Who is rohini nilekani

You have been very forthcoming about your philanthropy, something that not many philanthropists in India are. Why is it important to talk about your philanthropy? The philanthropy sector in India is just a few decades old.

In the West, the rich do talk about their philanthropy, both in their own circles and publicly. That needs to happen in India as well. People need to use their circles of influence to talk about how wealth in India should be used. We live in a country where there are million people waiting to be in the same room as us, so the responsibility of the wealthy in India is very different from other countries in the West.

People need to talk a lot more about how they are using their wealth for the public good, and make that an intellectually and socially interesting way of being wealthy. If you look at policy, other countries do things like have an inheritance tax, which certainly causes the purse strings to open up rapidly. But I am not sure if India is ready for that now. Other things can be done to make it easier to set up nonprofit institutions and reduce the regulatory cholesterol around them.

Today we are seeing a crackdown on nonprofits by making it difficult for nonprofits to do political work. That is a mistake. After all, if you want to change things in society, a lot of the work is going to be political, not in the traditional sense of political parties, but political grassroots work. Whichever government is in power needs to feel secure enough to allow nonprofits to do human rights-based political work.

We also need ecosystem players to come in, who can build the capacity of the nonprofit sector and draw more professionals into it. I believe in supporting people with high commitment, with very good ideas and good integrity, in areas where I can see a possibility of real change happening.

At whatever scale the people are working in, if I see real commitment, if I can see the power of those people and their ideas, and I can see they are building good institutions, I feel very tempted to go into that sector. I often need to hold myself back. The areas I have funded, apart from education and water, are the environment, access to justice, independent media, cultural arts—because that is a huge area that is underfunded in India—and a few other exciting spaces, like policy advocacy and think tanks.

I believe India needs to build out its intellectual infrastructure. It is the most complex country in the world to manage. They need ideas. They need pilots that are executed outside government. They need evidence to make better policy and better law. Philanthropic capital—especially domestic philanthropic capital—is best suited to help build out a whole new range of institutions, like think tanks and evidence-making institutions, that do research and advocacy that can feed into effective policy.

Many of the societal problems that philanthropic capital aims to play a role in solving often have to do with public services, whether it is water, health, sanitation, or education. These services are often either provided by the state or regulated by the state. So when philanthropists come in and work in any of these areas, at some point they will encounter the state in one form or another. Look at Arghyam, for example. You cannot work in water, which is a kind of public service that we mostly depend on the state to provide, and stay away from negotiating with the state.

It is very important for philanthropists to start thinking about this from the get-go. So when you design your philanthropy, think about the role that the state plays in that particular sector. Having said that, it is not easy to work with the government.

February 25, Interview. Apart from building a flexible and resilient framework for the future, philanthropists, civil society and the government must work in tandem so that every rupee is absorbed on the ground We can definitely say that civil society and the philanthropy sector stepped up rapidly in the face of the pandemic, March onward. Very quickly, […]. May 17, Article. As people return to life and work post the lockdown, some predictions point to a mad rush to do even more than before.

Travel more, buy more, meet more people, eat out more — do more of more. The government too is expected to do more to restore economic growth and livelihoods. Much more is […]. May 22, Article. While the good work for the betterment of women and girls in India has to continue, the work in gender equity shall remain incomplete unless young men and boys are brought within the ambit of interventions.

We need to onboard men, not only for causes of women such as achieving goals of women empowerment and […]. November 2, Report. Rohini discusses trust-based philanthropy, the effects of the pandemic in India, […]. October 28, Podcast. Civil society organisations became the first responders during the Covid Read about their response to the second wave as well as 4 key take-aways from it that can help us prepare for future disasters.

If you were a disaster, where would […].