After making their mark in leading multinationals, IIM and IIT alumni are now taking their success stories a step further and heading some of the most influential international nonprofit organisations, helping them tackle challenges ranging from protection of human rights to mitigating climate change.
While IIM-Ahmedabad alumnus Salil Shetty is secretary-general, London-headquartered Amnesty International, IIM-Calcuttas Ingrid Srinath is secretary-general & CEO, Johannesburg-based Civicus: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. Asit K Biswas from IIT-Kharagpur runs the Third World Centre for Water Management in Mexico and IIT-Madrass Shailesh Rao has set up Climate Healers in California.
As the operational head of Amnesty, Shetty is pioneering the promotion and protection of human rights across the world. In his earlier stints, Shetty spearheaded UN Millennium Campaigns global advocacy campaign to achieve millennium development goals (MDGs) related to poverty, illiteracy and diseases and led ActionAid as chief executive to turn it into one of the most influential anti-poverty NGOs.
However, in the eighties, the road to civil society was seen as unfashionable for those passing out from IIM-A and the London School of Economics.
Recollects Shetty: “When I first left the lucrative private sector to join an NGO, my well-wishers gave me sympathetic looks, as if I had completely lost the plot. In the eighties, NGOs were little known in India and the acronym was often mistaken for non-gazetted officer. After people learnt about NGOs, the idea that one could be a paid professional at these organisations sat in conflict with the traditional notion of a social worker.”
Ingrid Srinath too had to fight her share of battles. After spending 12 years in the corporate sector, grandiose designations, bigger responsibilities and better perks alone did not motivate her. Today, as the head of Civicus, she works with local, national, regional and international civil society organisations to strengthen participatory democracy. During her earlier stint at Child Rights and You (CRY), she transformed the body from a charity-based organisation to a rights-based one. Srinath also played a leading role in the campaign to make education a fundamental right under the constitution.
After passing out from Mumbais Elphinstone College and IIM-Calcutta, Srinath had her first experience of the private sector. “While the MBA provided me a holistic worldview and working knowledge of a range of disciplines necessary for general management, exposure to the private sector has been both an asset and a liability.” It has helped more in technical areas like financial management, HR systems, brand marketing and bridging the communication gap between the for-profit and non-profit worlds. However, at least in the beginning, it was a handicap in appreciating the value of things that are hard to measure — justice, commitment and democracy, for instance, she adds.
While Shetty and Srinath are making the best use of their management training and vision to help international NGOs overcome global challenges, IITians Biswas and Rao chose to be entrepreneurial and set up organisations to deliver larger policies or smaller practical solutions.
Biswas, founder-president, Third World Centre for Water Management, primarily works in the area of water resources management.
He has also advised six heads of UN bodies, secretary-generals of OECD and NATO, global aid organisations and 17 national governments. His proposal to the UN to designate the 1980s as the UN Water Supply and Sanitation Decade led to the provision of clean water and sanitation facilities to millions of people. For his pioneering work, Biswas won the Stockholm Water Prize in 2006.
The IIT-Kharagpur alumnus says IIT education had helped him start his career, but it developed in its own after that. Biswas says that he went on to set up a knowledge-based think tank because developing countries often secured the wrong policy advice from international organisations, and this often led to long-term problems. These organisations were often peddling the same solutions, irrespective of whether the problems occurred in Timbuktu or Colombo. In the real world, one size does not fit all. I wanted to establish a policy think tank that would give the correct policy advice for water management in a specific location at a specific time for developing countries, he adds.
Fellow IITian Raos Climate Healers has come with a pilot project to provide free solar cookers to villagers in India to help reduce the use of fossil fuels for cooking. Rao also plans to incentivise the use of these devices on the back of earnings from carbon credits. At an individual level, he emphasises on the need to reduce the consumption of biological resources. “Today, nearly one-third of land worldwide is used for livestock production. If people cut their consumption of animal products and free this land, subsequent forest regeneration can store carbon and help offset man-made emissions, thus providing more time to fix our energy infrastructure.”
An IIT-Madras and Stanford University alumnus, Rao has also worked at Intel and AT&T Bell Labs and secured 10 US patents and 3 Canadian patents. His switch to the NGO sector came after he was inspired by Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth.
“The exposure to the private sector in the beginning has been immensely helpful, as I was trained to approach problems from a systems point of view, which is precisely what is needed for our environmental problems,” Rao says.
Alumni from IIMs and IITs are not the only ones leading the Indian charge in the global development space. While trade, development and agriculture expert Anuradha Mittal founded the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank in the US, environmental campaigner Ashok Sinha was, till recently, director, UKs Stop Climate Chaos. Sushmita Ghosh, a former country representative, is president emeritus, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, based in the US.
Additionally, there are a few people donning more than one hat in India and abroad. ICT and knowledge management expert Naimur Rahman, managing director, New Delhi-based OneWorld Foundation India, is also the chair of the executive committee of Global Knowledge Partnership, a multi-stakeholder partnership in ICTs.
This trend of India-bred origin leaders joining or setting up NGOs abroad is also fuelled by the countrys rising importance in the global development sphere. OneWorlds Rahman says, “It’s only natural for Indians to assume leadership in the international development sphere, given the competitive edge they enjoy because they are home-grown and exposed to both the best and the worst.”
Ashoka’s Ghosh adds, “India’s importance really rests on its talent. Just as businesses have discovered huge markets in India, social change-makers are beginning to find huge markets for change, too. Practically, any social innovation worth its salt could be adapted for India. Indias breadth, depth and wealth of social innovations, as well as social challenges, make it a perfect laboratory for change-makers.”
Shetty can’t help but agree. “Reasons for the huge Indian presence in global NGOs are not any different from the reasons behind their growing numbers in global companies,” he adds, In the NGO context, India has a very vibrant civil society, which offers a fertile breeding ground for NGO leaders. And the sheer depth and diversity of socio-political problems the country faces, make it a training school like few others.
Elaborating on how his Indian experience adds value to his work at the global level, Shetty says, “My work in India, followed by my time in Africa, has fundamentally shaped my thinking and approach to my work. India offers the classic paradox, with the highest concentration of people living in poverty and deprivation on one hand, and some of the most innovative solutions to these problems coming from the NGO sector, on the other.”
Obviously, the presence of more Indian leaders in the global development community is a win-win situation for both in their pursuit of the greater good. And its only a matter of time before we see more leaders of Indian origin leading global NGOs.
Source: The Financial Express
Published on 15 October 2010