Daan Utsav: When Enough Isn’t Enough In A Pandemic
The need is now. Each one of us needs to dig deep. This is not the time for ‘long-term strategy’ in our giving.
I am a relatively new philanthropist. Until two years ago, I had barely enough money to make ends meet, having set up two social enterprises, one of them a nonprofit. I was drawing a very small salary from the other. My only significant giving until then was in 2008, when I sold 10% of my stake in the for-profit enterprise and donated it immediately.
In 2018, I finally ‘cashed out’ and put 50% of the money that I got into a Foundation, as a corpus. And I started working on a long-term strategy to build volunteering in India - with a plan to spend the corpus down over the next 15 years and keep giving the bulk of the rest of my money away too. Even then, my small corpus wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to achieve a lofty objective like getting every Indian to volunteer. But like any entrepreneur, the thought was that if I can build a proof of concept with my limited resources, create some impact at a modest replicable scale, then perhaps one can leverage the larger Foundations to eventually get every Indian volunteering.
Things were going along well – we had a pilot lined up to try and get every citizen in one pin code to volunteer. We had started on a pilot to implement large scale volunteer-driven mentoring programmes. And the thought was that once these are proven, we can put in more resources behind them to help scale.
Then, Covid-19 and the lockdown threw our plans out of the window. Like many others, my first thought was to conserve our funds for our strategic cause. That was till the images started unravelling of lakhs of migrants walking back home, thrown out of their places, hungry, with no money.
Like everyone else did, I started writing cheques – first to feed people, then to provide masks and personal protective equipment to hospitals, and finally to help transport migrants back home. By July, we had spent our entire budget for the year.
And then I sat back, like everyone else, saying, “Hey, I need to conserve my resources”. Maybe not for myself, but for my long-term philanthropy strategy. That too was till two weeks ago, when a TOI story about how the homeless in Mumbai were struggling tore me apart. A mother feeding her young child sugar and water because that is all she could afford was a visual that haunted me that night.
The reality is that we are going through a K shaped recovery, where some of us are at least as well-off financially as we were before Covid-19, some even doing better thanks to liquidity in the stock markets. And a huge number of others, without access to this liquidity when they need it the most, sliding down the ladder into penury. We now face a serious risk of losing in one fell swoop, 15-20 years of work done by the entire country, pulling people out of poverty. To watch this and to do nothing beyond some token donations, while we stash away funds for future vacations, is no different than Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burnt.
Mohandas Pai once said something powerful in the context of nonprofits – “corpus is the capitalisation of misery.” To build a corpus for future philanthropic use, amounts to denying much-needed relief from misery today, so as to relieve it tomorrow.
The reality is that no financial investing can compound as aggressively as the return on investment to society of helping the poor now. Let me give you just two examples:
- This #DaanUtsav, Sustainable Green Initiatives wants to help farmers in impoverished Bundelkhand plant 1 lakh fruit trees – papaya, pomegranate, lime, guava, and custard apple. Each sapling costs Rs 21 including support to the farmer to ensure they grow well. Each tree will earn the farmer Rs 500 a year (50 kg fruit at Rs10/kg net income). Over 5 years (these trees last much longer), that’s a whopping 2381% internal rate of return. Even if we halve the income estimates, it is an IRR of 1190%.
- Or take Haqdarshak, a social startup that, this #DaanUtsav, at a cost of Rs 300 per vendor, hopes to help 5,000 street vendors access a Rs 10,000 loan under the Svanidhi scheme. They will do this by helping the vendors complete government paperwork. At a conservative incremental income of Rs 100 per month for three years for the vendor, it is a stupendous IRR of 400%.
Children’s and maternal nutrition, basic healthcare, food for the hungry- all have similar ridiculously high returns on investment.
The need is now. Each one of us needs to dig deep. climb down from the top arm of the K, and pull people up from the bottom leg before they slide down into the abyss. This is not the time for ‘long-term strategy’ in our giving. We need the humility that no matter how much our corpus, it will be just a drop in the ocean of resources required to change the world, and we better do what we can today.
And so, I’m digging into the corpus I’d set aside, and intend to give away our 2021-22 budgets in the next four months. What all of us do may still not be enough, but we have to each do the best we can.
If you haven’t watched Schindler’s List, please do. And if you have, do watch this three-minute end scene from the movie once again. Perhaps if we do our best now, we will not regret it later.
Venkat N Krishnan is a principal trustee at the India Welfare Trust.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.