India’s philanthropic journey is still evolving
Amit Chandra
Helen Keller once said that the best and the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched; they must be felt only with the heart.
Our guest speaker today has touched millions of hearts. Amit Chandra spent over 13 years at the DSP Merrill Lynch and retired in 2007 as its Managing Director. He is a board member of Genpact, Tata Investment Corporation, Piramal Enterprises and a member of the CII National Committee on Private Equity and Venture Capital. Currently, he is the MD of Bain Capital, one of the oldest and leading global private investment firms, and also a founder of its
Indian office.
However, there is a lot more to Amit’s life. He is very passionate and active in India’s not-for-profit space. He has defined his portfolio such that about 70 per cent of his time and money is spent on some core projects such as GiveIndia, The Akanksha Foundation, Shoshit Seva Sangh and the children’s hospital in Mumbai. He also serves as a trustee in most of these organisations.
Amit was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in the year 2007 and Next Generation Philanthropic Leader of the Year by Forbes in 2013.
His wife Archana, who is an integral part of the journey, says that they have always got a lot more than they have given. If you ask Amit which has been his favourite and best social investment to date, he says it is the “joy of giving”. Amit is the single largest non-Rotarian to have donated over `70 lacs to Rotary.
— R/Anne Vita Dani
I would like to thank the Club for giving me the opportunity to speak about something that my wife and I are passionate about. Giving is the essence of the Rotary movement and it is a privilege to speak at one of its most eminent clubs in the country — both in terms of longevity and the quality of membership. I am happy that I am a partner in two of the Club’s projects — the YMCA orphanage and the vocational training centre
in Versova.
Our philanthropic journey is still evolving and I do not want to sound prescriptive. I will only share my journey with you and if there are interesting takeaways, it will be my accomplishment. While narrating my journey, I will try to answer three questions — why should we give, how much should we give and how should we give.
Why should we give? Most parents encourage their children to be giving. As a child, I remember we had very little money; but my mother ensured that my elder sister spent time in teaching our milkman the letters. In many ways, the seeds are sown at a very young age but what matters is whether that seed is nurtured, shaped appropriately and allowed to grow into something bigger.
One of my biggest takeaways from the United States was not the education I got, but my observations about American society. It is amazing how much of Western society has been shaped by individuals giving back to the community. Every major institution has been built on philanthropy. On the other hand, so little is being done in India.
After graduation, I decided to come back to India, which was very unfashionable at that point of time. I joined DSP Merrill Lynch where I got the opportunity to work with many wealthy families and individuals. I observed then that the wealth that people were creating was essentially an indicator of social status than something more substantial.
I wanted to know the purpose of wealth and did an unusual thing. I took a sabbatical at the peak of my career and joined a Vipassana course. I was lousy at meditating but for the first time in my life I spent 11 days with myself and a single question: what is the purpose of life and wealth?
I realised that I was blessed to do something more than adding zeros to my net worth and decided to engage myself in the not-for-profit space. I had started working closely with Shaheen Mistri who founded Akanksha and Venkat Krishnan who founded GiveIndia. I knew that they were doing remarkable work, were more talented than the average person I met in the boardroom and had consciously chosen to impact not just their lives but the lives of millions. My wife was already spending time at Akanksha and I too began to devote time and money to its cause.
A couple of years later, a friend of mine who used to run General Atlantic Partners in India, happened to send me The Billionaire Who Wasn’t, a book about the man who created a huge empire and one day walked into his lawyer’s office and donated all his wealth to found Atlantic Philanthropies. The work that Atlantic Philanthropies did was completely anonymous. I was struck by what a single man with a sense of purpose could achieve and began reflecting.
Finally, I told my wife that we should actually aim to solve problems than write cheques. We calculated a sum that would suffice towards fulfilling family financial responsibilities and one day walked into our lawyer’s office to transfer the rest of it in her account with the objective of giving it away during our lifetime.
This was the beginning of the second phase of our journey — figuring out how we wanted to drive a more meaningful change. So, when people ask me what to give, my view is that the answer should come from within. It is your choice and depends on which problem you are trying to solve. We were very clear about the issues we wanted to see addressed, specific behaviour changes that we wanted to see in the constituencies that we were dealing with. We were clear that it required pretty much everything of what we were generating to solve
those issues.
The moment we made up our mind, the question was how could we organise ourselves to do these things. We take a lot of things for granted by working in the corporate sector because there are well-established institutions and plenty of funding available. There are also a lot of people helping you to take decisions. This is not the case in the not-for-profit space and you really need to organise yourself.
We decided to take all our professional learnings and put in place frameworks for accountability, for governance and for regular monitoring. We make sure that we evaluate periodically, discard things that are not working and invest in those that work. We try to bring a more organised approach to giving and that is what the last four to five years have been all about. In many ways, people who know us well say our approach to giving is a little bit like private equity investing, which it is.
Let me wrap up by telling what my takeaways have been throughout this journey. Like my wife says, we have actually got a lot more than what we have given. We don’t do this selflessly. We do it because it gives us incredible joy when we see things change and see it beyond the immediate circle of influence.
We have learnt that when you start, you have to take baby steps, which we did for over 10 years. We started off as small cheque writers making donations to NGOs that our friends were supporting. Over time, by virtue of the compounding effect and having stuck to the cause, we are now involved with building and running schools in Patna, Mumbai and Pune. We have supported hospitals in Kolkata. We have built vocational centres in Bihar. We are looking at building our next one in Orissa. We have built one in Jharkhand.
One thing that has really given us a lot of joy is the Joy of Giving Week that we had conceived and which has grown into the largest philanthropic movement in the country. It is making people think a week before Diwali every year about how they can actually get joy in their lives by giving back.
Excerpts from the Q&A session:
Q. What is the yardstick of measuring ‘giving’ in philanthropy? How does one evaluate which cause to give to when there are five different causes? In your case it is a question of being personally involved in what you are doing. Many families say they want to build temples — that is their concept of philanthropy. Is there a yardstick for measuring the success of philanthropy?
Amit: The biggest yardstick is actually measuring change. Do not measure outlays but measure outcomes, tangible outcomes. When we started our partnership with the YMCA and Rotary for the orphanage and the vocational project, we focused on the macro parameters. A year or two ago, however, we all sat down and put in place a detailed and objective framework to figure out whether we are making progress.
Philanthropy is a personal decision. There may be issues I am passionate about, which may be irrelevant to you. What you want to give should come from within and often comes from personal experiences and from people you know. I have found three things — education, health care and advocacy for philanthropy. Supporting one cause or five causes is personal, but if you want impact you will realise that it is better to be a mile deep and inch wide than a mile wide and inch deep.
Q: You mentioned about advocacy for philanthropy and I think that is a very important part of the whole movement. Are you doing anything about it?
Amit: It is important to give wheels to this movement. For a long time in this country, business existed for the sake of society — whether it was Jamsetji Tata or Jamnalal Bajaj or G. D. Birla or the Godrej family. In the last 20 years, oddly enough, we have gone to the opposite end. This can change by people sharing their experiences more vocally. We have a club called the First Giver’s Club — 50 families in Bombay and 50 in Delhi — which works via GiveIndia and essentially is a forum for sharing experiences and helping each other do social projects. We started the Joy of Giving Week. We have also instituted a Matching Programme whereby we run programmes in which we match grants of those people who wish to give in a sensible way, in order to encourage greater giving. This has helped some people overcome the initial inertia.
Q: I suppose you take people who can give cash or service.
Amit: Service is far more important than money. My wife gives 100% of her time. She runs a school for the mentally challenged, which is the largest such school in the country. What she does is far more valuable than what I do.
Q: A lot of NGOs and charities in India use donation money for good work but when the well runs dry, ask for more funds. In the US, charities generate a lot of money which is ploughed back into good projects. Do we need to change the way some of our NGOs function?
Amit: There is no clear answer to this because there are some issues, where it is impossible to have a self-sustaining revenue model. For example, no revenue model is going to work in the space of mental challenge. There are other spaces, however, where an NGO can move towards sustainability. Once, during a trip in search of interesting causes to support, in central Bihar, my friend from Singapore and I, happened to drive into a small town called Muzaffarpur. There, we found a vocational training centre run by an unassuming guy. He had landed there in a bizarre way. He is my senior from VJTI who had spent two decades in Citibank in the US and Europe and had come back to India to build vocational centres.
I was amazed. This guy had figured out a way how to build a fully-sustainable vocational centre. The centre would take in a child, who at the end of the training would get guaranteed high-scale employment. He calls it the Pipal Tree Ventures and all he needed to do was to invest in capex for building the centre. The youth who got picked up by a corporate at the end of the training paid for the next child. It is a sustainable model. All that he needed to do was spend on the capex.
So, we built a centre with him in a place in Madhubani district, near the Indo-Nepal border. It is fully sustainable. We just needed to provide viability and funding for a year. There are some other models that are sustainable, like eyecare for example. Sankara Nethralaya has figured out how to have one paying patient pay for three non-paying poor patients. All you need to do is invest in the capex to get that hospital running. So there are examples of sustainable models but, unfortunately, there are some areas which are absolutely not sustainable unless you have either backing from the government or
donor funds.
Q: I am connected with several social and charitable organisations. How do you deal with government agencies because some of my friends have invested crores in different charitable institutions and government agencies ask them for bribes. Have you come across any agency that asked for bribes? How do you face such situations?
Amit: It is a challenge, but I think we are very clear with most of the organisations that we work with. We have a zero-tolerance policy, which means that although you will experience a lot of challenges in growth and operations, you will not buckle. We know of NGOs whose fundings were stopped for months and quarters because they refused to pay the 10 per cent ‘commission’ needed to get funds released from the government. There have been times when my wife and I have had to pay salaries of employees in some of these organisations. However, the path of bribery is slippery and should be avoided.
Obviously, growth is constrained. Akanksha runs 14 schools without any government funds. If government funding was available it could have easily done a hundred schools. Aspiration must be curtailed in order to put a boundary on practices that you wish to follow.