The bank executive who chose to finance the poor

After quitting the rat race, Nachiket Mor explored small-town India for a new deal in financial inclusion; now he is taking up a wider agenda. Nachiket Mor must have felt the hands of destiny on the day he was named. His namesake in Katha Upanishad swapped the promise of worldly wealth, power and glory for the knowledge of life after death.

Two years ago, Mor, long seen as the crown prince of ICICI Bank, India’s largest private lender, opted out of the race for the corner office to pursue an obscure goal as the head of its social service arm. He disappeared from the corporate scene. The talk was that he had shifted base to Thanjavur, a town often known for a thousand-year-old temple in Tamil Nadu.

Even today he is not really back. He prefers development seminars to press conferences. When journalists ask him about his work, he answers modestly. “It’s still too early,” is his usual refrain.

Yet, it’s important to know what Mor had been doing since he left ICICI Bank, for two reasons. First, some of ICICI Foundation’s work in health and education is already having an impact. Most non-profits can claim that. But, “there is a big difference between what ICICI Foundation does, and what a typical non-profit organisation does,” says Nand Kumar, education secretary of Chhattisgarh who has partnered with Mor. Second, his work in Thanjavur (as the chairman of IFMR Trust, an arm of a Chennai based business school) might turn out to be the next big idea in rural finance.

In 2007, when ICICI Bank formed ICICI Foundation to streamline its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, Nachiket Mor offered to lead the initiative. It surprised many. But for those who knew him, the dots connected. After all, he spent his impressionable years at Brockwood Park, a school founded in the UK by philospher J Krishnamurti.

Even at ICICI Bank, his interests had gone beyond the core business. Anil Kumar, a former ICICI Bank staffer who now works for IFMR Trust, recalls that Mor closely tracked his work in rural finance, “even though there were several levels between me and Mor.”

With an organisation to call his own — and with a commitment of 1% of ICICI Bank’s profit towards its budget — Mor did not go around building a big team. He put together a six-member team and put it to work with partners in health and education (and financial inclusion, civil society and environment).

Partnerships mean the foundation doesn’t get bogged down by its way of doing things, but incorporates best practices, Amukta Mahapatra, Director of Schoolscape, who has observed ICICI Foundation’s work in education, says. “What they have to do then is to share their learnings with others.”

Similarly, Chattisgarh’s Nand Kumar says that most non-governmental organisations tend to focus on a few locations and are too obsessed with short-term outcomes. But, ICICI Foundation works on pilot projects with the government, and helps the government roll them out in a bigger scale. It focusses on lasting transformation. “The impact tends to be much bigger.”

“If you want a parallel, our aspiration would be to be a McKinsey for the development sector,” Mor says. But there is a difference. “The pilots we do on the ground are large. We don’t stop at advice. We work at it until the result happens.”

Few deny that primary health and education — mostly in the domain of government and NGOs — need a more rigorous approach, in design and in implementation. Abhijit Banerjee, an MIT economist, says that many policies are based on zero evidence. “Development efforts would yield much better results with at least some evidence,” he says. Besides, some programmes, even if they are not perfectly designed, will improve things on ground, if only they were implemented well.

This is where Mor comes in. To help the government with ‘what’ and ‘how’. His organisation would bring an evidence-based, research-driven approach to find out what works. It will then show the government, how it will work. “Our focus is on government-provided health and government provided- education. The question is how you make the delivery happen,” he says.

Mor’s critics would argue that he is probably not the best person to ‘make the delivery happen’. He tends to evoke descriptions like ‘academic’ and ‘ideas man’. His resume can pass off as that of a professor, starting with his Ph.D at Yale and ending with a list of published works. At one point during an interview for this article at his Chennai office, Mor leapt out of his chair to reach a white board and drew a chart based on an 1960s academic paper to show what financial inclusion means. Even for his admirers, he is predominantly an ideas man. “You speak to him for one hour, and he will give you enough ideas to think about for ten days,” says a colleague.

At times, he could even seem a little out-of-world (A Haiku on his twitter page: “Icy mountain pass / Deep blue sky / Pure white snow / Perfect place to die”). There is little doubt that his is a mind that connects the lofty idealism of a poet with the academic rigour of a scholar. The question is whether it also includes the pragmatism of a businessman.

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