Atul Satija, the CEO and founder of The/Nudge Institute and CEO of GiveIndia, has been on a mission to alleviate poverty in India. Indian corporates have earlier been reluctant to contribute towards social causes but the tide is slowly changing. Indian billionaires are now seeing the impact they can create in the social space and the government is looking to collaborate with social organisations to bring about a change, he says. Excerpts from an exclusive interview:
Indian corporations have traditionally not been into giving. How have things changed now? What’s been your experience?
Earlier, we did not have a culture of corporate giving in India except for a few very good role models like the Tata Group, Bosch Group and a few other MNCs. However, that has changed with the CSR law in place. It is a requirement for every corporation (with net profit over Rs 5 crore, turnover exceeding Rs 1,000 crore or worth at least Rs 500 crore in the previous year) to allocate 2 percent of their profits to charities that are of different sizes and at different scales. The CSR committees work closely with the senior management.
In the first wave of CSR giving in the country, we observed that companies were largely trying to figure out ways to be compliant with the CSR law, and supporting local nonprofits, with opportunities for employees to volunteer. Things have certainly changed for the better now, with organizations learning about nonprofits, impact and evolving to build long-term partnerships, focusing on specific causes that they feel they can meaningfully contribute to, with mid-term commitment.
What factors do you think have led to these changes, if any?
The CSR committee working closely with the board, CEO and the leadership team has definitely contributed positively to the evolution of CSR spending moving from short, one-year, compliance-oriented spending towards a more impact-focused, multi-year design and deeper partnerships.
Additionally, the journey through COVID-19 has also contributed to these changes, as during the pandemic, the entire management team noticed the struggles of their employees as well as the world at large. COVID-19 exposed social inequities which caught the attention of the CXO-level leadership. Deeper questions, more sincere involvement and solutions to social inequities are now more regularly seen to be a part of conversations.
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What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced in this innings (Nudge/Give India) after your long corporate stint across companies including Infosys, Google and Samsung?
I think the two big challenges that I have faced are the limited talent pool and capital available in the development sector. The time taken to close a position from the limited available talent pool is much more than what I was used to in my corporate stint. There are a lot of great minds and inspiring people in the sector, but to move the needle, there is a need for manifold increase in talent mobility in the sector. The non-profit sector is still not a mainstream choice for India's top talent, at the scale of the problems that we are tackling.
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Limited capital is also a huge challenge faced by the development sector. There is no denying the fact that funding has increased, but given that the problems are large and wicked, available capital and innovative financing models need to further increase. We must make donors aware of the on-ground realities, so that they can also provide capital for often overlooked social issues. For example, during Covid, healthcare was the most urgently and widely addressed societal need that saw funding, and rightly so. But we also witnessed a slight dip in funding/attention in other critical areas of development like resilient livelihoods, which in fact have their own long-term impact on healthcare access, nutrition, etc.
Your mission at The/Nudge is to alleviate poverty. How do you plan to go about achieving this?
Poverty alleviation is a very complex problem. At The/Nudge we are aspiring for India to be poverty-free within the next 25 years, when India celebrates its 100 years of independence.
Given the economic and GDP growth we have seen, India has enough resources now to solve poverty. If we focus on the bottom 300 million poor, economic growth will also trickle down, thus leading to an increase in opportunities and employment generation.
Even in the corporate sector, a lot of people are getting involved in CSR activities way more than they were earlier. At The/Nudge itself, we have seen more people come on board, potentially to support the institute’s journey as advisers, partners and mentors to our startup ecosystem that we support. The/Nudge has incubated 83 nonprofits that have graduated from our incubator, and we have, as we speak, 15-plus organizations across our accelerator and 10 in our nonprofit incubator’s current cohort. So, in our overall portfolio of 110 organizations, we have 15-plus mentors who are helping these organizations. That has also increased post COVID-19.
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What could be one of the main enabling factors in this regard?
Where we still struggle is in the ease of doing business for social impact within the startup ecosystem and corporate growth. Sections of society continue to face challenges in getting the right opportunities or accessing the right capabilities. For instance, people in poor communities who are differently abled, the LGBTQIA community, certain minorities based on caste, class, religion, commercial sex workers and the like do not have equal opportunities and we need to support them.
There are also those who are in the bottom-most 25 million who may never be able to access market solutions, the jobs, the opportunities, skills, education, health or even government welfare nets.
Our role at The/Nudge Institute will be to make sure that we are serving the communities that will otherwise be left behind. We want to work for the upliftment of the poor by running large-scale programs like Ending Ultra-poverty in the next 15 years. We have three centres at the moment: Centre for Skill Development and Employment, Centre for Rural Development and the Centre for Social Innovation, across which we try to attack the complex, multi-dimensional problem of poverty from several angles. These include skilling and employing the youth, developing farm and near-farm income for the rural poor, scaling social entrepreneurship and taking on innovative programs to boost governance.
What’s the kind of support that the government can give to people who want to contribute more towards social causes?
One way that the government can indirectly support the development sector is by making things easier for the nonprofit sector and individuals who have the intent to contribute towards social impact. Something like an Ease of Doing Business Index. I’d like to call it ‘Ease of Doing Good’, which is a necessity for the development sector.
What we now need are more partnerships between the private sector, non-profits along with the government at the grassroot level, the state level, and with the Centre. The National Payments Corporation of India (NCPI) and Nandan Nilekani’s contributions with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) have both set successful examples for collaboration between the government, private sector and non-profits. Further, NITI Aayog’s hiring of consultants with private sector expertise, and even the central government opening joint secretary level positions to corporate professionals as lateral entry hires, are steps in the right direction which are further expected to grow.
At The/Nudge Institute itself, we have initiated something known as the Indian Administrative Fellowship (IAF), which is a programme that bridges the gap between government and corporate sector talent/capabilities. In this programme, some of the best talents from the corporate world, senior C-suite professionals, work closely with the Principal Secretary of different state departments for 1.5 years and contribute to the state’s development, thereby transferring their skills in strategy, technology, service delivery at scale, finance, etc., for nation-building.
Further, with a lot of startup funds being created across the country, there is also a need for impact-financing and grant-raising. For this, I would advocate large-scale adoption of Social Stock Exchange, which can lead to creation of more instruments for grants, coupled with even more accountability of impact that will help the development sector.
What’s next for you? How do you plan to take Give India and The/Nudge to the next level?
For GiveIndia, a giving platform, we want to make sure that we make giving bigger and better. We want to bring higher trust in giving and more trust in nonprofits. Over the next 5 to 10 years, we want to make giving at GiveIndia closer to a billion dollars per year, from the $150-170 million we enabled last year. The idea is to make sure that we can build resilient livelihoods for all Indians.
One of our aspirations with The/Nudge Institute is that we can serve about 50 lakh poor families and bring them out of ultra-poverty in the next decade. We are also looking at skilling millions of people every year through our skilling programs. Drawing and retaining top talent in our country, in the social sector, to solve the nation’s most pressing challenges, is another aim. My personal objective with this journey is long-term contribution to making India poverty free in our lifetime.
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