The army of India’s NGOs, voluntary groups and individuals need far more support than only donations.
Image courtesy: power-of-giving.com
In the summer of 1978, I took a train to Piparia in Madhya Pradesh. As far as I could tell, it was the middle of nowhere. I was straight out of school and was headed for a small village nearby. My parents had insisted I work for a few months with an NGO called Kishor Bharati which, with the Friends Rural Centre, had started a science teaching programme in rural Madhya Pradesh.
There were engineers, scientists and doctors at the centre, from all over the country. The pay must have been miserable, if there was any. The amenities were basic: common toilets, water pumps or wells for bathing, simple meals and none of the tools we have today. I remember Arvind Gupta from IIT Kanpur, a lean, tall, bearded man who seemed to care for only two things: science and children. These people were there to bring science into villages, to develop ‘a scientific temper’.
The project had to work to a prescribed syllabus. That meant bringing into the lives of village children alien concepts and objects, things I took for granted. Those Camlin compass box sets, for example, with their little rulers, dividers and compass. Arvind fashioned a divider out of a piece of string and two sharpened twigs and then went out to explain to the children how to use it. I think he related it to water — using it to draw a circle in the dust, the site for a future well.
I’ve lost touch with Arvind since; that’s entirely my loss. I believe he works at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune. He is said to be a popularizer of science, but calls himself a toy inventor. His website has a wonderful range of toys made from everyday household objects, all designed to bring science, mathematics and astronomy into children’s lives. His passions remain undimmed.
Despite all its problems, or perhaps because of them, India is a country of countless men and women like Arvind, working individually or with voluntary organisations of every stripe, from the dentist in Ooty who works with indigenous peoples to the doctors from Mumbai and Delhi in Chhattisgarh and the lawyers, architects and planners in city slums. Many work against terrible odds in appalling conditions and for next to nothing in financial terms. They wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.
Years ago, during the hearing of an environmental PIL, a senior lawyer asked one of the NGO’s activists what he did. “I do this,” the young man said. “No,” said the lawyer. “I meant what you do for a living.” The activist looked bewildered. “I told you sir. This is all I do. Nothing else.” The senior’s expression said it all.
India’s corporate fashionistas and the auction arteratti tell us that India has “no culture of philanthropy”.1 But philanthropy and charity are not the same thing and one might have nothing to do with the other. Philanthropy is a 2500-year-old word, probably traceable to the Greek myth of Prometheus. It combines philos or love of anthropos or mankind and speaks of being human, and humane, of helping others and humanitarianism. It’s also not right to say there is no culture of donations or charity. A March 2010 paper by Arpan Sheth of Bain & Company says India’s donations in 2006 were 0.6% of the GDP, ahead of China and Brazil and other ‘developing’ countries, but well behind the USA (2.2%), UK (1.3%) and Canada (1.2%). Comparing India and America in this manner might be both deceptive and inaccurate. India is only recently rich (and America recently poor), and 0.6% of the GDP is not bad going giving that the top two have a headstart of over a hundred years. A very small fraction of India is truly rich. Also — and Sheth acknowledges this — donations are typically end-of-life actions, the kind of thing you do when you’ve had your fill of Bentleys and yachts and penthouses in five countries. Some of our noveau riche are still inhaling lines of surplus cash. Seeing donations as a symbol of financial success isn’t something we’re used to, but that too is changing as more individuals follow the charter set by others like Azim Premji of Wipro.
We should remember, too, that charitable/donor foundations in America are frequently the result of crippling estate duties and taxes. We don’t have those here (and this isn’t a recommendation for their re-introduction), so there’s little fiscal incentive to put money aside for long-term donations. That said, the Tata Group and the Birlas have long been known for their support to voluntary groups and today many commercial enterprises from corporates to banks have very structured donations programmes. So the private sector does lend support; perhaps not enough, but that can and will change.
It’s simply wrong to say that we don’t have a ‘culture of philanthropy’. Certainly Bill Gates doesn’t think it’s true. Not only does it muddle the distinct concepts of charity and philanthropy (and the omnibus ‘giving’ applies to both) but as Vikram Doctor points out, is both sanctimonious and patronizing. It devalues the actual work being done by individuals and NGOs by taking out of the ambit of philanthropy and reducing it to the more mundane “non-profit”. Unlike charity and donations, it’s not always possible to monetize philanthropy. The value it generates is often intangible.
If bemoaning this supposed lack of a ‘philanthropic culture’ is supposed to mean that Indians don’t make donations, then that’s untrue, too. It’s just not done in the simplistic I-give-you-money way. Indians donate in different ways, including by giving to temples, something that is often regarded with so much disdain that no one stops to do the numbers.2 Temple trusts are strong sources of secular funding in many areas. It is unclear whether the comparitive figures take into account donations by religious trusts. It seems altogether unreasonable to import a Western cultural construct of corporatised, foundation-driven funding to India, not reckon indirect funding of the kind we see here, and to then find India wanting in comparison. Here, donations are often driven by community and faith; Jains, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and Sikhs all have strong complex donation mechanisms built into their belief systems and these donations are made by individuals and mercantile communities. Merchants, rulers and princes made donations for constructing wells, hostels for pilgrims, hospitals and schools. As part of a community, they, too, benefitted from this giving. There is no reason to exclude this from any assessment of India’s “culture of philanthropy”.
The oldest hospitals in the city, too, are also all set up and run by trusts. Does that count as philanthropy or does it not? Why should it not? Then there are the huge amounts donated by the government itself. CAPART, the Council for Advancement of People’s Action And Rural Technology, a Government of India initiative evaluates NGOs working in rural areas and their needs. The CAPART website has a list of the top 100 NGOs ranked by sanctioned amounts. Number one on that list has a sanctioned donation of over Rs.7 crores; the top ten between them have sanctioned government donations of Rs.40 crores. Again, it’s not clear if these amounts figure in the calculation of India’s ‘giving’ relative to its GDP.
The problem is elsewhere. Often, it seems that anything worthwhile in the country is being done by an NGO and the government’s only role is to find ways to shut them down. That is what happened in 2003 to the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme. By the late 1980’s, it had been adopted across Madhya Pradesh and, from 1982, was being run by Eklavya, a voluntary organisation set up with support from the Planning Commission, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the Department of Science Technology, the University Grants Commission and the government of Madhya Praesh. It was expanded to cover social sciences. By 2003, the HSTP had shut down. Somebody in the Madhya Pradesh government didn’t like it. No amount of private foundation-driven donations can change so implacable an enemy. But as much as those in uniform, the men and women too who make up groups like Eklavya are warriors, and they are resilient. For every Eklavya project a government shuts down, two rise.3
This is what most desperately needs to change: an acknowledgement from those we vote into power that voluntary groups are not hindrances, certainly not seditious, but the most powerful agents of change in this country. The RTI Act, perhaps the most seminal piece of legislation in recent times, was the direct result of NGO work. Without various groups and individuals, those affected by the Bhopal gas leak would have been long ago reduced to statistics. Environmental NGOs have saved entire forests and valleys; and young men and women from well-to-do city families are volunteering to teach in municipal schools and in villages. Amit Damani, for instance, is a young man from a well-to-do Mumbai family. He went to Northwestern University and was one of those who came back to volunteer at Shaheen Mistri’s Teach for India initiative. He describes it as game-changing. No real equipment, none of the aids he himself had a student, perhaps just a blackboard and chalk and students happy and willing to learn. Amit is one of many. If what he does is not giving, not part of a “culture of philanthropy”, then nothing is.
Correctly used, philanthropy is about more than money, about more than sitting in air-conditioned boardrooms and deciding who should get how much from a massive fund. It also about trying to improve other people’s lives hands-on; and this is what our volunteers and NGOs do. Used the way it is by corporates, the word itself now has a nasty smell. It puts this ‘Philanthropist’ (with a capital P) in some god-like position and alters the balance between the donor and the donee, the latter being reduced to the level of a supplicant (or, with some donors, worse yet: a mendicant). We need to rid ourselves of these connotations. What our NGOs and volunteers and non-profits do is work, just like everyone else. The difference is only that their work is not by itself remunerative; therefore they need support. Not just charity (which is redolent of giving to the needy), not only Philanthropy (with its superior-inferior tilt), perhaps not even only ‘donations’; but also support, and to use a word that is more inclusive and participatory, contributions. Change the word, and see what happens to the question. Does India have a culture of philanthropy contributing? Yes it does. Should that continue? Absolutely. Does that need to be increased? Without a doubt.
If philanthropy is a two-way street — as Sheth says, donations are the smart thing to do because everyone benefits — then what the nation’s wealthy corporations and individuals need to do is more than set aside large amounts of money for giving away. They must do that, yes; but they must also contribute, and that means lending names and resources in addition. Corporations have huge advertising budgets, for example. Yet corporate sponsorship of public awareness campaigns on television, in print and other media is very low. Voluntary organisations cannot afford the fees and costs required to mount awareness campaigns through advertising agencies; corporations can. Cricketers get lucrative advertising and sponsorship contracts to endorses a slew of products from colas to cement, insurance and toothpaste. For every two such ads, the corporate could insist on a one public awareness campaign by that sportstar; or engage the sportsman to be the ambassador for that cause. Many people protested the HSTP shutdown, but no corporation lent support.4 Corporate houses wield enormous influence in the corridors of power. That influence should not be limited to furthering only the corporation’s interests. Giving money for the sake of it is as useless as giving it for appearances or to feel good. Volunary groups need partners, not munificent benefactors. Donations need to be accompanied by support in other intangible ways too. The homilies on our apparent ‘lack of a philanthropical culture’ do not address this at all. Lobbying for those you financially support is philanthropy too and it matters just as much as the money. Increasing the ratio of corporate giving to GDP isn’t enough. As far as I can tell, only Mr Premji seems to show this level of commitment.
We should think about the number of people and groups across India in need of all kinds of support and contributions. Nobody seems to have counted them. Karmayog, a remarkable aggregator of NGOs, reports nearly 20,000 groups of different kinds and I know that the list to be incomplete. If we only looked we’d find that there is an India shining out there; it’s just not the one with the glitzy shopping malls and six-lane highways.
Also: Clinton, Lindsay: Mind the Gap: The Current State of Indian Philanthropy, Beyond Profit, 20 July 2010 ↩
Sonia Gandhi’s article in the Mint is a very fine example of this kind of condescension. ↩
This is not to suggest that every NGO is kosher. Far from it. There is enough skullduggery here as anywhere else, and CAPART routinely blacklists those it finds guilty of various wrongdoings. At last count, some 600 NGOs have been blacklisted, some of them perhaps inaccurately. Take this as a footnote. ↩
The protests and representations from scientists and academics were widespread, and the shut down was universally condemned. See the many leaders, editorials and articles in The Economic & Political Weekly for example. ↩
Where India Shines
In the summer of 1978, I took a train to Piparia in Madhya Pradesh. As far as I could tell, it was the middle of nowhere. I was straight out of school and was headed for a small village nearby. My parents had insisted I work for a few months with an NGO called Kishor Bharati which, with the Friends Rural Centre, had started a science teaching programme in rural Madhya Pradesh.
