us, who are practitioners, to understand the big data numbers, right? How much rain falls, how much water availability there is, and how much of that is usable, those kinds of things are important to understand. How many rivers flow in India – big numbers like that are very important to understand, but they do not particularly help ordinary citizens. But within a city, you can find such a huge difference between how much water rich people like us use every day, which goes up to 400 liters a day per person, and a person living in a slum, not very far from my house, who may not even get 30 liters per day. Those are the kind of numbers I am interested in understanding, and why that is so, and what can be done about it.

I can give a lot of examples on how, in our work over the last 15-16 years, we have tried to unpack some of the public government data sets to really be able to arrive at civil society pathways of action using that data. For example, we know that in the 60s and 70s, there was hardly any use of groundwater, it was only about 1%. Now we are using more groundwater in India than the US and China combined. And we have some 30-40 million bore wells, nobody knows the exact number, extracting groundwater. Now, knowing that this is such a crisis was great, but we were able to create data in a participatory designed groundwater programs where local communities, with some of our hydrogeologist partners like AquaDam, were able to collect data on their own aquifers and then develop social protocols on using that water, which was then understood to be limited and finite.

So, some really fascinating examples of better, more sustainable, and equitable use of water simply by putting data in the hands of people and giving them agency to understand how to collect it and how to monitor the water resource using simple data gathering tools. I will give another quick example. We worked with the Karnataka state government on a program very early in the Arghyam days, called ‘Suvarna Jala’, where they wanted to put rainwater harvesting times in all the schools of Karnataka. It seemed like a good idea, but then when we started collecting real data on the ground, we found that many of the schools did not need it or already had rainwater harvesting. Secondly, the teachers had no clue what the thing was, which had arrived during the summer holidays when they were not there and it was not possible for them to use it properly, without adequate training, etc. So, using that data, we went back to the government and they stopped the second part of the program so they could redesign the whole thing, saving a lot of money of the public exchequer in the bargain. So, we try to use data in that manner.

There has definitely been an evolution in water data, notes Gleick. For a long time, we collected a very narrow set of water data – information on rainfall, run-off data from rivers, and water quality data that only included components that engineers needed in order to build big dams and figure out how to take more water out of the system for human use. However, in the last few decades, or really in the last few years, he says that there has been an explosion of interest in water, or there has been a growing realization of the water crisis and its many different dimensions. There has been an increase in awareness and activities, not just by the scientific community but by local communities trying to figure out how to understand and address their water problems.

This has pushed the demand side for water data and it has resulted in positive changes, says Gleick, including collecting data on how much water we need to do certain kinds of things, data on the ecological impacts about water, data on the economics of what water is costing people and relating to the human right to water and whether we should be charging money for water at all. So these changes have also highlighted some of the big gaps in the data that we have not been collecting, he says. There has also been an evolution in the way we collect data. For example, satellites have collected new forms of data that have brought to light the nature of the groundwater crisis. Gleick mentions the GRACE satellites which measure and provide detailed information on the severity of the groundwater overdraft problem, which has spurred conversations around what we can do to protect and restore groundwater.

The Challenges of Collecting and Sharing Data

When it comes to the Bazaar or markets, the demand for understanding water and data on water must have skyrocketed because now it has become a key constraint in the supply chain, from manufacturing to the software industry. When you do not have water, you cannot produce anything, even if it does not appear to be related to water. So I know that the market demand for water data has shot up in the last few decades in India, and that is where some of the differences begin to appear, where today there are corporations that can acquire water data for their use and we do not even know how they use it. But today, private satellites can give markets access to data which the common citizen cannot and the state will not share, because data is an extremely political subject, especially in India where water is both a state and a union subject under the Constitution. How many times have there almost been state battles, over the sharing of data and the sharing of the water itself. So, water sharing is such an important political subject and the data in the public domain in India is very contested.

We all know that no state is waiting to put out absolutely true data on its rivers because these rivers are going to flow into other states, and all of the sharing has to then be talked about to political constituents, which in India’s case, we have even seen terrible riots over any political perception that one state is unfairly giving its water to another state. We all know how data is packaged and presented when there is this notion of zero sum games, of a resource that cannot be renewed when it needs to be. So that is a very important thing when it comes to the supply side of data, which is why it is crucial to have civil society institutions or citizens try their best to ground truth the public data, so that they can make local decisions at least with more accurate information. Often the state’s supply of data may not be at the granularity that is useful to citizens to act on their water problems.

For example, when it comes to water quality, fluoride or arsenic are two of the biggest contaminants in our groundwater here in India. We do not have the exact numbers but millions of people are affected, due to fluoride or arsenic, with serious health concerns. But the point is, if I am sitting in a taluka or a small zone somewhere in a generally arsenic-affected area, it does not automatically mean that all my water sources necessarily have arsenic. Sometimes, like we found out in our work in Balapur Puri, Orissa, though there was a lot of contamination, it was not reported in the government data sets. So then our partners had to work with the parliamentary representative and actually get Balapur represented in the MIS system so that they could get the funds to tackle the arsenic. So, we would love to see a world where there is data coming from the top, but there is also ground truthing and data contribution from below. The goal is for data to not always be flowing from one direction – top to bottom or bottom to top but, like water, have it flow in multiple directions. For us, it is really important to see how data can be used as empowerment of Samaaj, of society, because markets can easily empower themselves with data. The state, of course, sometimes has a monopoly over data, but what about citizens? If citizens have to use data so that they can develop more agency for themselves and their institutions, how do we restructure the idea of data and how do we, in this 21st century, flip the idea of data as something that either the state or the market uses to something that citizens can empower themselves with? And so we came up with a broad structure, which is a part of what we call Societal Platform Thinking, in which we allow for the principle of how to distribute the ability to solve instead of simply trying to solve a problem.

Gleick also notes that there is a difference between raw data in the form of numbers about a physical or geochemical factor and data that is ultimately useful for informing public policy and community decisions. For example, data on carbon dioxide tells us how much carbon is in the atmosphere, but it does not tell us where that carbon comes from, what the consequences of that carbon will be for climate change, or what the consequences of climate change will be for society, which is what we really care about. Similarly he says that water data tells us a physical or geochemical fact, but the things we really care about are the implications for human health, for example. Politics is a very important piece of this. For a long time, and even today, some water data was collected by governments and kept secret. They were considered national security issues and they were not shared because of concerns about what political neighbors might use the data for.

The public was rarely involved in collecting data, but now Gleick thinks that we are slowly seeing a change in that. The internet has certainly facilitated our ability to share information, satellites have launched, producing data that is much more accessible to the public that previously governments were able to keep and hold secret. So, the idea that data ought to be open source, which is something he believes in very strongly, is a really important one. And any tool that we can develop that promotes the sharing of data is important for making that data more useful. The other issue is granularity. It is important to know that hundreds of millions of people are exposed to concentrations of arsenic in certain parts of Asia that are unhealthy. This is really important from a policy point of view and for developing strategies for dealing with arsenic. But on a personal level, people want to know whether their water has arsenic in it and that requires a different granularity of data. It requires people to be able to test their water or for someone local to be able to test the water, share that information with communities, and then provide the resources to help them deal with that problem.

On the issue of the legitimacy of data, Gleick believes that it is important that data be trusted and verified and that governments should not be the sole arbiters of that. Governments should not be the only collectors of data, there should also be independent verification. That is a question for different legal systems – whose data is legitimate and what data is considered legitimate. To Gleick, we are entering an era where more individuals and citizens are able to collect and share data. When this data conflicts with official government data, that should raise alarm bells, and there has to be a way for there to be independent verification of data. Governments have failed to collect data that is important, or they have collected this important data and kept it a secret from citizens. The Internet is helping that, he says, and we are seeing more collection of data and widespread tools like our cell phones that are becoming instruments for collecting data. So there is a lot to be learned in this area.

For the government, especially to collect more data is becoming more vast. But in some cases, we must also point out that it works well. For example, after the tsunami in India, the government started really focusing on getting the right data, the right predictions, and the right modeling to tell us when the next threat is going to come. And we have seen for every next extreme weather event, there has been a very decent early warning system in place, which has actually trickled down to the local disaster management authorities. So we have been able to save thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives because of the good modeling, the predictions, and the data put out in public at the right time and for the right people who need to make quick decisions, especially when it comes to floods and cyclones. So, in that sense, there has been a huge improvement. I think there has been a lot more data put out in the public domain in the last few years in India. There might be a small trend reversing it. Some of my people in the field have been worried that perhaps there is a trend in the opposite direction, but if we could envision data as water data at the community level as an open public good, for people to discover, share action, and report back on what happens with their use of data, I think we could avoid many water conflicts.

Gleick agrees, giving the example of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where community and university groups started testing the water and found concentrations of lead and other contaminants, which led to big policy changes and the way water utility was managed. That data did not come from the government, it came from individuals and nonprofit organizations. Another example is how inexpensive air quality monitors are now available in the United States, so when there were severe wildfires in California over the last few years, people were able to use indoor air quality monitors to know when to use a mask or avoid going outside. These crowd-sourced data sets were publicly available, he says, and we are beginning to see more and more of these kinds of examples. We really need inexpensive devices like this, perhaps something similar for water where you could just test your own water. I know a lot of people are working on this. And then you should be able to put that data out and get these massive pictures of the quality of water around any community or state or nation. We are still waiting for the technologists and scientists to give us something very simple, with which we can measure not just bacteria but at least 8-10 indicators of water quality.

In Bangalore, for example, our lakes are a source of pride for us. They used to be a source of sustainable irrigation water in the previous days, but now Bangalore is a megalopolis and we mostly use our lakes to walk around and throw our sewage in. But, citizens have gotten very excited about lakes in the last decade, and they themselves are going around collecting data and often coming up against the civic bodies, saying “You said there is no sewage, but excuse me, here is proof there is sewage coming into my lake.” When the quality of demand rises in the public, there is no system that can withstand that pressure and it will have to yield. So, if we keep building the quality of demand for the data – for real, verifiable, maybe triangulated ground truth data on water, there is no system that cannot start to yield and either share or figure out solutions together with the community. So that is kind of a theory of change that we have to help prove out in the coming days, because there are so many questions, right? One is the quality of the data, the other is data standards. I mean, there seems to be so much confusion about how to collect data, and what are the standards by which we measure something like quality, quantity, accessibility, etc. And then there is the interoperability of that data, because you have your data set and I have mine, and if the twain will never meet, then we can not do the big picture analysis at all. And we are stuck between this lack of trusted quality of data, lack of common data standards, and lack of interoperability of data, right? So we need to work more and more towards getting that done, and in some scenarios at least, ask if water water data can be an exhaust of common activity rather than us having to constantly spend resources, human and financial, to collect data?

The Responsibility of the Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar

In terms of the role that the three sectors should play, Gleick believes that each has a different responsibility. It is the responsibility of governments to spend the money to build, for example, extensive remote sensing systems and satellite systems, to collect large-scale data that the public cannot collect. It is also the role of governments in general, to collect this data and make it available to the public, to the scientific community, to the academic community, and to the public service community to use the data the way they think is important. On the other hand, he thinks it is the role of communities to increasingly be clear about what is really important to them. Along with local community groups, they need to define what data ought to be collected, and then to help drive forward to collect that data. Satellites and remote-sensing platforms that collect data on the hydrological cycle are paid for with public money, and so all of that data is in the public domain – this is the principle that the United States follows and this is how it ought to be in general, he says.
Communities would love to be able to crowdsource data to create patterns so that they could complain about inefficiency or inadequacy of water. I do not think we are there yet, but it is beginning in some things like water quality for lakes and other small water bodies around communities. But the government does have an obligation to put out a lot of data that people can use, both for research and for action on the ground. As we look at climate change, just imagine how critical water data is going to be for people and governments who have to act when water-driven crises are coming to hit us, right? So it is going to be so important to have open, public, trusted, verifiable, interoperable, and discoverable data, for quick decision-making in a fast-changing water scenario. We also forget about the state of our oceans – that data is global public goods as well. And some people are working on how we can create global data sets on the state of the world’s oceans.

I am not an expert on this so I am talking from the Samaaj side, but people are now also discussing carbon markets, carbon funds, and cap, trade, tax etc. At some point, they are going to have to start thinking about water. I am not trying to commoditize water or any such thing, but we may have no choice but to look at innovative instruments of financial policy to look at water as well. I think we are going to have to do some innovation even in the market space and the pricing of water at some level, to be able to manage it better. I come from a people perspective first, but if we look at what is happening with climate change, for example, data and modeling is going to be so important even in the building of public infrastructure in a country like ours, where we have not finished building out our public infra, right? Now, if you are going to build coastal roads, what if there were some data or some modeling available to you to say, “Excuse me, do not spend 10,000 crores on one road near the coast because in 30 years it is going to be a stranded asset.” I mean that kind of data is necessary to be able to make good decisions, especially when a country like ours has to make tough choices on public infrastructure. Having good water and climate change data at least, would go such a long way in helping us make smarter decisions.
There is another that we have not discussed very much, and that is the private sector, Gleick points out. There is a growing interest in water sustainability in the corporate sector. There are both good and bad companies in this area, but a tremendous amount of water is used by the private sector to produce the goods and services that all of us demand. Years ago, very little water data was publicly available about how much water different sectors use, how it is used, whether it is used sustainably, or on the quality of the discharged water. The good news in this area, he says, is that there is a set of companies that are trying to be somewhat more responsible in the CSR space. They are understanding what their own water use is and working with local communities to make sure that they are efficient and not hurting the local communities in which they work. The more effort that is pushed in that area as well, the more we can help a piece of this problem, and many corporations still use a tremendous amount of water and do not report or measure what their own water use is and that continues to be a challenge.
If we could have more data collected at various levels on how much water is used for every unit of production of anything, it would make a difference. Many companies are now setting their own goals to keep reducing this in the whole supply chain, year on year, not just because they have suddenly become enlightened, but also because it is a strategic imperative to use less of a scarce and costly resource like water. So we are seeing a lot of innovation in this area in India and across the globe. Maybe there should be more sharing across the market sector as to how to increase water efficiency down the line.

If we take the long view, says Gleick, more water data is available, more communities are demanding certain kinds of water data and producing water data. The amount of good information that is available today is much greater than it was 20 years ago in the water world. We know more, and he believes this information is having an effect on public policy. We are slowly making a transition from the old way of thinking about water, partly because we have better data and better information about both the nature of the problem, but also the success of certain kinds of solutions. There are certainly enormous data gaps, he points out, and a tremendous amount of information that we do not collect on the basic hydrology of water, in the water quality, and in the economics and cost to communities, so there are lots of places where we could see improvements. However, Gleick does believe that we are moving in the right direction. The trick is how to move faster, collect the right kinds of information, and ensure that the information is used by politicians and policy makers.

In India, I think we do have more data out in the public domain, but how can we push for a more open public sharing of more data that is relevant for communities to act upon? It needs to be at the right granularity, it needs to be more trustworthy, and there should be more enabling policies to allow different sets of factors to collect and share data. So we basically need more open sharing of water data, and it should not flow in only one direction. Water data needs to flow in many directions. Gleick agrees, noting that we also need to have a better sense of what a truly sustainable water system looks like – what it really means to provide safe water and sanitation for every human on the planet; to support ecosystems and protect the natural environment; to protect the water that the natural environment requires as well; the proper role of economics in allocating and managing water; and the human right to water and what that means. If we put all these things together and we have a vision of what a sustainable water system is, then the kinds of data and information that we need to manage, protect and run that system will be clearer, and that will help us figure out what data we need to collect, how we need to share that data, and how we need to use the data to influence public policy, he says.

We can put data in the center of the conversation, but actually data for what? Data so that we can all have sustainable equitable water for all living systems on this planet.

To fail is to have dared | IDR Failure Files

Philanthropist, author, and former journalist Rohini Nilekani speaks to India Development Review (IDR) co-founder and CEO, Smarinita Shetty, on why failure needs to be underwritten in the social sector, and how philanthropists must develop more patience and create a space that normalises failure in the context of nonprofit work.

You can listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, Google, Jiosaavn, or on IDR’s website.

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Transcript:

To fail is to have dared | Rohini Nilekani

“We need that patient philanthropic capital to allow organisations and missions to go through some failures, some learning, some experimentation and, pull out those things which succeed and will become socially sticky.”

Hi, I’m Shreya and you’re listening to Failure Files — a podcast by India Development Review (or IDR). This show features highly relatable narratives of failure by people working on complex issues of social change. Their stories are a reminder that the path to resilience cannot be built on success alone — failure is a necessary condition for it.

Today, on our very first episode, Rohini Nilekani is in conversation with Smarinita Shetty, co-founder and CEO at IDR. Rohini Nilekani is chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and co-founder and director of EkStep, a nonprofit education platform. She is also the founder and former chairperson of Arghyam, a foundation she set up in 2001 for sustainable water and sanitation. From 2004 to 2014, she was also the founder–chairperson and chief funder of Pratham Books, a nonprofit children’s publisher. A committed philanthropist, Rohini also sits on the board of trustees of Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), an environmental think tank.

In this interview, Rohini speaks about why we need to underwrite failure in the social sector and how philanthropists must develop more patience, and create a space that normalises failure in the context of nonprofit work.

Smarinita Shetty: Today we have a special episode for you – not just because it’s our very first episode on the show, but also because we’re in conversation with Rohini Nilekani, a long-time advocate, and often a lone voice amongst her peers, for having more open conversations about failure.

Hi Rohini, it’s such a pleasure to be having this conversation with you.

Before we kick off this interview, I’d like to ask you to share with us, a time when you failed. Can you tell us a bit about what was that experience like, and what you learnt as a result?

Rohini Nilekani: In my professional life, I’ve experienced many failures, some worse than others. My very first failure, I guess, in my professional life as an activist philanthropist, if you like, where we ourselves got involved in the solving of some problem was in 1992, after one of my close friends died in a very ghastly road accident. It was really preying on my mind for the years before that. And then I got a few really great Bangaloreans together, and we set up Nagrik with the tagline: For safer roads. We worked in it for a few years with not much of a budget, but I don’t think the budget was the problem. I think the problem was that we didn’t know how to quite go about it. And while there was enthusiasm, and passion and a lot of intelligence in the group, I think we didn’t structure ourselves. I take a lot of the blame myself that we didn’t really know how to be strategic. And so the whole thing faded away. The problem didn’t go away at all. India remains number one in the world, unfortunately, in road accidents and deaths in the world, 160,000 people, often young. But then we dropped it. But it was a failure for sure, at many levels. But it taught me a few lessons about how to not to do things, how to think through things before, how to set realistic goals, how to ensure that you have a professional cadre working with you, not just enthusiastic good samaritans, that’s not enough. So a lot of lessons from that failure. Do I wish we had succeeded and really had safer roads — so that’s one.

At the Akshara Foundation where I also was very active in the organisation. There too, we failed many times in the sense that we kept on and on trying new things. And some of those things were really very difficult to implement. Like we were trying some evening schooling, we tried bridge schooling, we tried so many things that fizzled out because it was not easy to sustain them. Partly because the demand was also not too strong. There were many things we succeeded at too, but many of those small experiments, that in a sense, failed. Again, from that we learnt that it’s okay to experiment and fail, so long as you all very quickly recognise that this is not working, but something else might. So in that sense, those small failures, even though they were many and if you had to write a string of them, they would look impressively long. What they did was allow us to consolidate other focus areas and learn how to do things that would stick.

In Pratham Books, similarly, we tried many things, some of them succeeded wildly. Some of them didn’t.  I don’t know whether we should call them failures as such, I think we should call them experiments from which you got to learn what works and what doesn’t. But then I was thinking over the last few days in preparation for this conversation that take Arghyam. I set up Arghyam actually to learn about my philanthropy– how to do more philanthropy better. And then from 2005, we shifted to a full focus on water. But in these 20 years or 16 full years of working on water, if somebody looked at our Arghyam’s work and said, “Hey, the water situation in India has gotten much worse since you started working on water.” So now is that a failure of the organisation? Is that a failure of the vision? I think we could say that maybe Arghyam, could have been much more impactful. Or you could say that the water problem is so huge and so complex that in any case, it is completely unrealistic to expect one organisation to do anything more than shifting the needle in some of the aspects of the water situation.

Smarinita: You make a very important point you’re making about how time-bound the perception of failure can be, especially when we’re working on complex issues of social change. What’s viewed as a failure today, might actually only be a setback on a path to success. So how can we create space for people and organisations to fail openly, and to recover from those failures? If philanthropists need to be partners here, then what needs to happen for them to stay the course, even in the face of such setbacks.

Rohini: Yeah, I completely agree that we have to be very conscious of timeframes when we are talking about failure. As you said, correctly, what looks like a failure today may look like success tomorrow. And when will that happen? Sometimes you cannot predict. So especially philanthropists have to be very aware of this. And I think civil society needs to put forward more stories and examples of that. Yes, something seemed to be failing in the beginning, but as the demand caught up, and the supply side had to react to the demand. Just take the education sector, for example, about 25 years ago, parents were not so committed to putting their children through 14 years of school, especially those in agricultural families. The dropout rates were horrendous. The out of school, non-enrolled children were very large. As the demand and the understanding that education might lead to a better life for their children began to sink in, thanks to government policies, thanks to NGO work, thanks to markets also, seeking more educated employees, the demand for education built up so rapidly, that earlier all the work seemed to like throwing effort into the desert. And then suddenly, those seeds took root and they began to flower. Today, all our children are enrolled in school. The pandemic was a setback, but the idea of education being necessary has been completely internalised in India. So it took some time, but what might have seemed like a success to a scattering of NGOs and philanthropists, today looks like a lot of success. So, once more stories like this and more understanding of this are shared, I think philanthropists will be open to having a longer timeframe. We need that patient philanthropic capital to allow organisations and missions to go through some failures, some learning, some experimentation and, pull out those things which succeed and will become socially sticky.

The relationship between the philanthropist and NGO partner has to start with trust so that the NGO feels accepted when they are trying to do something different. Because if they’re not trying to do something different, how are things going to change? And then when they do something different, and the demand is not ripe, or the institutional structures are not ripe, as we saw in my example, with Akshara, etc then those experiments will fail and will have to be tweaked. And so the philanthropy organisation has to allow that to be, first of all raised and explained, and then more experimentation allowed. So that’s the very first simple thing. The second thing is, once you trust an organisation, can you commit to multi-year funding so they’re not spending 30 to 40 percent of their organisational bandwidth, trying to raise funds instead of trying to innovate on the ground. So I think these are the two main things, the three main things trust, patient capital, and allowing the conversation on failure and allowing the conversation on failure and innovation to be upfront and transparent.

Smarinita: On the topic of allowing for an open conversation with nonprofits grantees and donors, many organisations might be hesitant to talk about their failures in the fear of losing funding. In order to create a safe space for such conversations, it also becomes important for philanthropists to talk about their failures. Why do you think those conversations are not happening-not only in the social sector, but even in the private sector?

Rohini: I think in the peer group that has been much more of conversations on– ‘you know, I tried this, it didn’t work and now our whole mission focus has moved to something else.’ So I think that has begun to happen. And I think it’s probably been happening before also outside India. But the talking publicly about failing as a philanthropist– who wants to listen to that story? I mean, somebody needs to want to listen to that story. There’s is no use going out there and beating your chest in public for no good reason. You probably need to do it to the right audience. And that audience is probably the civil society sector where philanthropists can speak about how they themselves at a meta-level experimented with certain sectors then lost passion in them perhaps, or saw that their approaches would never get them to their goal, or whatever it might be. So there needs to be some forum for philanthropists and NGOs to get together.

 

But the philanthropist and the organisation need to be very sure that, again, I’m repeating that failure is not glorified. We are not trying to achieve failure, we are going to fail because it’s not always possible to succeed, but we are not trying to fail. See in the corporate sector, sometimes they really glamorise failure that fail fast, fail forward, etc. I think in the nonprofit sector, we have to be a little careful not to say that and use that framework because we are talking about people and their lives and we’re talking about their well-being emotional and financial and social and we are not trying to fail. We know we will fail we will have to accept that we failed. We have to recognise failure early but that’s one thing.

The second thing is that we have to be also careful to distinguish between the failure of the organisation and the failure of some individuals within the organisation. Because if it is the clear failure of some individuals, perhaps from a moral lapse, then there is a different way of dealing with that failure then when the failure is coming out of a good intent to innovate. So of course, that if it is a moral lapse then is very important to weed out. And secondly, if we don’t recognise failure quickly, how on earth are we going to turn around and try something else. So, creating the space to analyse failure– first internally by the organisation and then a little more openly, should become some kind of structured process. I’m sure many organisations have it, is not like nobody does these things. But since we’re talking about these things publicly, perhaps together, some people and organisations can come up with some frameworks, toolkits, processes, which are easy for organisations to follow. So that we are acknowledging and analysing failure.

Smarinita: And how does the perception of failure differ, when it comes to, say, the corporate sector or the public sector, vis-à-vis the nonprofit space?

Rohini: You know, failure, failure in samaaj, failure in sarkar, and failure in bazaar, are looked at a bit differently. Okay, as I said, in bazaar, failure is underwritten very structurally by markets and financial markets, right? You’re allowed to go there and try something really crazy. And if it fails, yeah, of course, it’s not a great thing at all. But it is entirely possible that you can dust off that the limited liability company that was set up allows especially for this structure, isn’t it? You can dust off your failure, file for bankruptcy or whatever, in the West especially. And then somebody else will back another idea that you bought. So the whole structure of failure is underwritten very well, by financial markets

In sarkar, actually, it is very hard to fail. No, it’s very hard for sarkar to accept failure. And that’s fine because their goal is not to provide risk capital to society, but rather to provide equity and service delivery. So sarkar’s failure, and bureaucrats especially, are incentivized not to act in case they fail. So the failure is really a failure to act rather than innovate, try something, fail, accept it, and then do something else. However, the politicians are used to failing, and it’s a class that is used to winning and losing. So they kind of tend to take failure to win elections in their stride, because who knows they may win the next one. And because there’s a political party structure, it doesn’t matter, there is a space for failure because even if you fail to win an election, you can sit in the opposition.

Now we come to the samaaj space. And by samaaj I mean, not people in general but civil society institutions. There again, there is a greater risk appetite to try out things to help society. And we need to make sure that there is much more underwriting of that failure. And the reason we are having this conversation is much more needs to be opened up about real failure, about bad failure and good failure. And there is space in civil society to fail for sure, but there is less underwriting of that risk of failure.

Smarinita: I want to go back to something you said earlier, about how when organisations fail, there’s a loss of knowledge, especially in the social sector. Because many of these setbacks and the lessons learned from them, are internal to the organisation. But surely there are advantages for other organisations, when they can learn from others’ mistakes, and not repeat what has already failed before. Do you think there’s a way to make that knowledge, and those insights, available to the larger ecosystem of players? How should we be thinking about that?

Rohini: This is a very important point because the goal of the social sector should be that we should ensure that even if organisations and institutions and leaders fail, they might, right that is the way of life. But how can we make sure that the mission or the public goal, the societal goal, the societal idea doesn’t fail, or doesn’t fall by the wayside, because some organisations failed? How do we keep space for others to continue the task, the societal task? One way that our teams have been thinking and practising, is to convert the effort and the knowledge into digital public goods. And because digital is so much easier to scale, and you can, people from all over can discover digitally much more than physically.

What if we had a process to look at the failure and success. I’m not saying there’s never the only failure. But what if we created mindshare and time to look at the failures of India civil society over the last 40-50 years that we have to understand. Because by now, the social sector should have been even more thriving than it is now. It should have been, in less risky spaces. Could we have done something differently together? I mean, the extreme buoyancy of the civil society in the 80s, post the Emergency, a lot of things began to happen. And I think there’s a second wave now because young people who think very differently from the leaders 40 years ago have a new kind of energy in the social project to increase equity, access, etc, using technology, using very young leaders this time, using very different methods. So what can this new wave of civil society actors, some of whom we are very lucky to support, what can they learn from the old wave of civil society actors in India 40 years ago, from the 70s to the 2000s. What were their failures? What can we learn from that and do things a little differently? I would love to see a gathering of some of our stalwart leaders to share what they feel civil society as a whole failed at doing and what these next wave should do differently.

Smarinita:

Thank you so much Rohini for joining us today to talk about something that’s really important when it comes to nonprofit work. There’s a lot that we have covered today, but I’d like to leave our listeners with two important points. The first is that all of us within the social sector need to make space for failure. We cannot carry on like we have done before. We need to analyse our failures and most importantly learn from them, because failure, as we all know, is inevitable. And secondly, philanthropists must trust nonprofits to do their work. They have to develop patience so that nonprofits can take necessary risks, to grow, to change, to experiment. Thank you.

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Failure Files is produced by Disha Acharya, Pallavi Deshpande, Rachita Vora, Tanaya Jagtiani, and me, Shreya Adhikari. This podcast is part of a larger initiative at IDR, where alongside 15 partners, we are creating a space for candid conversations around failures in social impact. To read more about this growing movement, check us out at idronline.org. You can also share your own failure story with us at writetous@idronline.org. Thank you for listening, and see you next week.

The Cerebration Podcast: Expert Talk with Rohini Nilekani on Restore Agency

This is an edited version of an episode of the Cerebration Podcast, a co-learning series hosted by ShikshaLokam in collaboration with the Societal platform team. In this episode, Rohini Nilekani discusses the idea of restoring agency and how to become an agent for change.

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From a very young age, I was interested in how to change things for the better. When you’re young and full of that kind of superior moral energy, you can be very irritating. I’m sure I was – I used to glare at people who littered and would pointedly pick up the garbage when they threw it down, which is not a good way to encourage others to take agency and create a change. I learned that you had to be less judgemental in order to allow people the opportunity and encouragement to change. As I began gaining experience in the sector, I slowly realised this important lesson. My first foray was with Nagrik in 1992. One of my dear friends had died in a horrendous traffic accident, and so I began to research why we have so many road accidents in our country. India has the highest road accidents in the world – 160,000 unnecessary deaths on our roads every single year. So I set up Nagrik to help citizens participate in making our roads better.

That was the first of many institutions I have been with, and through this journey I have created a theoretical framework for myself, in the continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar i.e. society, the markets, and the state. Although these three entities exist in a continuum, the Samaaj must come first. After all, even the Sarkaar and Bazaar are made up of the people, the Samaaj. The Samaaj is at the base, it’s the foundation and our first sector, so we need it to get better and create systems and institutions that can hold the Sarkaar and Bazaar accountable and create a more empathetic and efficient society. For me, Samaaj is the sector in which all my philanthropic work is centred around. This is because I think it is society that can enable a better world. The more we work on Samaaj institutions, the more we will discover good leaders and be able to innovate our way through today’s complex problems. That is where all my hope for my work comes from, and agency is very tied to that idea.

The Imperative for Distributing Agency 

When people are able to have agency, their perspective changes. They go from being hapless, helpless, and hopeless, to someone who wants to do something even if it is out of their comfort zone. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should simply tell the person at the very end of the pipe, “Take your agency.” Agency doesn’t come very easily to those who are the most exploited and vulnerable. So we have to help change the system around people first, so that they are in a position to take that agency. We have tried to do that in the education sector, through Pratham Books and now EkStep, asking ourselves how we can make everybody feel part of this societal mission to ensure that every child can learn and is able and equipped to learn. A child cannot take agency on their own, so how can the Sarkaar, Bazaar, and Samaaj enable agency for that child.

Through the Akshara Foundation, we did many things to help children come back to school since enrolment was an issue. At Pratham Books we realised that only publishers had the agency to publish books and that there was a lack of children’s books in India. So we created a platform where writers, illustrators, editors, and translators were given the agency to put out books without waiting for publishers to accept their stories first. We managed to distribute the agency for publishing, writing, illustrating, editing, and translating, and the result is tens of millions of readers who suddenly had access to wonderful books in a variety of languages, to read anywhere and for free. Therefore, there are some things that can be done to reverse agency. It’s not always easy but the possibilities exist. For example, Gandhiji didn’t give a speech about agency, he simply saw that the salt tax was not correct and decided that he would take his agency back. He internalised the locus of control by picking up salt and saying, “This unjust law doesn’t work for me. I’m taking agency back with a fistful of salt.” He did this without violent protest and proved that agency did not lie with the colonial chap with a stick, but with the farmer in his fist. Today, it’s possible to work with many institutions to help the government do its public services better. In the design of our programs and portfolios, we can try to see how more people at every level are able to work more effectively or to their strengths, thus distributing the agency to be effective.

When we talk about restoring agency, we have both a moral and a strategic imperative. Moral because all of us want power over our own lives and circumstances. All of us also want to reach our highest human level and we want the agency to help others as well. The strategic imperative to work on distributing agency is that all our problems have to be solved in their context. We cannot sit in America and solve the problems of Chennai, or sit in Delhi and solve the problems of Bihar. Problems have to be solved locally by people in their own contexts. For that to happen, we need democratic, decentralised power – the power to make change, to be flexible, make small shifts, and help more people understand the complex issues that impact their life. These are all ways to restore agency and to become both more empathetic and more effective.

With Agency Comes Responsibility 

Agency is a big word and sometimes it can be frightening. Often we wonder how we can be responsible for restoring other people’s agency when we don’t feel like we have agency ourselves. But I’ve found that there is always some way to increase agency. On one of my visits to Bihar, I travelled to the islands of the Kosi river, in the backwaters where the most vulnerable of India’s communities, the Musahari people live. I went to an island by boat and I will never forget their faces. They are not far from the District Magistrate’s office but almost none of the officials had bothered to go to that island and visit the people there. They were suffering and completely neglected by the system. When I was there, people told us about their problems and how hard it was to get access to healthcare services. The District Magistrate told me that it’s very hard to go there and that they need tens of crores to spend to build a bridge so that administrative officials can go there and help those people. Meanwhile, one little fellow came up in a boat with a tin box to sell ice cream on that island in the middle of nowhere. This ice cream vendor had taken the agency to make his own livelihood there. So in any situation, there’s always an opening where we can either take agency or help give agency, and it should be a discussion, a dialogue, a thread of hope. It should not be something that is pushed down the pipeline to the people at the bottom. Instead, we must find more words to describe agency so that people really understand what we are talking about. We need more stories in more languages, so that the word agency is unpacked for people to understand that it simply means allowing everybody to be part of the solution and not remain part of the problem.

A problem arises however, when agency is conflated with power because power is often seen as a zero-sum game i.e. if you have more power, I will have less. So if we hand over agency to someone else, it may seem that we have less, but that’s not what real agency is about. We need to move from a zero-sum game to shared power. Sometimes it is true that if I get more agency, you may get less. But we must overcome that fear by demonstration. For example, if I’m a very good school leader – my students and teachers are happy and my infrastructure is good, but despite this, the SDMC thinks it is better. They may have a reason to think they’re better but I worry that it’ll take my agency away. We need to acknowledge the legitimacy of this fear, but then also try to help people to be open to experimentation. As the school leader, I may be worried, but what if my work became easier? Can I shift some of the responsibility? Agency and responsibility have to go together, so if the SDMC gets agency, they also have responsibility and accountability. In that case, school leaders may actually be grateful for the SDMC sharing some of that power and being responsible for the library maybe, or the toilets or attendance. Perhaps that will work out better for everyone and the school leader will be able to focus on other things. So we need to learn to address the power dynamics and channelise it in a more positive way.

In terms of working with the government, I think we need to reassess how we approach it. Before you reach out to them, you must do your research and understand the mandate of the government office and the officers that you’re contacting. I learnt this the hard way, after many years of going in blind and not knowing anything. Once you approach them, instead of asking them for the agency to do something, your approach could be asking them how you can help them. Explain what’s possible for you, how it overlaps with their mandate and offer your services to them. If you give a little opening to people, they are more likely to respond than if you want to force them to do something that you need, especially government officers. There are many good government officers who are open to help from capable citizens. They recognise that it’s a load that needs to be shared. As you build trust and show evidence that you can do good work, you will get a good response. Humble persistence does pay off. In the end, there is no cookie cutter model for restoring agency. We may have to do different negotiations at different levels, so when we’re doing agency at scale, we must remember that we need to tackle it in context. 

Podcast

E9 | Schools Cement Boy Stereotypes

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani in conversation with Dr. Deepa Narayan on her podcast, What’s A Man? Masculinity in India. They are joined by Akshat Singhal co-founder of Gender Lab, an organisation that runs gender awareness programs for boys, and three boys who participated in this program.

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Over my years in the philanthropy sector and the kind of work I was engaged in, we were talking to women and understanding their situation and desire to create a more level playing field. But I also kept encountering young males who I would get into conversations with and whose stories kept piling up. You could see the pain in their eyes, and some of those stories stayed with me. Once I met a little boy on the roadside, and he was crying loudly. A girl was with him who turned out to be his sister. I stopped the car to speak with him and I found out that he was crying because he had done sterlingly well in his 10th standard exams and wanted to go to college, but his father had refused him. Instead he got him a public sector job in the road transport division. Those tears broke something in me as well. 

We have seen how so many SAGs have changed the lives of 16 million women in India – they are a support system and a safe space. But I would ask my teams, “Why don’t we have self-help groups for men?” They told me, “Men can’t gather in groups like that. They don’t trust. They don’t share. So you can’t do that for men.” I wondered why not, because men need a safe space too. How do we create a safe group for men, where they can share without being ashamed? I knew of many people who were working with women, but who was working with young men and boys? One or two names came up and so it became a portfolio. Four years ago we had one organisation, and now we have 15.

I think in India, this last century has been a difficult one, especially for the situation of women. So our first priority was to look at what’s happening to girls and women. Seemingly every norm needed to be changed. But once you begin doing this work, you realise that even when you empower women, if they’re going back into disempowered situations with the men and women around them, then they face two terrible choices. One is to rebel with all the risk attached to rebellion or the second is to acquiesce, so all that empowerment has to be left behind. Those choices are not good. So once you start looking at this situation in context, you realise that we simply cannot ignore men. 

Many issues need to change for them. First of all, just having conversations and being allowed to say things, without being judged for not fitting certain stereotypes of masculinity. If you judge them for that, you cannot have the next conversation. We need to open a conversation where we can look at our own gaze as well. Where are we not looking and what are we afraid of by looking there? Can we even emulate success as masculinity? Sometimes, I find myself being so aggressive because we have decided that success is about being powerful, aggressive, and dominant. So we always need to be aware of those assumptions in ourselves and around us. 

However, there’s also a kind of backlash to women’s empowerment, where men become intimidated or nervous about women’s power. We need to also look at complementary public policy and public finance going towards making young males also feel that they can move forward. This is not to say that they don’t already have lots of power and privilege, I’m not challenging that. But they are watching their sisters being able to make interesting career choices while they’re trapped having to do a certain kind of job. So we need to be wary of that backlash as well. 

Rather than the binary of black and white, we must now start thinking about how we can learn to occupy the grey areas in between, whether it’s in terms of gender, politics, or anything else. There are so many rich shades of grey and such a broad spectrum that we should not be afraid to occupy those spaces between the polarities, because all the richness and nuance is there. When you accept freedom, you also accept responsibility for other people’s freedoms. When it comes to gender, that means that if you want freedom in your gender, then other genders want it too.

Schools mold boys, says Dr. Deepa Narayan, during the most impressionable ages they spend five days a week at these places of learning, which are also powerful cultural spaces, occupied by educators who may bring their own values, prejudices, and stereotypes about how boys should behave. So for Akshat Singhal, it was important to start this work in schools. The Gender Lab Boys Program works with eighth standard boys, and is structured around a service learning format, which allows boys to go through a classroom learning experience and take it to their own communities and solve community problems based in the program context. Their goal is to create a safe space for boys to be themselves and to talk to them about how they are also victims of patriarchy, while having privileges through that system.

Over the 20 hour program, they discuss what sex and gender is, and then move towards understanding masculinity, the idea of mardaangi, and what it means to be a boy. By touching on different issues, they hope to build critical thinking so that the boys begin to question the messaging that they receive from different spaces themselves. Akshat mentions that there are four sources that shape the notions of masculinity – school, family, society, and media. School systems are especially designed on a control and discipline-based system where boys and girls are treated differently. Along with the boys program, they have a teachers’ program as well where they understand what their issues are and the new possibilities that can emerge. But there’s also a kind of resentment to boys questioning their teachers and principles, because these are uncomfortable issues that are being tackled. 

As Deepa points out, in speaking with the boys who have attended this course, they were able to identify core dimensions of toxic masculinity that they said have changed in themselves. They gave everyday examples like not acting entitled at home and helping out, reducing fighting, managing anger, expressing emotions, having more conversations at home, and becoming positive agents of change in their own communities. Schools can and must liberate boys from narrowly defined behaviours that perpetuate a cycle of unhappy gender inequality, anger, and missed potential. We can uncover our own gender stereotypes and change our schools to become more gentle, expansive spaces for boys and girls, says Deepa. 

Episode 9

Rohini Nilekani On The Pleasures Of Being In Nature

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s interview on the Bird Podcast hosted by Shoba Narayan. They discuss Rohini’s favourite birds and why conserving nature is an “enlightened self-interest” for humanity as a whole.

Since I was born and brought up in Mumbai, the only birds we saw were crows, sparrows, and sometimes parakeets. However, I used to spend all my vacations in Dahanu, my grandparents’ home north of Bombay and very close to the forests of the Western Ghats. So my introduction to birds began there, in addition to visiting the Karnala Bird Sanctuary for picnics. Even then, my interest in birds only developed later, when I had taken my children for a picnic near Bangalore and a friend pointed out a cattle egret. I realised there’s much more to know and so I bought my first bird book, and started telling my children about it. When children are very small, sometimes it gets very lonely and I was looking for something to turn to. My birding experience really transported me to a special place, and I’ve not looked back since.

Reconnecting With Nature

India is so rich in birdlife. Right in my garden, I have recorded 55 species and I’m sure there are more that I haven’t found. I have also ventured far outside of my garden and spotted birds during memorable trips to Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Goa, and Tamil Nadu. In Kabini, I spend a lot of time looking at birds, as well as in the forests of Karnataka, the Andamans, Kerala – almost anywhere in the Western Ghats, and along our coastline. I realised that birds are all around us and they are the easiest way to start connecting with nature and the wild because they are ubiquitous. Birds have always been fascinating to human beings because they fly. The first thing a child wants to do is fly like a bird. Since I’m interested in getting more people connected to the wild, because I think the future of humanity depends on us engaging with nature, birds seem to be a really good segue into that. I wanted to see how I could support the efforts of many NGOs, especially Nature Conservation Foundation, to create an India-wide interest in birds, and do it strategically and systematically over many years. So I’ve given them a multi-year grant to increase interest and build the capacity of people to appreciate, understand, observe, and protect birds, and to get involved in bird conservation. The aim is also to build the capacity of citizen scientists to do courses in bird watching and ornithology, so that in every tourist destination in India you can find local experts to take you birding.

Birding has taken off well in India and the hope is that it will create many livelihoods. It’s important for us also, to get people involved in bird conservation because birds are the figurative canary in the mine – if we know what’s happening to birds, we also know what’s going to happen to ourselves. Although the pandemic has set us back a bit, I hope that this work can pick up speed and that we can create a network of organisations across the country supporting this effort, with the help of other philanthropists. 

Research is increasingly showing us how important mindful exposure to nature is for humans. It is literally linked with health parameters. The Japanese have adopted Shinrin-yoku i.e. forest bathing, which is important especially since Japan is so urban. They have found enough correlation between human health and happiness and being in nature, in a mindful way. We seem to be quite deracinated in our lives right now, especially if we live in cities. In urban areas, you don’t get a chance to explore all the wonderful mysteries of nature. But it’s important to have that connection with our environment. When I go out into the forest, I feel the possibility of expanding myself and of quieting myself, simultaneously. At first, you’re enraptured by all the sights and sounds. But after that, you feel a kind of stillness, which seems almost meditative, after which you can’t help but feel restored. Even the most cynical people who I have brought to the forests with me have been hooked and want to return again. There is a magic to forests, which has been written about for thousands of years, so it’s nothing new. What needs to be renewed is the urgency by which it becomes a broad-based project to introduce urban children to the wild, and reconnect with nature in a mindful way.

When I had travelled to Sikkim with my husband Nandan and Dr. Kamal Bawa, founder of ATREE, I remember being gobsmacked by the sight of the fire-tailed sunbird. We were in the Lachung valley, in the summer when the rhododendrons were out and it was gorgeous. I knew that there were some really spectacular birds there, but when I saw the fire-tailed sunbird, my jaw dropped. It is a bird of such spectacular beauty. I spent so many hours watching for it so when I finally spotted it, it was completely unforgettable. There are many other instances like this and birds that I have found fascinating, like the monal pheasant in Bhutan and the heart-spotted woodpecker in Kabini. And of course, the paradise flycatchers with their long white ribbons, the blue-capped rock thrush, and the golden orioles that visit our bedroom windows in Bangalore are some of my other favourites. I can’t think of a bird that I don’t like. Sometimes we may get a bit irritated with the koels who insist on waking up at odd hours, but I really like all birds.

Engaging the Samaaj

Going forward, I think it’s very important for Samaaj or society and its institutions to get involved with conserving our birds. They provide so many ecosystem services that we don’t think about. They are seed dispersers and scavengers, they clean up stuff for us and actually help build out our forests. They play a very critical role in the environment and unless society gears itself up locally and in context to protect birds, our 867 known species of birds in India may disappear. 25% of them are already somewhat endangered, as are the global birds. Our Samaaj needs to protect these birds, through citizen action. In India we have lots of evidence that local people protect their local birds. For example, the Kokkarebellur in Karnataka where the migrant painted storks and pelicans that come along are vigorously defended by the local people. They make sure that the areas where the birds roost and nest are protected even during agricultural season.

Another example which went viral is that of the Amur falcon, which migrates through India. In Pangti, the local tribal communities who used to catch, trap, and eat the birds have now signed up to protect them. We can find heart-warming stories like these everywhere because we have a lot of respect for birds throughout our history and mythology. Birds have served as the vahanas and vehicles of all our Gods and Goddesses and portrayed in our marvelous temples and sculptures around the country. In Hampi, migratory birds were illustrated in stone one thousand years ago. Indians have always maintained a deep respect and understanding of birds. This is why today’s digital Samaaj, the new citizenry, also needs to reconnect and there are so many more ways to do so than in ancient times. So there’s a lot of hope and that’s the kind of work I love to support.

I like to start my work from the Samaaj side, and I think there’s a need to build more awareness. One way to do that is through really good storytelling. We have such marvelous young filmmakers who are documenting our wetland and forest birds, and I think they have learned to tell stories very powerfully. We should never underestimate the power of storytelling, and you can tell lovely stories about birds. In fact, one of the earliest stories that we told our children was about the thirsty crow. I don’t know a single mother in India who has not told the story of the thirsty crow. There are many such stories being told through excellent documentaries now. I believe that we also need to start creating more opportunities to take young people out into the wild. There are many new start-ups centered around the culture of camping. If we can encourage this culture and do it with an ecological sensibility and intelligence, we can create a bigger and better community that is much more connected to the wild, and therefore committed to a sustainable future.

If we are not able to do this, to change our relationship with the environment, it is at our own peril. The economy is just a subset of the ecology. Even the economy derives a lot of services from the ecology, and if we don’t protect it we will be economically worse off as well. Climate change is a huge factor in this, and our country has stepped up with some very aggressive nationally determined contribution goals, so we are aware that our future prosperity is linked to our ability to conserve our ecology. Of course, there are always going to be trade- offs, but I think if we keep the big picture moving towards conservation and re-energising people’s connection with the wild, then I think prosperity itself can be redefined. Today, everything is defined in monetary terms. We want people from the villages to come into urban areas, so they are leaving behind good water, clean air, trees, and forests, but what are we bringing them into? I think some of those things are going to become more valuable as time goes by, and we will have a refashioned economy as well, that takes into account some of these positive values of nature.

Protecting Ourselves By Protecting Nature 

I have spoken a lot about my trips to Kabini and my search for this single animal, a black panther, which has become a kind of a teacher to me. It’s only a black cat, but I have invested certain qualities in this animal, mostly to allow myself to grow. The poor fellow has no clue that I exist, but because it took me years to find him I was able to learn a lot about the forest and the interdependence of every creature from carpenter bees and the birds to the bears and cats, and the trees and seasons. In the chase for this one black animal, I began to see him as someone who helped me on my own path towards peace, knowledge, and renewed wonder. So I’m very grateful to this black panther who doesn’t know that I exist. Every time I see him, I feel something indescribable. There’s something rather special about this particular black panther. My romance with him has really allowed me to understand so much and become so humble about how little we understand about the complex connections on which we are all dependent. It’s a lesson we need to learn especially in light of this pandemic. I got a chance, while sitting in that forest waiting for hours for this animal to turn up, to think about all these links, marvel at them but also re-commit myself not only to supporting more conservation efforts but also to tell my story more widely so that more people can be inspired to experience the wonder and joy that I have had the privilege of experiencing.  

We don’t have to travel far to experience this. Birds are everywhere, animals are everywhere. I feel so proud to belong to a country where, in spite of so much land pressure and population pressure, we have kept our biodiversity of flora and fauna alive. Even though bird populations are on the decline, there are many other species that are thriving and being supported by people despite us having one-third the landmass of America. We have practiced a kind of coexistence all these years that is under threat now, but I hope that people are beginning to see how we can have peaceful coexistence with wildlife. I believe in the precautionary principle. It’s easy for me to say because I live very safely, so I respect those who are in the path of danger and I don’t expect them to leave man-eating cats alive, but we can also ask ourselves how we can tread more lightly on this planet. The precautionary principle means we don’t really understand the connections, we don’t know how many species are needed to keep this whole web together. So apart from the moral right of species to live on their own, there’s also the serious existential question of how much of the biodiversity we really need in order for our next generations to be able to live and thrive. If we can go forward with a humble heart and a scientist’s mind, then we get this sense of the continuously renewing wonder and find out a little more about how our world is interconnected.

In my opinion, the first step in order to conserve and protect, is to observe and love. Wherever you are, even if you have a small balcony with one single pot in it, you will see what happens if you plant the right thing that will attract birds. If not, keep just one bowl of water on a ledge outside your kitchen window. Create something for the birds, especially in summer. In my little garden, I’ve planted bushes that attract birds for nesting, hiding, roosting, and perching. Everyone can do small things like that to help birds survive and thrive. Secondly, all over the country there are good conservation organisations, from very small to very large. Find one in your local area, find out who the people behind it are and support them with however much you can spare. There is something all of us can do to help in the conservation of birds as well as nature, because nature supports birds. So do what you can and learn what you can about birds, and you will begin to love them. In India we respect crows as representatives of the souls of our ancestors. Even if you live in cities, do something for the crows around you, or for the pigeons who make such a mess. Look at them differently, look at their shining blue and purple necks and marvel at their beauty. Observe, love, protect, and also support whichever local conservation organisation you can find. See what happens then. This is how we can build a thriving society that protects itself by protecting nature.

Episode

The Architecture of Good Markets

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani in conversation with Naushad Forbes, business leader and ex-President of the Confederation of Indian Industry, for an episode of India Development Review’s podcast, On the Contrary. Along with Arun Maira, the host of the show, they discuss what markets must include, whom they should serve, and the role they must play in enabling inclusive economic growth.

IDR Online

The Assumptions of a Good Market

A good market is one which helps to increase the public interest and prosperity, not just for a few but for all people. Ideally, this is also done without harming our planet. I see a good market as a kind of conversation rather than a dialogue of the deaf. It should be a way for people, societies, and nations to discover services of value that can be traded in as fair a way as possible. In our 21st century environment, there are so many questions to ask about market failure. However, I prefer to call it societal failure because it only happens when societies and the state are not able to create the leadership, institutions, and governance which can rein in excessive market power. I look forward to a world where Samaaj, Bazaar and Sarkaar can be in a better balance.

Unfortunately, over this past century we have watched this balance grow increasingly skewed. My philosophy is that societies came first i.e. people came first and created both the Sarkaar and the Bazaar in order to reduce conflict among themselves and create more efficiency, productivity, and prosperity for all. Over time though, instead of the Samaaj being the first sector, somehow we have relegated civil society and its institutions to the ‘third sector’. We need to set that right at the outset if we are going to make sure that the state and the markets are more accountable to the larger societal interest. We must now ask ourselves, how do we create a better system of capitalism or market economy which doesn’t allow all value to just pull towards one end of the spectrum? Secondly, how do we start to keep at the forefront of our minds that we are the proverbial frog and the water is getting hotter without us noticing it, because this is the decade in which we have to heal ourselves and the planet.

Naushad Forbes points out that when people talk about markets, they assume that a market needs many buyers and sellers to work efficiently, that a single buyer or seller cannot control the market, and that there is equal information about the potential benefits and costs of the trade on both sides of the seller and buyer. This is what creates equity that markets can potentially deliver together with efficiency. However, when these assumptions are not true, we end up with a less equitable market. So, how do we enable markets to work for people who are most disadvantaged? The solution may be to invest in the capabilities and skills of people.

Naushad gives the example of investing in education, since it enables people to participate in more productive activities and participate in markets where they’re able to earn good salaries and livelihoods, and get the rewards that an efficient operating system can deliver. There are also many failures that take place in markets, one being the environment since the cost of pollution is not something that markets have factored in. It’s possible for states and civil society to tax itself such that it invests in education and capabilities for all people in a society such that they can participate in markets. At the same time it’s possible to create minimum standards that must be maintained regardless of what the market outcome might be.

Listening to What the People Want

We need our government to start creating better regulations in order to safeguard certain resources, especially when it comes to environmental issues. These don’t have to be regulation which kills markets or innovation, but regulation which creates fair competition. As of now, competition seems to be reducing instead of increasing. We have seen how so many sectors that were more competitive are now becoming oligopolies, if not monopolies. This is not good because the power of some of these big players has become so vast that when innovations do pop up, they just swallow them up into their own stable. We need the government to be able to enable competition and innovation coming from everywhere, which means it must also look at how a small entrepreneur with a very good idea does not have to take far more risk in putting his innovation out than a big player.

This point goes back to the welfare role of the government. We cannot separate the idea of innovation and entrepreneurship from a safety net because otherwise we’re distributing risk unfairly. When a small entrepreneur does not have the safety net of public health, public education, disaster management, or the risk of absorbing failure, in comparison to the big guy who has access to private education, private healthcare, private capital, etc., then we are not distributing the risk of innovation fairly. This is where the government has to step in to create fair competition, a welfare net which I think is necessary for creating good markets. It also needs to regulate the excessive power and oligopolies, monopolies forming. Ideally, capital would also be made available to all, in the right doses and at the right time without you having to sell your soul for it. 

If we consider the trends of the past 150 years, an increasing number of people in the world have been able to participate in activities from which they have then benefitted, says Naushad. The same is true in India – since 1991 we have seen a greater reduction in the percentage of the population below the poverty line. These are indications that markets deliver a degree of prosperity, which any alternative system tends to struggle with. The issue is that it may not deliver this uniformly and equitably. However, Naushad argues that allowing the government to try to regulate the market may not be a wise solution. He mentions what happened in India in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when the government determined the price of cement, which led to a situation where there was a shortage economy co-existing with high prices. Once the intervention was removed by the government, the market operated efficiently – the price fell and the shortages vanished at the same time. So Naushad suggests finding ways where institutions independent of the government set the rules of the game. Some of them might be public institutions, others might be private institutions and they could propose a variety of formal and informal rules. However, he does not believe that India has the capability and competence in government to determine the right outcomes.

We need to listen to what the people want. Naushad gives the example of the ongoing farmers’ protest, caused in part because opposition voices were not heard. We have existing mechanisms and our parliament, where the opposition has a right to be heard. When they are not, then that voice shows up in the form of protests on the street. If we use our existing mechanisms to hear people out, we will be able to address many of those concerns. Perhaps not all of them, but enough of them so that people believe that some of these changes and reforms are in their interest. The ones that aren’t, that strike fundamentally at a livelihood, are addressed in another way such that we then say, “This is something in the longer run that I’m willing to go along with.”

Arun Maira notes that while India’s economy has improved overall since 1991, the broader picture is concerning, in terms of the size and growth of the economy and its relation to an increase in environmental degradation and inequities. Although the size of the economy has been growing larger, the shape has been worse. Per unit of GDP growth, the Indian economy has damaged the environment more than almost every other country, and it has grown less jobs per unit of GDP growth when we need to grow  much more because of our population than other comparable economies. To Arun, we have stopped listening to the people who are not benefiting from this system, and when they speak up, we say they don’t understand and that they are just protesting good reforms. The experts believe they have the solutions, the economists believe they know how economies should be run, and they’re not listening to diverse voices of other disciplines, and certainly not of people with less power in the system.

A Willingness to Learn

In order to go forward, I think that markets need to return to being spaces of discovery of goods, services, and talent, and we need to deepen trust. There has been a breakdown of trust between the state and the markets, and between the consumers and the markets as well. So we need to find quick ways to rebuild that trust. My attention is especially focused on the environmental dimension. The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ecology, and this ecology is very critical to people especially in India, because our people’s livelihoods are so deeply tied to the ecology.

We say that the perfect way of getting more people into prosperity is by pulling them off of farms because we have very low productivity in agriculture, so we don’t need 600 million people to be engaged in this sector. But even if 400 million of them are removed from the equation and we try to do more productivity on our farms, what will we do with the 400 million people and what will that do to the ecology? Unless we’re able to answer that question, I don’t think we can even think of reimagining agriculture. I see the conversation happening between the government and farmers as an opportunity to rethink how we can do sustainable agriculture while keeping people’s livelihoods attached to the land in a sustainable way. That’s one avenue through which we can go about restoring the idea of local innovation, discovery, and trust.

We are all citizens first. We are not consumers or subjects of the state first, we are citizens and human beings first and foremost. So we need to develop our own ability to hold conversations about what good markets and good states can be. We need to do this so that we can all continue to survive together. We need the power of markets for its innovation and drive towards efficiency, and we need the state to hold human beings accountable and to create the institutions to have more equity, to unleash the good of markets. I think people are realising that the time has come to grapple with these big questions 

The problem is that all of us, myself included, want to prove that we are right. And if I’m right then you have to be wrong. So how do we, in this decade of increasing polarization, have the confidence in ourselves to hold on to the grey spaces between black and white and listen to other people’s ideas without judgement? It’s only by doing this that we may be able to find our way out of the existential threat that we are facing right now and unleash more creativity. The minute I shut you down, I shut down the potential of your ideas and your innovation and vice versa. We need to learn how to hold and express doubt without fear of reprisal, and recover those spaces of speaking maturely without judgement. There are many pathways given by so many experts, so we should listen and occupy the grey area to understand its nuances and riches.

 

We have been experimenting with unbridled democratisation of opinion. It was necessary because at first, not enough people had a platform to say whatever they wanted. Social media allowed that to happen. It’s been a wild ride and an amazing experiment, but experiments can and do go wrong. Reason lies in knowing when an experiment has gone too far. While we should never have to clamp down on anybody saying anything, to undermine professionalism and experience and allow everyone to be an expert just because they have an opinion has actually damaged the building of better governance, better markets, and better societies. So we should allow ourselves to respect experience and professionalism.

The problem occurs when those who are already in power monopolise what expertise is, who can become experts, who can acquire experience, and who disregard those traditional wisdom experts. This is when things go wrong. But we have reached a point of extreme danger in society to say that everyone is equally able to profess an opinion, because we are not. Then it’s a race to the bottom. Even when it comes to the relationship between consumer and the producer, I think some forms of expertise and experience have to be respected to make the markets better. As Arun mentions, the experts we require now to find the new normal, which will produce a more inclusive pattern of growth, more equity and justice, and less environmental degradation, are experts who are humble, listen deeply, and are willing to learn. 

Sea Change – Nandan Nilekani, Rohini Nilekani

To unbundle the thinking and provide diverse perspectives on the need for new ways of catalysing scaled, speedy and sustainable societal change, we are happy to share a 3 episode podcast series titled Sea Change; co-produced by Societal Platform and Vakku. This is a show about societal change in the digital age, and how to make a bigger, faster and more inclusive impact in the world we live in.

In this “First Episode” of Sea Change “Another way of seeing” (featuring Nandan Nilekani, Rohini Nilekani, Robert Palacios from World Bank, Ankur Vora from Gates Foundation, Lalitesh Katragadda, Sanjay Purohit and Pramod Varma), we speak to a group of people who set audacious goals, like transforming how children learn, how people access capital, or healthcare – but they don’t believe in focussing only on solutions.

 

Podcast