This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s comments at an online event hosted by New America. The discussion was on the margins of the 2020 UN General Assembly to launch a #DigitalDecade to develop open source technology solutions that will strengthen public institutions in countries worldwide.
We have reached a tipping point when it comes to digital public platforms and that’s marvelous news. And I believe that societal platforms are the most critical thing to focus on in these times, because when we forget to do that, I really believe that the markets and the state become far too powerful. If we want to really move towards our goals of equity and sustainability, then we have to design for the inclusion of all those in whose name the state and markets function, right? So, we call this effort Societal Platform Thinking and it has design principles and core values to guide us, and we really intend to empower the first mile, not the last mile – we call it the first mile, where the problem manifests and we aim to restore agency.
So, we all know that societal problems are large, complex, and dynamic and that any effort to address them has to be anchored in the creative collaboration between society, state, and markets. But how do you reduce this natural friction to collaborate? How can you create platforms that allow for contextual problem-solving? How can these be designed in a way that is unified but not uniform, so that we can support rich diversity at scale? And that’s what keeps our teams awake at night. To solve these complex problems, maybe we don’t need a single platform, but an ecosystem of platforms that play different roles. So some can act as context-independent foundations, like mobile, cloud, or GPS. And this is the digital public goods infrastructure that we are talking about, that allows everyone a unified platform to engage with. The second layer is the context-aware layer, which allows the co-creation of tools that build trust. That allows all actors to work together with a shared understanding of processes. And the third layer is the context-intensive layer and it’s very domain-intensive because it allows people to actually deploy and amplify solutions in specific sectors, whichever they may be, livelihoods, or water, or education.
To us, Societal Platform Thinking is a kind of wrap-around that allows all these platforms to work together to actually serve society. So, let me give you a very quick example in education, which we all know is highly complex, and that while we try to keep the child at the center, a host of people and institutions are required to help children learn and to keep them learning, right? So the team used all our new thinking to help India’s union government build a national education platform that they wanted to call DIKSHA. This educational infrastructure also creates a bridge between the familiar physical world of the textbook and the classroom, and bridges it to the emerging digital world. So for example, through this effort, India’s state governments had printed QR codes in 600 million textbooks in about 16 languages in the past year, and teachers are creating digital content on this platform that links to the static chapters in the textbook and makes students get any time access to learning.
And just see where that led us recently. When the pandemic forced schools and colleges to shut down, the education system had to go online. It was extremely urgent to stem the loss of learning to 320 million children in India. And surprisingly, teachers, parents, and children seem to adapt and shift very quickly to this platform. And just look at the statistics. 1.2 million teachers trained, 175 million learning sessions done, on this government platform, just in these past few months. And a lot of innovation has also gone into making sure that those who don’t have access to digital devices can also participate, and we call that online for offline. That is the power that public institutions can pull together in this digital age. But to achieve this, we really believe that every actor, and every institution has to hold one core value that we, as a team, hold very dear – to restore agency. Because we all know that talent and innovation is everywhere, we have to unleash it so that more people can become part of the solution instead of remaining part of the problem.
The point is, after all, digital platforms are just digital platforms! But what makes it play well for society is the power of intent. And even the power of intent is not enough, we also have to deploy the grammar of that intent. That’s why we think what we call Societal Platform Thinking (but it is just one way, many other people are doing similar things) is critical, because it incorporates the design principles shown here, that allow people to appreciate that grammar of intent and to use that grammar to create their own language, their own poetry, their own prose, if you will, to fulfill their societal missions. As a team, we are very excited with this approach and the potential of this digital age. We are eager and impatient to collaborate with everybody, and what’s happening here is music to our ears. So let’s just get together and make digital technology work harder to service society.
Water is the key sector when it comes to climate change related challenges. It is ever changing and complex, with equity, quality and quantity issues rising routinely. Usually, water issues have to be dealt with locally, in context. For example, even if you planned to bring water from a faraway river to a city, it is the city planners who need to engage with how equitably that new water will be used; they will have to design to carry away excess flow and sewage and so on.
For that, you need local talent. You need communities to come together along with trained professionals and local leaders to understand how THEIR water behaves, both above and below the ground. They must be able to find granular solutions that accommodate upstream and downstream solutions created by others. For example, to manage groundwater sustainably in one panchayat, you need to find out if you are sharing an aquifer with another panchayat, and co-create an equitable system.
This means that we cannot push for one size fits all solutions. Instead, we must design capacity building in order to distribute the ability to solve. A technology backbone, which is unified but not uniform, which allows local, contextual problem solving at scale is the need of the hour. Our teams at Societal Platform.org and Arghyam are beginning to build just such an open, digital, shared public infrastructure.
Nurturing community capacity and resilience in the face of climate change is critical. In the water sector, for life and livelihoods, it is especially so.
[Written for the September 2020 issue of the ICC Newsletter]
Rohini’s keynote at Indus Action’s Schemes to Systems conference. Philanthropist, Rohini Nilekani stresses on how the voice of Samaaj should be amplified and understood, while reducing the administrative gaps.
Thank you to Indus action and all the people gathered here. A special namaskar to the two senior politicians here – Dr Palanivel Thiagarajan ji and Mahua Moitra ji. Civil society groups must find ways to interact ever more with the political class and the business class – after all we are neither anti-government nor anti-market but we are pro people, pro samaaj. That is the first calling of the civil society sector. And everybody, bar none, is a citizen before they are a politician , a bureaucrat , A CEO or an employee, we are all citizens first, and last too, when we shed our day job identities and go home.
It is now exactly 15 years since I started speaking and writing about the continuum of samaaj, bazaar and sarkaar – and it is a continuum always in a dynamic balance and the continuous quest is to make the balance more just to all . And I have been saying that samaaj must become conscious that it is the first sector and it has to work to make sarkaar and bazaar, which come later, accountable to the larger public interest of the samaaj.
But what is the role of Samaaj actors in times like these, when people the world over, and in India too, seem to be fearful and insecure and retreating to narrower and polarized spaces?
I really believe, and this came to strongly this morning as I wrote this speech, is that today, as always, the role of empathy is absolutely critical. Empathy within, for ourselves, and empathy for others.
This is the important inner to outer journey we all struggle to make as civil society actors, isn’t it?
And in this aspect – how civil society institutions themselves behave becomes important –
How can we avoid the cancel culture so prevalent in the west, how can we reduce otherization? It is hard to eliminate otherization completely perhaps, because humans do seem often to define themselves against something else, maybe even an enemy, possibly as part of our evolutionary biology – but can we reduce this tendency through more awareness of the benefits of coming together ? Can we look outside OUR ideological walls if we want others to look outside theirs? Is it the work of samaaj institutions to create windows in all such walls?
Can we create those shared spaces, which are held without judgement, so we can discover ways to build a better society, a better samaaj?
How do we awake to and help awaken people to see ourselves as more than subjects, more than beneficiaries, more than consumers?
To see ourselves as humans in a complex web of humanity, as CITIZENS, as NAGARIKS?
And then, what are these citizens, these nagariks? What do citizens do?
Citizens are aware, they are alive to what is happening around them socially, economically, ecologically, politically. They belong to a community of other citizens. And it doesn’t matter if that is a small neighbourhood community or a global one, each is important, especially if it has thick bonds. One problem that has emerged is that social media has allowed the thriving of very thin bonds, and that has created groups of people that can be easily aroused to negativity. It is part of the work of civil society groups in fact to help build social bonds that are thick, so that people can work together in more harmony for a common cause.
Citizens, when fulfilling their role, are curious about and willing to participate in the co-creation of a society that makes their own lives and all others better, more abundant, more creative. And after empathy, for me, Creativity is an important word because the zenith, the apex of human history may be the ability of people to generate beauty, through their own talent ,agency and co-operation with the talent and agency of others.
To create is the is to be human. And I don’t mean just art and sculpture and beautiful buildings and things, but also the creation of big new social ideas and societal movements too, that enable humans to take such giant strides of consciousness, as in the universal vote, as in so many freedom struggles, and so much more.
That creativity is the most precious thing for samaj organisations to nurture. And we need to debate much more on how we can generate more sympathy and more creativity as the green fuel for the engine of samaaj as a whole and for CSOs too.
But these are challenging times, and our work is not so easy.
In a kind of reversal of the global liberal order which had perhaps gone stale & lost its relevance, and more importantly, its creativity – we seem to be in the grip of a shrinking of identities to narrow and narrower selves –
From Global to National
From National to Regional
From Regional to Religional
From Religional to the Tribal
From Tribal to ??
For the political class, this narrowing of identities frankly, can be useful, as it creates easy to capture voter groups.
For markets too, it can be beneficial , as it creates good segmentation to capture consumer bases.
In fact, sometimes, I only half-jokingly say –
Bazaar has made the tyranny of choice so complex (even to buy rice, a daily staple we have to choose between price ranges, between polished and unpolished, red and white and brown, organic and non-organic, and so on, endlessly, )& the pandemic has made personal/ family choices in the social space so frightening that people want simplicity in their politics- just delegate to one entity and forget about it.
But this is a cop-out and we must all beware of this trap.
Because when we cop out of being citizens, full citizens, what we are likely to get is a monopolies or monoculture of ideas and of practices that eventually will start to make societies less stable and less sustainable. We all know the cliché of the plantation and the rainforest and most people agree that the rainforest, with its diverse ecosystems is more healthy and sustainable, and so it is with societies too. But to maintain the diversity in society, citizens, unfortunately do not have the luxury to sit back and relax. We have to tend to our social gardens, however small they might be, and in all seasons.
Because, no matter what the benefits may be to sarkaar and bazaar, for Samaaj, and for civil society this shrinking to the smaller self only generates more fear, more insecurity and more divisiveness,
inevitably leading to conflict over identities, ideas and resources.
So the role of CSO’s then is to inspire people to see ever more of themselves in relation to the outer world- through collective action, collective creation, through campaigns, projects ,workshops & more. And eventually all of these hopefully, will foster more empathy, allowing people to see themselves in others’ shoes, even looking to the well-being of future generations, and thus to become the highest embodiment of themselves
Is this all too idealistic? Ye of course it is. But if we together believe in this grand human project – of increasing empathy and creativity in society – even if it takes 25 years or a 100, then we can move inexorably towards this magnificent goal with a feeling of hope and belief that all our actions, however small, like little drops of water – will eventually create the ocean .
Thank you for this opportunity to speak among so many amazing organisations seeking to build active citizenship, and also among senior politicians, whom we look to to help shape a positive social agenda. Dhanyavad and namaskar.
Citizens now have more opportunities to take active part in building urban resilience
This year, I have been from Bengaluru to Kabini and back several times. Every time I return from the forest and the rural countryside, my eyes and senses hit refresh, and I see my home city with a new perspective.
The overwhelming impression is of a metro undergoing a painful renewal. Masses of threatening concrete overhead, piles of rubble underneath. And through this grey canvas, dots of colour as hapless citizens weave through the traffic, without proper visibility or signposts, navigating past trucks and haulers, moody traffic signals and perplexing roundabouts.
It feels as if Bengaluru, like so many other cities in India, is testing its residents. The unfinished infrastructure is a poster promise of a better future. The city demands patience, demands faith, demands hope. The residents experience resignation, weariness, and a lasting numbness.
When I finally get home, I enter an urban version of the forest I left behind – my neighbourhood has a dense canopy of trees. Yet Bengaluru is not homogenous, and my sylvan surroundings are an anomaly now in the erstwhile garden city. It has a criss-cross of diverse identities and designs. It has layers and layers of privilege on top and tiers of disenfranchisement below. Yet, the dysfunctionality of the city creates a perverse equaliser. It brings an end to the secession of the elite. Our bubble breaks with the chaos of the traffic, the pervasive pollution and limitations on personal spaces.
But there are now new opportunities to engage with the city’s future.
All over India, there are efforts inviting citizens to re-imagine belonging. To make the city their own. The discourse has firmly shifted from whether the city should grow to how it should grow and change, and who should participate in the change-making.
Today’s technologies enable mass participation in civic design. In metropolitan areas and beyond, digital age civil society organisations (CSOs), often helmed by creative young leaders, use tech-enabled design to challenge the supremacy of the State in urban futures. Thriving Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs) and dynamic CSOs seem determined to take back their city.
For example, during the lockdown, Yugantar filed a Right to Information (RTI) petition to find the total number of slums and their population in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation. This data was then shared with local NGOs to better target relief work. Haiyya, through a local campaign called Health over Stigma, helped hold service providers accountable for providing safe, non-judgmental sexual and reproductive health services, especially for unmarried women. Reap Benefit in Bengaluru has developed an open civic platform that comprises a WhatsApp chatbot, a web app and a civic forum. The chatbot guides users with simplified steps through a variety of civic challenges that are engaging and fun. If you see a pothole on the road, you can send photos, but go beyond reporting to next steps. A friendly technology helps convert agitation into action and turn bystanders into stewards.
Civis understands that technical environmental legislation can sometimes bypass civil society, even though we are all heavily impacted by environmental degradation. In March 2020, a draft notification with radical new rules was put up by the environment ministry for public consultation. Civis put up a simplified version and more people were able to directly participate in the consultation.
We must encourage these and many other samaaj-based efforts. More importantly, we must each find our own way to participate in these ventures. Democracy cannot be a spectator sport. Good governance must be co-created, not just consumed. No matter who you are, you are first a citizen. Even if you head a government department or a successful business — you remain a citizen first, a part of your community. And I believe it is only the samaaj and institutions of the samaaj that can hold the State accountable to the larger public interest of making our cities more livable for all.
Luckily, today’s new technologies allow us to participate more effectively with relative ease. I am not talking about simple clicktivism, but how a tech-enabled, societal ecosystem can distribute the ability to solve; can democratise civic engagement; and can help people co-create their city’s future.
However, there is an important caution here. We need civil society itself to get more digital in the digital age. Especially because only an engaged digital samaaj can keep tech corporations more accountable and prevent them from unleashing tools that distort the political and democratic process or reduce individual and collective agency. Urban movements are critical for this cause.
The pandemic has forced us to speed up our thinking on what cities should look like in the future. Citizens now have more opportunities to take active part in building urban resilience. Young leaders are creating more options for empowered citizens to co-create more humane environments. When we return to the city from the forest, we should feel a buzz, not a burn.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani in conversation with Vidya Shah, Chairperson & CEO, EdelGive Foundation at EDGE 2020. They discuss Rohini’s insights from her philanthropic journey over the years.
My work in philanthropy spans different spaces, from groundwater and sanitation, early learning, social justice and governance, to the arts. I have portfolios on active citizenship, young men and boys, environmental issues, and how to collaborate on better access to justice. It may seem like this approach makes me a jack of all trades and master of none. But I would like to put this in perspective, because while these are all different issues, to my mind they focus on the same thing, which is the strengthening of Samaaj. I’ve said many times that making the Samaaj strong enough to solve its problems on its own, obviously with collaboration, remains the single driving spirit behind my philanthropy and my other work as well. Regardless of what field we are working in, what I look for is ideas, individuals, and institutions that have the integrity, commitment, and passion to solve something that they care about. These are all societal issues, and through my philanthropy, I hope to strengthen communities and Samaaj to respond to problems and see themselves as an active part of the solution. Thanks to India’s thriving civil sector, I am able to work across these areas and have the privilege of supporting some amazing organizations.
How to Strengthen and Support the Social Sector
There are so many things acting on civil society right now. Pressures of fundraising, pressures of all kinds of reforms that the government is undertaking that are worrying the sector a lot right now. And on top of that, because of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) law or because of various diversions in ideological beliefs, many rich philanthropists have undertaken initiatives to implement their aims on their own, hiring their own people and operating within their own gate. They may be collaborating with the government, but not necessarily with existing civil society institutions. This is a worrying trend because these civil society organizations have their feet very firmly on the ground. They’ve done the work for decades, they understand how problems evolve, and how sometimes a new solution may give rise to a new problem. Unless you have a deep, contextual understanding of the issue, you can’t really grapple with the inequities that common people have to face. So, I would say to philanthropists, even if you implement within your own organization, make sure to find those people who are already doing good work. And I think many of them do that. For example, at EkStep we are rolling out a huge platform along with the government, but we also made sure to include many civil society organizations in it.
We need to collectively work on making our society strong, and that means strengthening its institutions, leadership, and a moral base so that we can confidently hold the markets and the state accountable to the common public interest. Society is not homogenous, especially in India, so it is a tricky task to ensure that societal tensions do not spill over. For that, I think the first thing is we need to go back to the basics. We must start having conversations about how do we see ourselves as citizens first? How do we see ourselves not just as consumers or subjects of the state, but as active participants in society?
Today it is so easy to wake up in the morning itself as a consumer, you know? The first cup of tea you have and until you go to bed, something is there which ties you to the market very closely, especially digitally. Today, states are so powerful. From morning to night, you’re also ruled by a million laws, some of which you don’t even know. So how do we grab back for ourselves? We need to understand that we are citizens first, and that we must work to make our society better for everyone, whether that means just doing something within your building, house, neighborhood, city, or for the whole country. So, just that flip from realizing you’re not a subject, you’re not a customer, you are a human being and a citizen first – once these layers are understood, it becomes easier to do the work which strengthens Samaaj.
The task before civil society and the media now is to make people see that they need to be giving back to society, and the work that they do through their businesses is not enough. Because that old idea of the business of business is business, that’s over right? We have understood the interconnections so much better, especially in 2020, that I think for more business people and wealthy people to start giving forward into areas that they don’t directly benefit from. It’s a very critical way forward, even for themselves, because you and I know what kind of satisfaction and joy and discovery we get from doing this work. I think it is up to us also to tell these stories a little better than we are doing right now, to draw in more people into this adventure. So, there’s work ahead on all sides.
This is more complex for women, since many women do not have control over their finances and being able to give is a tricky issue. Personally, I had to battle for my identity because Nandan takes up such a large space. I had to work and demonstrate over time, my approach is complementary and different to his. I was fortunate enough to put my own money into Infosys, so I became independently wealthy and have more control over my own finances. Families need to understand that women can use their talents, not only in their jobs and home life, but can also work to improve their community. I urge women to take this up confidently, start as small as you feel comfortable with, but do not be afraid to make the demand on money to give forward, because it’s another way to contribute to the family and instill important values in the next generation.
In the last two decades, people have had these conversations and learnt from each other in the sector. They are beginning to join head and heart and pocket. It is true that people start either from the heart or from the head, and strangely the journey from the heart to the head is actually a very long and deep journey. It’s an evolution. It’s a learning path, and people who start from head quickly realize that they need a bit of heart, and people who start from the heart realize, “Oops, we need to think this through much more for systemic change.” So they get there eventually, and again, we must make sure those of us who are so passionate about this sector, ask how we can keep more resources out there so that people can converge their head and heart and not forget about their pockets as well. Open your head, your heart, and your pocket.
Most people have understood that they have to work with the government, the biggest player of all. And that doesn’t necessarily mean the Prime Minister’s Office. It could mean working with the local panchayat, ward councilor, or mohalla committee, or it could be any form of a state or a para-state organization. So first of all, we need to understand what we mean by government. And if you’re doing new philanthropy, begin small. There are a variety of opportunities to engage with the government and it will help to expand your own work, even if it is at a very small scale. Today, if you go to your ward councilor and say, “I want to give books and uniforms to one school”, you are already working with the state and the political system. If you begin small, you will quickly understand how that will help you to scale up your work.
The Challenges for Indian Philanthropy
I think philanthropists who are business people who have to constantly work with the government, are generally very nervous to take on risky things which the government might think are anti-government. Even though they may not be, right? If something is pro-people, it’s not necessarily anti-government. So, we have to be very careful in our philanthropy. It must be pro-people or pro-ecosystems that also benefit people. And I think Indian philanthropy needs to take a very hard look at what is actually happening on the ground. Why are people suffering? With climate change, who’s going to suffer? Those who live at the edge of livelihood and land, livelihood, and water, those kinds of places.
If we do not understand now that the economy is, as they say, a wholly owned subsidiary of the ecology, then even businesses will not thrive. Otherwise, corporates will shy away from the hard questions about pollution, water sustainability, land issues, agriculture, and many more issues. Being pro-people and pro-environment for our country is important right now. We can afford to take more risks, even in terms of access to justice. How many people are languishing in prisons without trials because they do not have easy access to courts and lawyers? Societal issues are intricately linked together, and those connections are being woven tighter together as time goes by. We need to understand this and use those insights in our philanthropy.
I think that civil society in India needs to realize that they were dependent on foreign and multilateral organizations for funding, and that they did not spend enough time and energy to bridge divides between them and Indian funders. Instead of assuming that people will not fund them, they need to now tell their stories in a way that will help funders understand. So there is a lot of work that civil society needs to do to reach out to Indians who are becoming wealthier or are already wealthy. We need to galvanize our own super wealthy, and get the wealthy to start openly giving. When we talk about wealth in India, it is often in hushed tones. Wealth creation is actually a good thing because that’s how you bring more and more people into prosperity, which is why societies allow it and the state encourages it.
But wealth must be used and must be seen to be beneficial for all society. If only a few private people are benefiting from wealth creation, and masses of people are not seeing the benefit of that wealth creation, then clearly something is very seriously wrong. So, there is a lot of churn going on right now. These last 20 years, a lot of economic papers have celebrated billionaires, but I think we are seeing a tipping point now. People have understood that while wealth creation is good, accumulation of so much wealth in few private hands that is not visibly being deployed for societal interests, people are beginning to wake up to the problems that that poses. And I think today all wealthy people need to reflect on the opportunity to be more useful to far more people and do it visibly. I think the time to be shy about it is over.
Finally, we need to look at retail fundraising. How do Indian civil society organizations tap into this more effectively? While I think we do need to professionalize civil society, the core of the sector is the volunteer energy that people have in them. The desire to do good for its own sake, without transactional results, is what motivates us. That is what we need to see coming up again, so civil society has to learn to tap into that.
Moving Towards a Digital Civil Society
The pandemic has helped us realize the importance of digital spaces, especially when it comes to creating a more resilient civil society in India. Whether in terms of organizations’ capacity to quickly respond to emerging problems, or the capacity to not be dependent on a few funding waves, the sector would benefit from the move to the digital. In order for this to happen, we need to build out capacity building as a sector in philanthropy and civil society. We need to provide more training, tools, and resources to civil society organizations because without financial support they may not be able to do it.
Over the past few years, our teams at EkStep and at the Societal Platform have been thinking about how to use technology to build for inclusion. Although I am not a techie, I have learned to expand my definition of tech – farmers use the plough, Gandhi used the charkha, we moved from bullock carts to cars, and these are all examples of technology. Everything is technology, but information technology particularly is double-edged and we know it can be used for both good and bad. Information technology amplifies intent, so working on intent and declaring it is very important. We need to constantly make sure that our technology does not lead us away from our intent. So how do we make technology work for society, to serve Samaaj? This is why we designed Societal Platform Thinking. If we want everyone to have an education, healthcare, access to justice, water, or any other basic necessity, can we use the power of all these emerging technologies to do that instead of trying to capture value at one end of the spectrum?
There are no simple solutions, but I believe the way forward is to create open public digital goods so that everyone can be a part of taking back technology for society. I don’t see how else we can solve these complex societal issues, which is why I urge civil society organizations to bring themselves into the digital age, because the new societal problems are going to be digital age problems. We need a healthy digital civil society to tackle digital age issues on virtual platforms. These are complex issues, but they can be made simpler with the goal that technology must enable inclusion, choice, access, and agency. And we have to design for all these principles, which is what we hope Societal Platform Thinking will do.
Rohini Nilekani is a fierce believer in the power of being an active, participatory citizen. She quips that her friends could get irritated with her Gandhigiri, as she went about picking up waste which people had thrown on the road or requested people to stand in line at bus stops right from her childhood days.
Today, as a philanthropist and a leading voice representing civil society, Rohini supports ideas, individuals and institutions doing ground-breaking work that enables a strong samaaj with ethical leadership, a sense of urgency and the courage to learn. She is the Founder-Chairperson of Arghyam, and Co-founder and Director of EkStep. She is also an author, Giving Pledge Signatory along with her husband Nandan Nilekani, a former journalist and a member of various advisory boards.
How did you arrive at this idea that value is created when the civil society, government, and markets come together and co-create to solve societal problems?
Since childhood, I always felt very strongly about citizens banding together to do some things. But putting these three things together really happened in 1997 – when I had gone on a field visit for our work on water in the Northern state of Bihar in India.
I got talking with one of our partners there, with whom we were working through Arghyam. He said to me, “in the good old days, society used to be very strong. And then in the last century, the government became stronger (starting with colonialism and onwards), followed by even stronger international corporations, especially with globalization. In the process, society kept getting pushed back and back and back to the lowest point instead of being at the top”.
This really made me think. I started reading and learning about societal movements, about social change, about power structures. And it occurred to me that in this continuum of society, and markets, and the state – in this continuum, the most important sector was the societal sector! That if we want any change to happen, we have to look at the role of all these three sectors. I’ve been feeling for a very long time now that the societal sector has to be the strongest foundation so that the markets and the state can be responsive to the needs of the society. So all of my work has been on how we can strengthen the foundational society, to actually try and come together to solve problems for itself, and include bazaar and sarkaar without letting the societal power reduce. Without creating an imbalance.
This idea of Societal Platform Thinking was germinating in your mind and manifesting through your work since 2004. What were your personal experiences, how did you come to this construct of Societal Platform Thinking?
Through my work at Akshara Foundation, I learnt a lot about how to work with the government. But it was when we started Pratham Books, whose mission is to ‘put a book in every child’s hand’, there I realized that even working with the government would not be enough. You have to involve a broad section of society to make sure that every child is given the gift of a reading life.
We knew that the publishing industry in India was in dire need of change: if we cannot find more than 600 books in any mother tongue language put together but English, and we have 300 million kids! Something needed to be done with urgency! So we decided that we have to unleash the creative energy of all the people in India, because every household is a storytelling household in India. Everybody tells the stories of the epics to their children and grandchildren. So how could we transition from an oral culture to a written culture?
We started working with publishers, with state governments, and we worked with every single creative artist we could find. It taught me the power of unleashing the most amazing positive energy of people. Writers, illustrators, translators, editors, publishers, governments, philanthropy – everybody came together. We innovated on how to make a book cheap to publish, and financially accessible to many? Even though it was underwritten by philanthropy, we wanted it to be eventually financially sustainable. And, we did.
So, innovation mattered a lot. Partnerships mattered a lot. I learned about unleashing the societal energy that people have in them to achieve a common goal. And this learning has informed the coming together of Societal Platform Thinking.
You have always stressed on leadership for the society and of the society. So when you think about leadership, how do you look at that dimension?
The true idea of leadership has to come from a place where I feel the responsibility to change something that I think is not correct in the world. It could be anything. And if leadership is born from that – that idea of transformation, then you have to shoulder the responsibility to make that transformation happen.
And we all know that we can’t do this by ourselves. Leadership is about being a follower of other people’s ideas, because we are always standing on the shoulders of other giants. But it is as much about being able to create a followership. We ensure that by our example.
For me, the power of intent always matters a lot. I did realize on the way, however, that just the power of intent is by no means enough. When I co-created my first institution in 1992, Nagrik, we wanted to have safer roads in India. While the intent was strong, by every metric it was a disaster – now i realise that we didn’t yet have the language or the grammar of that intent, so that we could be effective. A leader must learn with his or her team how to create a grammar, so that people can build a language.So for me, leadership is about enabling the grammar of that intent, so that everybody can work on enriching the language of that mission or whatever that we decide to do together.
You are an advocate for creating safe spaces to embrace failure, and you have talked a lot about this. So we’d love to hear your perspectives on failure and how you look at failure.
In the social sector, it’s very hard for us to talk of failure publicly. I do understand where it is coming from – most social sector organizations need funders, and funders like to hear nice things about what they’re funding. It’s only now that there is much better sense that funders need to know about what didn’t work. So that they are able to fund that as well.
We are beginning to learn that failure is okay. In fact, we had a failure conference in Bangalore three years ago, where icons of the civil society movements in India came and said, here’s how we failed. Here’s why we have failed. We take the responsibility for that failure. But here’s what we learn from the failure.
Nobody wants to fail – so we should be careful of not glorifying failure. But in our organisations, we really must make time to understand failure, to accept failure, to discuss failure, and then where possible, to pin accountability without demeaning that person or team so much that they won’t try anything different again.
You have led the charge in philanthropy in India in many ways – with investments in Societal Platform and the way you have been a risk funder through trust. Tell us more.
I started off as an activist in some sense – whether it was at Nagrik or Akshara or Pratham Books. I was inside these civil society organizations, and I knew how difficult it is to have to respond to donors who don’t understand the ground reality. The reality is that things keep changing, and you need to be able to respond to that changing situation in a flexible manner. Whereas, if you’re stuck with some programmatic kind of backed donation or something very specific, it really makes the organization very rigid, and makes people very anxious about reporting to the donor. So, I know the feeling and the hardships – I had been on this side.
So now as a donor, I know that I cannot, cannot, cannot thrust my own ideas and opinions and rigidity on to any organization and expect them to succeed. There’s just no way! I recall, one of the first people that I gave a large chunk of money to, Mihir Shah in Arghyam said, “Rohini, don’t make the mistake of calling your partners grantees. You should not be a donor and they should not be grantees, you should be partners.” We really try our best to always do that. Trust is a basic currency we need. You just have to work on trust. Of course, you have to do some due diligence and sometimes your trust will be betrayed, but you learn. So for me, trust is the absolute foundation of any partnership.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s address at the ACTIZENS awards ceremony hosted by the Desh Apnayen Sahayog Foundation. In her speech as Chief Guest, Rohini Nilekani discusses how we can harness India’s latent potential to shape extraordinary citizens who will make India the world’s greatest democracy.
You and your friends, and all the young people like you in our country, have a really joyful responsibility to hold a brighter future and not to get weighed down by it, but see yourselves as trustees of a bright shining future for our country. I truly believe that if we can get our country right, if we can get India right in so many ways – including on the front of equity and justice and environmental sustainability, and opportunities for all – it is much easier for the whole world to be in the right path, because we are soon going to represent 1/5 of all humanity. So, think of the future as a road on which we will all walk together, carrying a light, joyful responsibility on our shoulders, because we are poised for so many good things. But as Vallabhbhai said, “Each one of us if we’re not active, this potential can fall apart.” They keep saying that what we call a demographic dividend can become a demographic disaster. And I must apologize for my generation, we seem to have left young people with a host of problems. But, in some sense, I think sometimes the crisis as we saw last year, the crisis of the pandemic, showed how much marvelous humanitarian energy could be put forward into the world.
So if we decide to look at the potential of abundance everywhere, I think we can genuinely collaborate to make a better future than some people claim that it might become. And democracy is a very important part of this, I believe. Because what do we want when we all sit and quietly think, what kind of society do we want to belong to? Just like you and I, all want our freedoms – the right to act, to speak, to wear what we like, to work, to improve our opportunities, and to improve the opportunities of the people around us. Everyone wants the same thing. So, the minute we step out of ourselves and into our communities, we realize that pretty much everyone wants the same thing. And therefore, what can I do? Because all of us here, some of us are more privileged and I accept that. Definitely, I belong to the very lucky privileged class. But all of us who are gathered here today are very, very privileged people in this country. And we know there are so many people out there who are not as privileged as we are, and yet, they have the same dreams, the same aspirations, and the same hopes that all of us have. So, one of the first things I believe we need in this century, which is already somehow 20 years old, is empathy.
I keep telling young people to stay curious, because there’s so much that we don’t know. And life is full of so many possibilities. So one: Stay curious. Two: Stay connected, because everyone is dependent on everybody else. And sometimes we forget that we are part of this big web. So stay connected, understand all the connections. This small little virus has taught us that. And third : Stay committed. Because all of us, especially when we are young, are trying to find our little space in the world, right? Who am I? What do I want to be? What about my personal ambition? But what about everything else? And from what I’ve seen and heard of all of you, you’re already much more mature than I was at your age. You are very clear about what you want to do. And I salute you. Really, I meet many young people in this country, except in the last year, which I feel so sad about. But they have shown me the limitless possibilities of India’s future. So again, I thank you for taking on this project, which Vallabhbhai started a few years ago.
So, when I was like you I must say that I was an activist. I was a bit aggressive, which I don’t recommend. But I was like that. And I used to say everything must be right. I grew up in Bombay and actually, I was very lucky because we had very good public services. Some of you who are in Bombay may not have even experienced what I had in the 70s and 80s. We had a good bus service, good electricity, good water, public safety, and women could go safely out at night. It was a different time and a different city. But sometimes people used to throw garbage. I used to get very upset and I used to go and pick up the garbage in front of everyone and glare at the person who had thrown it. Now, while that seems like the right thing to do, I soon realized that it didn’t make me any friends. Why? Because even though I was doing the correct thing, which is picking up trash from the public, I think my attitude was not right. I was doing it in a superior way, not accepting that I also have so many faults, other people have faults, we are all on individual learning journeys. So even as you pick up that trash and put it in the dustbin – we had proper dustbins in those days – something was not right, okay? And I had to learn, my young friends, over the years that the ‘what’ is less important than the ‘how’. So, I grew up and became more mature over the years.
When my husband was working for the government, outside our house in Delhi there was a tea stall and people used to drink tea and throw the paper cups right there. Now I said, “Should I go and make a big fuss? What should I do?” Then I said, “Be calm.” And I used to go everyday and very quietly, without making a fuss, picked up those cups and disposed of them correctly, and smiled and did namaste to those people, because really I’d learned that we cannot sit so much in judgment of other people. And when I did that, young friends, to my great surprise, within two days, the throwing of those paper cups stopped. After that, till I left that house, not one single piece of garbage I saw anywhere around me. Why am I telling you this simple story? It’s because we all evolve, yes, but I would like you to learn from my journey that sometimes when we do the right thing in the wrong manner, it really doesn’t help anybody.
So, having said that, always participate. All of us know things around us are not right. Some child may think, “Oh, why are we wasting water?” Some other young person may say, “Oh, what about our rights of expression?” Some other young people may be interested in other environmental issues. Please learn more about that thing which you care about and are passionate about and you want to change, and then think, talk to your elders, talk to your friend, “How can I participate in making real change and not make the mistake which Rohini did?” Participate with humility, participate without judgment, participate with self-reflection, and you will see the difference between doing it one way and doing it another.
Young friends, I was very lucky because Infosys, the company my husband set up with Narayana Murthy and others, that we became very wealthy, but not immediately. Infosys had to work for a very long time, very hard. It was after 15 years or so that Infosys succeeded wildly and beyond anybody’s expectations. And I had made a very early investment. From my small amount of money which I had in Infosys, I turned into a wealthy woman. Now, why do I tell you that? It is because in my family, wealth was not considered something great to be proud of. One of my grandfathers was very wealthy and did a lot of philanthropy. The other grandfather, my father’s father, Babasaheb Soman, was a lawyer who half the time didn’t want to take his case to court and asked his clients to settle issues out of court, and so he got no fees.
So he was certainly not wealthy, but both of them had wealth of mind. My father’s father joined Gandhiji when Gandhiji made his first clarion call for volunteers to come to Champaran in 1917. He was among the first people to go and was there with Kasturba and Gandhiji for several months. They built schools, they built toilets, they did a lot of work and then my grandfather joined the freedom movement. But always we were told that wealth is not what you aspire to, you aspire to high thinking. So, when I came into so much wealth, I was very confused, “What should I do?” Because I was on the other side before, and now I was on this side. Now I was the wealthy one. And it took me a long time, my young friends, to accept that wealth because it was ethical wealth. It came about the right way. And what was the responsibility of that wealth in society? I slowly learned that I was only a trustee of that wealth, and that it must be used for society.
The responsibility of wealth in a democracy is to be useful to society. And then I started my more serious philanthropic journey over the years, working with several organizations. Today, my husband Nandan and I have signed the Giving Pledge, which is a global pledge, where we have committed publicly to give half our wealth away to good causes in our own lifetime. And I tell you, it’s not easy at all to do that well, okay? It’s a huge responsibility, but we take it very, very seriously and if God forbid anything happens to us, our children have promised to fulfill that pledge.
The last point I will say is that in the continuum of the state, society, and markets, my strong belief is that society must come first because at the end of it, no matter who you are, you may be a student, you may be a teacher like Vallabhbhai, you may be a very successful investor, you may be doing very well in the Army or in politics, or anything, but who are you first? Of course, you’re a human being first, but after that, you’re a citizen. You’re a citizen of your society, you’re a citizen of your nation, and you’re a citizen of this world. So you’re a citizen before you are an employee, you’re a citizen before you are a consumer of market goods.You are a citizen before you are a subject of the state and good citizens together make a good society, and a good society can make sure that governments are accountable for the larger public good. They can also make sure that markets don’t become runaway powers and are accountable for a good society. So,by being the first building block of a good society, as citizens and actizens, together we can build a democratic society, where we can hope that, that child whose face you sometimes see when you’re coming to school or when you go for a vacation somewhere, who doesn’t have the benefits that you do, even that child can be included in a brighter future. So again, I say, stay curious, stay connected, stay committed and magic will happen.
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.
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.
In this interview with IDR, Rohini speaks about why we need to underwrite failure in the social sector, how philanthropists can support failure in practice, and shares some of her own failures as an activist philanthropist.
When working on complex issues of social change, failure is inevitable. Yet, people in the social sector are reluctant to talk about it. Why do you think this is the case?
When I think about failure, I think about the different ways in which it is perceived across samaaj (civil society), sarkaar (state), and bazaar (markets). In bazaar failure is underwritten structurally by financial markets. You’re allowed to go there and try something really crazy. And if you fail—not that anybody chooses to fail—there is a safety net for you. That’s why bazaar can afford to glorify failure a little bit, and say ‘fail forward’ or ‘fail fast’.
Sarkaar, on the other hand, is not incentivised or structured in a way that invites failure. That’s why they will prefer to see a proven model that they can take to scale, rather than try to innovate, because innovation involves a lot of failures. And this is alright because the government’s goal is not to provide risk capital to society, but rather to provide equity and service delivery.
Coming to samaaj, there is a greater risk appetite to try out things to help society, but there is less underwriting of the risk of failure. And this needs to change, because we are talking about people and their lives; we’re talking about their emotional, financial, and social well-being. So, in this context, it is important for social sector organisations to talk about failure, recognise it early on, and course correct. To do this effectively, we need patient philanthropic capital that will allow organisations and missions to experience some failures, some learning, and some experimentation, to find what works.
You make a very important point about philanthropy providing risk capital and staying the course. What does this look like in practice?
The way I see it, there are three main things that can create an enabling environment: trust, patient capital, and allowing the conversation on failure and innovation to be upfront and transparent. For me, it all begins with trust. The relationship between the philanthropist and nonprofit partner has to be built on trust, so that the nonprofit 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 some of these experiments will fail, either because the demand for those services or the institutional structures that support them are not ripe enough. Philanthropy needs to create space for these failures to be talked about and explained, and then allow more experimentation.
Once a funder trusts an organisation, they need to think about committing to multi-year funding.
We also need to be very conscious of timeframes, when talking about failure. Take the education sector in India, for example. About 25 years ago, parents were not very committed to putting their children through 14 years of schooling. Dropout rates were high and the number of out-of-school children was large. But thanks to the work of nonprofits, government policies, and markets, the understanding that education might lead to a better life for their children began to grow, and the demand for education built up rapidly. Today the idea of education being necessary has been completely internalised in India. Though it took some time, what might have initially seemed like a failure to the nonprofits and philanthropists working in the space, (the number of children with no access to education), today looks like a lot of success.
Once a funder trusts an organisation, they need to think about committing to multi-year funding so that the nonprofit is not spending 30 to 40 percent of their organisational bandwidth trying to raise funds, instead of trying to innovate on the ground.
In spite of a growing recognition among philanthropists that the programmes they support might not work, nonprofit grantees might still be hesitant to talk about their failures in fear of losing funding. How do we address this?
I think the social sector putting forward more stories and examples of short-term failures that allowed them to innovate and succeed in the long-run will build an understanding and make philanthropists more open to having a longer timeframe with their grants. In doing this however, both the philanthropist and the organisation need to make sure 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, and it’s important to accept that.
While doing this we also have to be careful to distinguish between the failure of the organisation and the failure of some individuals within the organisation. There is a different way of responding to failure of some individuals—perhaps from a moral lapse—than a failure coming out of a good intent to innovate. The analysis of the failure and its origins is extremely important. Creating the space to do this—first internally by the organisation and then a little more openly—should become a structured process. I’m sure many organisations do this already, but it would be helpful if we could come together to create frameworks, toolkits, and processes, which are easy for organisations to follow and share publicly.
Beyond acknowledging and analysing failure internally within organisations, what can we do to ensure that others can also learn from failures, even if not their own?
This is a very important point because the goal of the social sector should be to ensure that even if organisations, institutions, or leaders fail, their mission shouldn’t fall by the wayside. We need to keep space for others to continue the task—the societal task—even if some organisations fail. One way I see of doing this is by converting the effort and knowledge of organisations into digital public goods; using open source technologies that allow people to come in and share, discover, and learn. In a sense, this is a de-risking from the failures of individual leaders, organisations, and innovations—sharing knowledge so that we don’t make the same mistakes again.
We are not trying to achieve failure; we are going to fail because it’s not always possible to succeed, and it’s important to accept that.
But beyond just individual organisations or philanthropists, how can we learn from the failures of the social sector as a whole? To me, what would be interesting would be if we had a process to look at the failures of the social sector in India over the last 40-50 years. Because by now, it should have been in a less risky space. Could we have done something differently, together?
We are now seeing a new wave of young social sector actors using technology and other new methods to increase equity and access. What can they learn from the old wave of social sector players, who worked from the 1970s to the 2000s? What were their failures? What can we learn from them and do differently?
Can you tell us about some of your failures, and what you’ve learned?
In my professional life, I’ve experienced many failures, some worse than others. But my very first failure in my professional life as an activist philanthropist was way back in 1992, when I set up an organisation called Nagrik, after one of my very close friends died in a horrible road accident. Along with a few others, we laid out our goal to create safer roads.
We worked on it for a few years without a large budget, but I don’t think the budget was the problem. I think the problem was that we didn’t quite know how to go about it. There was a lot of enthusiasm, passion, and intelligence in the group, but I think we didn’t structure ourselves. And so, the whole initiative faded away; but the problem didn’t go away at all. India continues to have the highest number of road accidents and deaths in the world, with 150,000 annual deaths.
When I think about my own failures, I also go back to the fact that what looks like a failure today may look like success tomorrow.
It was a failure at many levels and I take a lot of the blame for the lack of strategic thinking on myself. But it taught me a few lessons about how not to do things, how to think through things, how to set realistic goals, and how to ensure that you have a professional cadre working with you—not just enthusiastic, good Samaritans.
And when I think about my own failures, I also go back to the fact that what looks like a failure today may look like success tomorrow. We cannot predict when this will happen, and especially as philanthropists, we need to be aware of this. It’s been nearly 15 years since Arghyam, the nonprofit organisation I set up and fund, started working on supporting sustainable water and sanitation solutions. Somebody could look at us and say that the water situation in India has actually gotten worse in this time. Is this a failure of the organisation and the vision? I think we could say that Arghyam could have been much more impactful. But one could also say that the water problem in India is so huge and so complex that it is completely unrealistic to expect one organisation to do anything more than shift the needle in some aspects of the water situation. And we have been able to do that. We have been able to make the issue of groundwater more visible among practitioners, donors, and policy circles. Some of the policies that our partners have been able to embed in government frameworks will hopefully create more sustainability and equity in the water sector, sooner rather than later. To a certain extent, we succeeded in nudging, catalysing, and innovating. But of course, if you look at the whole water sector, then Arghyam has by no means finished its journey towards its mission.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Arun Kumar on Succeeding in Partnerships. The discussion highlights the importance of partnerships in addressing large and complex societal issues and the need for including partnerships in the organisation strategy.
Collaboration is an important topic in the social sector today. Collaboration as an idea should, in its essence, be an equal partnership of different players and actors. You cannot call it collaboration if there is one power center and everybody has to follow that power center. Collaboration is difficult in practice because it requires that all collaborators should have a common vision and mission, and learn to give up control. In collaboration, we need to see everyone as a leader or rather as players on the same team, rather than seeking leadership roles. Good collaboration is possible only if we let go of control and truly co-create a path together. There are many forms of collaboration, which can be light touch or very deep, but I believe that this is the era for us to learn how to collaborate better, both in the social sector and in the philanthropy sector, and between the two.
According to Arun Kumar, collaboration is about conceptualizing and visualizing the bigger picture that perhaps needs to be completed by a collective. One of the biggest challenges is to enable every participant to see that bigger picture and agree on its broad contours, which includes a commitment to a certain concept or ideology, which are called non-negotiables. Those who have the ability to think in abstracts and to conceptualize the big picture may not always be the most skilled in facilitation or negotiations to get the collective going. This often results in issues of attribution, clashes of egos, representation, and leadership.
To be successful in your mission, a broad agreement is necessary. Kumar mentions the example of Child Rights and You (CRY) which headed an almost seven-year long campaign with a coalition of more than 200 organizations from all over India. Although there was no agreement on how to start a common school system or the medium of instruction, there was one common goal theme that everyone was committed to – that there should be free, compulsory universal education. Kumar also mentions the Right to Information and food security as other successful examples of collaborations.
Kumar speaks about his experience in 2020, where after the lockdown was announced in Mumbai, 14 organizations came together to collaborate and coordinate, to share information and find the cheapest mode of transportation, making sense of the procurement. They were organizations working in different geographies and on different issues, but there was an overriding need, and they came together beautifully. Another example shared was of Mission 24, an initiative by Apnalaya. It was aimed at improving entitlements in M-East Ward, which is right at the bottom of all 24 wards of Mumbai. With limited resources, it was difficult to keep people together on questions of advocacy, and to keep them committed for a long time. Advocacy and policy level change invariably knock at the door of ideologies, so it becomes that much more difficult to keep everybody together. However, if we are aiming for sustainable change and sustainable impact, there is no running away from collaboration.
But we also need to consider broader questions when it comes to collaboration. For example, Kumar asks whether we can view collaborations beyond the lens of a funding project, and view them as an investment in a longer term cause. What we can focus on is research, data, evidence, advocacy and policy change since these are areas where funding is scarce and collaboration difficult. This would mean looking beyond implementation and multiplying operations in the name of collaborations.
Having set up and worked with many organizations like Akshara Foundation, Pratham Books, and my foundations, Arghyam and EkStep, I think philanthropists have understood the need to collaborate. More so among themselves so that we can fund areas broadly, which it is hard for individual philanthropists to continue to fund, till it reaches the impact that it needs to reach.
There have been a few good examples of collaboration recently. The India Climate Collaborative has more than 20 donors and donor organizations working together to respond quickly and effectively to the challenge of climate change. The scale of the problem is only going to grow, and although we are still finding our feet in the ICC, the commitment and collaborative framework is in place. Similarly, with the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation, we recognise that good media is the foundation of a good democracy and a good society. A few of us came together to birth this organization which has noteworthy trustees – who make decisions to find good media so that the voices of the people around our country can be better represented through various media. This has also been a collaborative effort from the beginning.
It is becoming clearer that collaborations can help you to de-risk from all kinds of failures. I think the era of collaboration in the philanthropy sector is upon us. I hope this means that a diverse set of civil society organizations will get funded.
Diversity is crucial when it comes to solving complex societal problems because we need different kinds of ideologies, methods, experiments, and innovations to be backed by philanthropy, citizen movements, and civil society leaders so that when something works, we can try to scale. Cookie-cutter solutions will not work at scale – this is why our team has conceptualized what we call Societal Platform Thinking. Our main goal for this was to ask ourselves, during these challenging times, how we achieve the most impact at scale. Carrying out a successful pilot and then trying to scale up was not as effective, so we are flipping that around to understand what works at scale. For that, we need the Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkar, to be involved if we are going to solve complex societal issues. Our whole effort was focused on reducing the friction to collaborate between these three sectors. In order to do that, we’ve put together a framework on www.societalplatform.org, along with many public digital goods for people to use, toolkits, processes, and our team is always available to answer questions.
Solutions do not come from only one end of the pipeline, and if we want more collaboration, we have to learn how to distribute the ability to find solutions. How do we create more agency in a distributed way? How do we scale up diversity? How do we use technology for the public good? How do we allow people to solve problems in context? And how do we bring Samaaj, Bazaar, Sarkar together to do what they do best? This is how we are looking at collaboration. Globally, we are seeing increasing examples of good collaboration as well as from the civil society side in India. NGOs like Pratham, probably the largest education NGO in the world, require all kinds of collaboration at all levels.
While collaboration remains extremely difficult because it is hard for people to give up their space, egos, branding, and their need for attribution, the need for collaboration has trumped the need to go it alone. The pandemic has made it increasingly clear that we need to work together rather than in silos. We saw this happen over the past year, with people coming together in ways they had never done before, mounting a whole logistics model to tackle pandemic-related issues. They had to resolve their differences to be able to work together, and I think it has taught us how to collaborate a little better from the heart.
It is not an easy task to work across sectors, but we must keep at it and keep in mind that there is a common interest between society actors, civil society institutions, and market actors to work together to uphold rule of law.
Civil society organizations come from a lens of equity, and social justice; I am sure many in the market do too, but it is also about innovation, efficiency, and creating prosperity for a wide number of people. Both of them must uphold the rule of law to be able to function and have the license to operate in society. Corporations need to not only follow the rule of law to the extent possible, but also uphold the rule of law so that business can be done peacefully. Of course, the state is not infallible, in our country or anywhere else in the world. Power does extend itself in human beings and when they have power, they try to extend their power, and the state has a monopoly on many powers.
It is in the interest of civil society institutions and market institutions to make sure that the Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar remain in a dynamic balance and that one sector does not become so powerful that the other two are left at the mercy of any one of them. Each needs to work together to keep the others in check if we want a good society.
Global research points to the fact that when corporations attempt to become better corporate citizens – by reducing negative externalities which society has to pick up the cost of, by treating their employees better and working towards improving the world rather than destroying it, those companies are doing better. There is not only a moral but a strategic imperative to get there. Businesses are not going to put themselves at risk because they constantly need the state to approve of everything that they do. But there are always openings to collaborate on some aspects which are morally undeniable and need to be done for a better society.
In India there is a good separation between the markets and the state, and I see the opportunity for samaaj institutions to work with the state to ensure that we have better markets which do not try to capture value only but distribute value down the line. The age of partnerships and collaborations is truly here and whether we fail or succeed, we have no choice but to keep trying.
It may not be easy for civil society organizations to collaborate with people whose ideas may be completely different from theirs. However, given the circumstances now where the trust between the state and civil society organizations has reduced considerably over the last few years, I think it is imperative that civil society actors create new networks for collaboration so that the interests of society are better represented with a diversity of views.
Civil society institutions need to come together and collaborate better. They can seek some philanthropic support for this as well, because sometimes we may not be good at storytelling or presenting our messages. I would request my civil society friends to come together through more platforms to tell your stories, and bridge the divide between yourselves and Indian donors. The age of the foreign donor is going away and there may be a kind of philanthropy nationalism emerging. Everyone wants to fund in their own countries and Indian philanthropists are coming together to fund new areas and new collaborations. So civil society actors have to come together as well.
