Rohini Nilekani (Chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and Core Founder of AIP), in her Keynote Address at the launch event for the AIP-BCG report, “Wealth with Purpose: A Report on Private Indian Philanthropy,” emphasised the critical role that the report will play in expanding the understanding of philanthropy in India. She also spoke about the importance of collaboration between samaaj, sarkar, and bazaar in addressing complex social issues.
The launch was held at the Motilal Oswal Tower in Mumbai in July 2024.
Transcript
00:00:00 Rohini Nilekani: Namaskar, how are you all? It’s wonderful to be in my native city in the monsoon with the sea looking so beautiful, and yet we are not flooded out. What better can you hope for in this beautiful city of Mumbai? It’s wonderful to see this room, as Ajay said, of people who have understood the true meaning of using their wealth for societal purpose. And thank you, Ashish, thank you to the whole team for putting together this report. I have read it. It adds substantively to the discourse on Indian philanthropy. Congratulations, and we look forward to much more because there’s going to be lots more to uncover about the journey of the philanthropists of India.
0:00:49 So I thought most of you are very well-versed in what is happening in philanthropy. Many of you are doing most amazing, innovative work as your journeys in philanthropy move along. And it is a journey. It’s like climbing a steep ladder. It’s 32 years now since I started working in this space, and every day I learn something new and aspire to do something more. So in this journey, all of you know, you’ve read many reports, you’ve done a lot of research in your own philanthropy. So I said, what is the one thing we all don’t talk too much about that I should broach?
0:01:25 And I thought that some of you know that I keep talking ad nauseam about Samaaj, Sarkaar and Bazaar. But I realized that in this journey of philanthropy, Ajay spoke about how we as philanthropists can work together with Sarkaar to do systems change. And he described a lot of the leveraged work that they are doing with Sarkaar. But I realized that many of us have not talked enough about the role of Bazaar. Without Sarkaar, Samaaj and Bazaar working together, there is simply no way we can solve the many, many societal, complex issues that face India today. As we grow economically we also want to have our society develop so that everybody in India, all 1.4 billion of them who are standing outside these hallowed rooms have a chance to sit at this table along with us. Isn’t that the final goal? That all of society should have the same opportunities, at least.
0:02:27 In that journey, civil society organizations and philanthropies have learned in the last 20, 30, 40 years, especially to work with Sarkaar. And indeed, there are thousands, if not millions of champions within government who are working together with civil society, Samaaj institutions and philanthropic foundations to help achieve scale in poverty reduction and increased all sorts of societal goods. However, we have not learned how to work with a very key component which all of you, most of you in the room represent, which is the Bazaar. Now why is that?
0:03:08 I think it is because we have not, civil society has not managed to make Bazaar enough of an ally in this journey. I must say that many of you will agree that many of the societal issues that are created are…many of them, not all of them, but many of them are actually negative externalities of the Bazaar. Whether it is societal issues of labor, livelihoods or it is environmental issues, many of them stem from inside the fences of Bazaar.
0:03:46 And again, I’m not trying to bring anybody from Bazaar down. I’m a very happy shareholder of the Bazaar. I think the results of Infosys came out today. Vallabh Bhai, I haven’t seen them. I hope they were good, but so I’m not at all anti-Bazaar. I’m saying how can we all together learn how to tap the Bazaar as a more of an ally? And I think there are many synergies possible that in this journey of wealth with purpose that we can unlock. I’m going to give you two examples from my experience.
0:04:17 So tomorrow, in fact, I’m going to co-host together with Rainmatter Foundation, somebody here from there. A climate leaders meet. Some of you will be there, together with the India Climate Collaborative. And we all are very acutely aware of what’s going to happen with climate change, especially in this extremely critical decade of human development. And this India Climate Collaborative was set up together with the Tata Trusts, the MacArthur Foundation, EdelGive and us, and this collaborative hope to build India’s climate ecosystem and harness the climate philanthropies potential working with government, business, civil society, etc.
0:05:09 This is a classic example of how we can pull in Bazaar from both inside and outside. 2-2.3 times is the growth of fund flows towards climate action just in six years, between 2017 and ’23. Earlier, climate action represented about 1-2% of overall philanthropic funding. But it is increasing very rapidly because of this kind of collaboration between civil society organization and Bazaar organizations. And I believe that we need much more such collaboration where, while Sarkaar, of course, is going to be the dominant player when it comes to funds because they have the most money, I do believe that we can unlock much more when we use Bazaar as an ally.
0:06:02 Today, Bazaar knows very well how climate change can affect everything in its supply chains, right? More and more and more people come and say, “How can we be much more sustainable end to end?” And I think here is where there’s a very close possible relationship between civil society organizations working at the first mile to limit the impact of environmental destruction, working together with the best intentions of Bazaar to certainly reduce the damage that is coming our way and to create a future very different from the future that we fear.
0:06:40 A growing body of research has demonstrated how greater respect for CSOs and civic freedoms increases actually the Bazaar’s potential, financial investment, facilitating economic reform, reducing social unrest, and allowing both ideas and resources to spread at unprecedented rates. There was a 2018 paper called the Business Case for Civil Society, which shows that the work of civil society organizations can reduce the cost of corruption, can help businesses be sustainable, can enhance investor and employee and customer relationships.
0:07:22 Remember, civil society organizations also help to maintain societal harmony. And business houses know very well that in the absence of societal peace, it is really very hard to conduct business. So there are many synergies between the civil society sector and the Bazaar sector, which I think remain underutilized. And I think we should start thinking together, how do we create better synergies between these two sectors?
0:07:51 I would give one example of an organization called Agami, which we fund through the Access to Justice portfolio. It is dedicated to accelerating innovation and law and justice in India. Some of you might know of their excellent work. Since 2018, they have also played a critical role in developing the online dispute resolution (ODR) field in India. I’m sure you all know that ODR is a public facing digital space in which parties can convene to resolve their disputes. Agami has been nurturing early-stage startups, Bazaar sector startups in which they can build a compelling narrative around the potential of ODR to unlock support from key stakeholders in government, in the judiciary and in the private sector.
0:08:40 The partners by the way, include NITI Aayog, the judiciary, ICICI bank and many, many startups. ODR is not far removed from our lives as we think. Dispute resolution costs borne by citizens and business have resulted in an aggregate loss of $56 billion to the Indian economy, and that means it comes close to 1.88% of GDP. Not at all a small number. And if we can improve online dispute resolution, can you imagine what ripple effects come down into society?
0:09:16 So there are such innovative possibilities where you bring Samaaj, Sarkaar, of course Sarkaar is there, but Bazaar together to solve some of our problems. And I have become very interested and would be very happy to hear from people in the room as to how we can bring Bazaar into a much, much closer relationship with both Sarkaar and Samaaj. I urge philanthropists and business leaders to think more about this.
0:09:46 I think in the report I was very struck, hundred HNIs were interviewed and more possibly, and you’ll be hearing much more so I won’t waste time on telling you more about the report, but what was interesting to me is the forms of giving were as diverse as Indian society itself. And it is our diversity I do believe, which allows us to experiment and innovate and successful models to be adopted. So there’s much more work to be done, but it seems the most heartening thing in the report, as you will hear, is that most wealthy people want to give more, faster and better.
0:10:22 So can you imagine the opportunity as India grows wealthy? Unfortunately, it is likely that a small portion of India is going to grow wealthier faster than everybody else. We cannot keep staying so far away from what was so beautifully described just now about the districts, for example, and the people for example, that are left behind. We have to pull up other people along with us. That is the purpose of wealth creation in society. No society will allow runaway wealth creation unless it is seen as a societal good. No nation will allow only a handful of people to grow wealthy and use wealth only for themselves without bringing in all forms of restraint.
0:11:10 So I won’t belabor that point too much because I’m already in a room of the converted. I don’t need to urge you to do. But there is always scope to do more. We struggle to do more, Nandan and I struggle. How can we give back more? We have signed the Giving Pledge. We have a long way to go to finish it, hopefully in our lifetimes. So always looking for more and more opportunities to collaborate at the systems level to create exponential change. For that, we have set up The Centre for Exponential Change very recently, and we hope to be able to take at least 10 societal entrepreneurs to significant scale in the next 3-5 years, in 3-5 countries. But that kind of imagination is needed to be unleashed throughout the chain.
0:11:57 Even if you’re beginning at the first step of philanthropy, I urge all of us, successful entrepreneurs, all of you to start thinking scale at the get-go. I’m not suggesting you launch millions of crores worth of ventures, but if you start to imagine, even if you’re supporting one child’s scholarship, think because you have this much, you have the wherewithal, you have the education, you have the networks, and you have the intent. How can you put all of that to think what will it mean to take your passion to scale? Your organization need not scale, but your mission can scale in collaboration with a hundred other entrepreneurs like yourselves.
0:12:39 So we have started looking at how do you scale? And we’ve come up with a framework, not the framework. And some of the elements of that to think about is how do you design for scale from the get-go because pilots succeed, and scale often fails. So knowing what works at scale rather than scaling what works, how do you put technology to work for you? Not be led by technology but be enabled by technology. How do you distribute the ability to solve? How do you create a system which is unified in its vision but not uniform in its processes? How do you therefore leverage the wonderful diversity of India to solve in context? How do you unleash, how do you distribute the ability to solve? This is the kind of, a few things I’ve told you about a process by which we can really scale every good idea that exists in this room.
0:13:41 Without belaboring too much because we are already a little behind schedule, I’m going to leave you with one thought. I love being in nature. I love everything from tigers to ants and the beautiful diversity. This is one country in India. Never forget that as you step out even into the city of Mumbai, India is the one culture, the one country in the world where despite so much population pressure on our land, we have nurtured flora and fauna diversity almost unparalleled in the world with this kind of land pressure. And that comes from a deep culture of respect, a deep culture of understanding the nature cannot be separated from human beings.
0:14:24 And for me, that is one of the most inspiring things in my life and work. I always look to nature for inspiration every day. One of the things I’m fascinated with is spiders. And spiders have been around for a hundred million years, much more longer than us. There are dozens of species that are doing miraculous things to build their webs and catch their food. And I always used to wonder, how is it that a tiny little spider manages to make a web from here to there with empty space in between? How does the spider cross from here to there with his web?
0:15:00 And then I read up about it and found that yes, the spider is capable of spinning different kinds of yarn with different stickiness and strength. He’s all ready, with the web to be spun, but you know what he has to wait for to go to create a web from here to that wall, for example, while all of us are sleeping at night? He has to wait and wait and wait for a gentle breeze to come along, which allows him to throw the first thread across that yawning gap of space.
0:15:29 And I always said, “My God, that’s so fascinating.” We didn’t realize the role of the gentle breeze in the making of the World Wide Web. And I think, I’ll leave you with that thought, ladies and gentlemen, maybe philanthropy is the gentle web which allows the spiders of Samaaj, Sarkaar and Bazaar to spin the beautiful intricate webs for societal development all over the world.
Let’s be the gentle breeze and use our wealth with much more purpose. Dhanyawad. Namaste.
