HON. RTN. AJAY PIRAMAL ON DOING WELL AND DOING GOOD
I’m really overwhelmed today; the Rotary that I see today and the Rotary I saw when I came maybe five years ago, the change and impact you are all having is tremendous. I want to congratulate each
and every Rotarian. Sandip (IDGP Sandip Agarwalla) and all of you have done a tremendous job. What I saw in Dharamshala, and I know the challenges that cancer patients and their relatives face when they come to Mumbai, so, it’s a great job that you’ve done.
I also know that your District is contributing the most in the world which is a matter of pride.
The Rotary Club of Bombay is also the largest contributor again amongst 37,000 clubs, and you have included me in this Club, and I feel it is a big honour for me. So, thank you. Suhail is a really good lawyer and he speaks so well and sometimes you know how lawyers are. They can defend on both sides.
I’m going to begin my talk with a story. This is the story of a people who were the true indigenous people who lived in America whom we called Red Indians in our school days, which is absolutely the wrong term, but this is a story of that. Once, a whole forest was on fire, and all the animals began
running out of the forest to save themselves.
A jaguar saw a hummingbird going in the opposite direction, into the forest. After a while, he saw the
hummingbird coming back out. Whilst all the animals were running away, this hummingbird kept flying in and out. Ultimately, the jaguar asked the hummingbird, “What are you doing?” The hummingbird’s answer was, “I am bringing water from the lake in my beak and going into the forest to douse the fire.” The jaguar was astonished, he said, “Are you sure of what you’re doing? Can you make a difference at all to the fire?” The hummingbird said, “I was born in this forest. It sheltered me and my family and gave us food. So, I am grateful that I am a part of the forest as much as the forest is a part of me. I try to grow trees in the forest by cross-pollinating from one to the other.
But now, when my forest is getting destroyed, I have to do something.” Surprisingly, miracles happen. The spirits in the forest heard and saw what the hummingbird was doing and there was a big cloud burst, a thunderstorm, and the fire was doused. Native American grandmothers teach their kids that miracles happen. You need to be a part of it and miracles will happen. I see that in Rotary today; you are a part of such big miracles. So, congratulations once again, for the tremendous work you’re doing.
My subject is ‘Doing Well and Doing Good’ and I chose it because of the purpose of our group which
is to do business and we also have a foundation. We chose these words very carefully: doing well and
doing good. It is not ‘doing well or doing good’. It is, that whatever we do, if it is business, it has to do well and it has to do good. Similarly, if it is philanthropy, it has to do well and it has to do good. What do I mean by that? I’ve seen people and, with all due respect, some NGOs look down upon people making money and profit which is a bad word. But, one has to do well in business.
It is only when you do well that you can do good because when you do well, that’s the surplus. You
get to do innovation and new things. Therefore, the world has progressed only because of innovation.
I see many doctors here; you see so many medical advances because of the contributions made by businesses in creating medicines, diagnostic equipment and so on.
Similarly, we have a financial services business through which we lend money to people for affordable housing. Therefore, if you do well, you can do even better. Doing well and doing good are both important. Now, I’ll come to the other part, which is a more fun part. Let me talk about philanthropy. Again, in philanthropy, it is important that you do well and you do good.
First of all, why do we need to do philanthropy? Rotary has service before self. What is the reason
for it? If you think of it, and especially if you are an Indian, if you are a Hindu, you believe that after many millions of lives you are born as a human being. So, that, itself, is a privilege. The second thing is that the families we have been born into, the education that we’ve had, the profession that we’ve had, all this is a matter of privilege. We could have been born on the footpath. We could have been one of those people who would not have had the family that we’ve had.
So, the fact that we have got this, means there is an obligation we have as human beings. I think we should learn from nature. If you look at it, nature gives everything to us for free. The water that we have: the river does not drink the water that flows in it; we use that water. The oxygen in the air
we breathe, the food that we get from the earth. So, all this is something that we are getting and if we do not give back to this, then we are being ungrateful. In the time of Covid, whether you were the richest person or the person on the street, if you had Covid and did not have a room, you were struggling to get oxygen. Every day, every minute in our life, we are consuming oxygen free. Therefore, I see that it is an obligation for us to give back to society more than what we are, and nature is the biggest example for that.
Let me talk about the principles on which we run our foundation. The first thing we believe is that the
problems that are there in our country have been there for decades and centuries. The solutions to
these problems do not come from abroad as many people think: “Okay, this was done there, so we can
do it here.” Therefore, you need innovative ways to solve these problems. The second is to do it on a scale. Our population is of 1.4 billion people so if you have to make any change, it has to be done on scale and the only way I’ve found to do it on scale is to partner with the government. Many of us hesitate: “Government mein corruption hai, government mein nobody works, we can’t do it.” That’s not true. I think if we have to make an impact, we have to do it on scale. The third thing I believe is probably the most important for our foundation and the basis of our principles is what we call as seva bhaav; let me distinguish between seva and seva bhaav. Seva means service; seva bhaav means service done with compassion and love. What is the difference?
When you give service or are just doing service or giving something, there’s a lot of ego involved that: “I am sitting at a higher position. I am helping you out because you are needy and in a lower position.” That ego does not bring out the best in you. But service given with compassion, with love, is the real service which is seva bhaav.
The best example is of a mother feeding her child. Is that a service that she feels she’s doing as an obligation to the child? No, in fact, it’s love and compassion and that is a difference which I believe you only find in India. I’ve met philanthropists all over the world but our Indian concept of seva bhaav, of karuna, is unique and we must recognise that because it makes a huge difference. So, with these principles, our foundation has been working in many areas. One is what we call our Karuna Fellowship, where we work with differently abled girls from not-great families but whom we are
working with to make them productive.
We work with 200 such girls every year and our objective is to help 10,000, at the end of five or seven
years, to make an impact. In 2017, the Prime Minister identified the most backward districts in the country. These were the least developed districts on the human development index. They were identified as Aspirational Districts and there are 112 such. The sad part is that 15% of India’s population lives there. But 1.5% CSR money goes there; nobody wants to go there. There is six months of flooding in some of these districts like the ones in Assam because they are just small islands in the middle of the Brahmaputra. Palghar, where Rotary works, is also where we work; it’s an Aspirational District because the conditions for the tribals are so backward. We have people physically present all over. It is impossible to live there but the dedication of our team and the seva bhaav that they have, you will never find that.
The other area we work in is tribal India. 10% of our population is in tribal India. A few weeks ago, Swati and I met our Honourable President. She, as you know, is a tribal, from the Mayurbhanj district in Orissa. We work in tribal health so she told us how she is 64 years old and she is the eldest surviving person in her whole village. At 64. So, you can imagine, India’s longevity is an average of 71 years. So we are working in tribal areas on education, health, and water. One of the other interesting programmes we have is the annual Gandhi Fellowship. Last year, we took 600 people, graduates and postgraduates from the top universities across India to train them. They work with us for two years and they become future leaders for the country. You will be surprised. This was started in 2008. At that time everybody told us that this is not possible; their parents were upset:
“How can you take our children?” I promised everyone that I would give them a job. But today
there are 600 such people coming out every year and frankly, they’re in great demand. We get 10,000
applications for this programme.
So, what we say is that we train you and your mission in life should be to be a millionaire. A millionaire means you touch a million lives. We have already got about 3,500 such trained people. We’ll make it to 10,000 in the next few years. This is the future of India in some ways. We have to
measure impact in everything that we do. In education, for instance, we started work in Rajasthan in 2008. Now we are in 28 states and Rajasthan is supposed to be one of the BIMARU states, but, in the national survey done by the government, the most improved state for education learning where they measure school learning levels was Rajasthan. We have worked in every public school in Rajasthan and it was the most improved learning level.
Second is that the district we started off with was Jhunjhunu. Again, there was a measurement of the
school learning levels in Jhunjhunu against districts across India. As you know, in India, there are about 700 plus districts and Jhunjhunu came as the secondhighest in terms of school learning levels. So, that’s the impact that the education that we are imparting is having and it is always measured.
In fact, the Prime Minister, as you know, has a programme called ‘Beti padhao beti bachao’. The
Jhunjhunu district was even mentioned by him in
Mann ki Baat. That’s the impact in education, in Aspirational Districts. In 2017, we started working
in education and health in only 25 districts because it’s very difficult in the beginning. A survey done by Harvard and by the Gates Foundation Trust found that out of all the 112 districts, the most improved in education in the top 10 or in the top five, actually, four of them were where we were working in and in health similarly, out of the top 10, four is where we were there. So,that’s the impact you can get and that’s what we measure. So, I thought I would share with you that
DOING WELL AND DOING GOOD
IS BOTH IMPORTANT IN
BUSINESS AS WELL AS IT IS IN
PHILANTHROPY.
You epitomise ‘doing well and doing good’ and are also the face of the new India being successful in business and exploding in philanthropy. In the cycle of enlightened self-interest, do you think business people will also go into governance? Because there’s a governance deficit all over the world, not only here. You think that would be the next frontier.
We can’t think that just because businesspeople go, governance will improve. Donald Trump was a classic businessman, a very successful one. I don’t have comments on whether he was good in governance or not. So, to say that they’ll be better is not… But what is important is can you change the systems in government? I did not speak much about it, but we are doing a lot in changing governance systems, public systems, by doing a lot of digitisation and simplifying systems. So, I think that’s where the
contribution comes.How much enjoyment do you get by giving pleasure to others and helping others?
If you look at the example of the mother feeding the child, who gets more joy, the mother or the child?
It’s the same thing. If you have seva bhaav, trust me, there’s a lot of joy. We have 5000 people working in our foundation full-time. I think, uniformly, they will say that this is the best thing that’s happened to them. So, there is joy in giving, much more than there is in taking.
I’m involved in many Rotary projects, and also some other NGOs. But the amazing thing is they are really, really poorly governed. So, can you help other NGOs? It’s not easy, I’ve been rebuffed by several people. When we work in these Aspirational Districts, we don’t do it on our own. Sometimes we work with, actually, frankly, we are working all over the country with more than a thousand NGOs because some of them, as you said, are poorly governed. Others,there may be four or five people. But some of the issues that they know are so local and so, I mean, they’re deep knowledge. So, we work with a lot of them and do this. We are doing it.