Daan Utsav: Giving With Both Heart And Head

This #DaanUtsav, BloombergQuint brings you a series of first-person accounts of how different organisations across India are making interventions at scale, or in depth, and bringing about significant transformation.

This Daan Utsav, the world’s biggest festival of giving, millions of Indians are celebrating the concept of helping one another and thereby growing themselves. On this wonderful occasion, I wanted to share why my wife, Archana, and I decided to give most of our wealth, and also spend a large part of our time on societal issues—the philosophy through which we are able to combine our hearts with and our heads.

We started our giving journey from the day we got married. Early on, we stayed as ‘paying guests’ since we couldn’t afford to rent a house close to work, but yet given the values imbibed in us and the fact that I was fortunate to have received scholarships for my higher education, we chose to start giving back to education causes right from then.

We steadily kept increasing both our absolute giving as our income grew over the years, instead of just growing our consumption. At some point, inspired by role models like Chuck Feeney and moved by the philosophy of Guru Nanakji, we decided to cap our material needs and give most of our income to causes that we were passionate about. We also started increasing the amount of time we both spent, because we realised that time was as, if not more valuable than money, and for the sake of our own satisfaction. For most of the last decade Archana has been a full-time NGO leader, and now runs Jai Vakeel, one of the oldest organisations in the area of intellectual disability, while for the past few years I spend half my time on our foundation and other causes.

In 2016, I got deeply impacted by the farmer suicides in Maharashtra, and began to think about the root causes of agri-stress, particularly amongst marginal farmers. This has lead us to focus deeply on addressing water security in drought-prone areas. Over time we have expanded our focus to also look at supporting marginal farmers adopting natural farming, as more of sustainable agriculture.

Amongst others, there are three key questions, we ask when we give in areas we have identified to focus on:

1. How Can We Maximise Our Impact?

As recently as five years ago, we were spread across a large number of NGOs and multiple verticals, all of which we deeply cared about. However, when we thought hard, we realised that to try to make a dent in any area, we needed to go deep into it. We also chose to work in underserved areas where we had both interest and differential capability. As a consequence, we zeroed in on social sector capacity building and sustainable rural development as our two focus verticals. While it was tough to pull back from everything else, we can see the results of this approach paying off.

In trying to reduce farmers’ dependence on rainfall, a consortium of donors that we have anchored, worked with farmers, and the government to rejuvenate over 7,500 water bodies in 27 drought-affected districts over the last few years. This exercise has more than doubled the storage capacity of these water bodies, to the extent of silt removed; and massively boosted the income of participating farmers.

2. How Can We Collaborate With Others To Improve Outcomes?

Social sector problems are beyond any one of our capabilities and yet we largely tend to work in silos. Collaboration not only increases the funding available to a project but also helps bring a diversity of perspective and ensure sustainability. A good example of this would be the commitment we’ve made in conjunction with the Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network, and Vikrant Bhargava to GiveIndia to help scale retail giving in India by 10x over a few years via investments into its platform.

3. Are We Making A Difference? Can We Improve?

The team at our foundation is encouraged to do a detailed analysis on the impact of the funding on beneficiaries. We seek to understand through third-party evaluations how we are solving problems while spending time with beneficiaries ourselves to ensure that we are grounded in them. Importantly, we keep looking for absolute and relative change while benchmarking interventions to other approaches that could deliver better outcomes.

The problems we engage with are deep and complex, and we have a long way to go before we can claim to be proficient in them. However, in our chosen areas, we are doing our best to serve the most vulnerable with deep empathy and humility, having an approach that combines the head and heart, and that we hope will make a real difference to millions of lives.

Amit Chandra is founder and governing board member of Ashoka University, chairman of Bain Capital India Office, and a philanthropist.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.