Shownotes

My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast this week took the path less trodden. After a BA in History from Yale and an MBA from Judge Business School - she didn’t follow the path of her peers to investment banking but decided to pursue a career in the social sector in spite of the disapproval of family and friends. 

Rachita Vora is co-founder of India Development Review. India Development Review (IDR) is India’s first and largest independent media platform for the development community. Before IDR, Rachita led the Dasra Girl Alliance, an INR 250 crore multi-stakeholder platform that sought to improve maternal, adolescent and child health outcomes in India.

During our freewheeling conversation Rachita spoke about her background, privilege and education that enabled her to take a decision to work in the social sector…….

👉🏾 The ambition behind setting up IDR

👉🏾 The challenges of running a magazine for the non-profit sector in an age of 24x7 media, dwindling ad budgets

👉🏾 The big issues facing the social sector in India including dwindling pool of donor, the regulatory environment, negative perception, small talent pool, the impact of COVID 19

👉🏾 The pivotal role of the social sector in helping India meet the SDGs and its ambition to for a high growth economy

👉🏾 Collaborations between state and the sector

👉🏾 Calling out the social sector for its shortcomings and Failure Files

We also spoke about future plans, existential questions, and what inspires her…..

Memorable Passages from the podcast 

👉🏾 Thanks Sudha. Thanks so much for having me. 

👉🏾 Yeah, sure. So I've been working in the social impact space for around 16 years and if you had asked me when I was a kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don't think I'd ever have imagined that this is a career choice I would've made. I grew up in an upper-middle-class family, so I grew up with a lot of privilege and a lot of opportunities. And I think because of those, I was able to attend Yale, which is really where I think the seed for wanting to work in the service of others really took root. I didn't realise it when I was there, maybe it was the kind of friends that I kept. But it was really when I moved back to India in 2007 that I began to feel very strongly that I wanted to use my education for something that was bigger than me.

👉🏾 And this was also alongside sort of at a time when there was just growing inequality and the wide income disparities, gender disparities, class disparities that I was noticing coming back to India after a while, really hit me hard. And so, I did sort of speak to a bunch of people and try to figure out where within the social impact space I could work, but then once I made the decision, there was really no looking back. And so I started working at an organisation called Swadhaar Finserve which was one of the first urban micro finance institutions in India at the time and then of course went on to work in CSR and at different kinds of organisations over the course of my career. And it's been an incredible education and reflecting on it, I don't think I'd change a thing at all because it ultimately brought me to IDR, which is a job that I absolutely love.

👉🏾 Yeah. I mean, I don't think my parents were too thrilled, honestly. A lot of my peers that graduated my class ended up working at investment banks and some of the top consulting firms in the world and then I also had friends who actually spent a year abroad teaching English in some country somewhere.

👉🏾 So I think it was definitely something that I had to convince my parents of. And it didn't help that back then in 2007, actually, I didn't really have any friends or any people that were senior to me that I knew that had chosen this as a career path. And so even sort of figuring it out took a little bit of time. But honestly, I think once I knew it felt like a call, and once I knew that this is what I wanted to do, it was actually very easy. The difficult part was trying to figure out where within the social impact space I might fit. What was I interested in because it's such a vast field, there are so many areas you can work in, so many kinds of organisations you can be a part of. So for me it was really about, well, where do I begin? And I was really fortunate to meet Veena Mankar who set up Swadhaar FinServe and she's been a mentor and like my full sort of hashtag life goals kind of person and I had the opportunity to sort of learn under her and the rest is history.

👉🏾 So IDR is the brainchild of one of my co-founders Smarinita Shetty, there are three of us in total, so there's Smarinita, Devanshi and myself. And honestly, I think IDR was just born out of frustration.

👉🏾 So what we had actually seen over the years of working in this space is that, we have the solutions to a lot of the problems that India was facing, right? Whether it's malnutrition, whether it's issues with sort of learning outcomes, maternal mortality, we had many of the solutions. And really the problem was that they weren't reaching the right people at the right time, in the right format for them to act. 

And we began IDR really just asking the question, what if we made this information available and we made it contextual and we made it relevant to people who were taking decisions, whether it was nonprofit leaders running programs, whether it was policymakers, whether it was CSR. What if we gave them the information they needed? Would it result in more effective funding decisions or policies that reflected ground realities? And so that was really the initial idea. We spoke to about a hundred people before we started trying to understand where they go to learn, what do they do if they find themselves stuck on a particular problem, how do they find solutions? And interestingly everyone told us that they don't read, it was 110 out of a hundred people saying we don't read.

👉🏾 But fast forward, we sort of tweaked our model a little bit and we built a product, we built an audience, we built an organisation. And it was only through this that actually, we realised how big our dreams were. Because the three of us would sit around this small table and I remember Smarinita would always, I think the first month we had maybe 5,000 visitors to our site and we were making projections for the year and she would say by the end of the year, we're gonna get to a hundred thousand. And it just seemed so unlikely, such a moonshot, because we were at 5,000, there were three of us we had no idea, we probably had funding just for six months anyway. But I think that has continued to be how we do things. There is this kind of understated ambition that I think characterises how we've always done things at IDR. And yeah, it's just been a hell of a ride. 

👉🏾 I was just gonna say, I'm sure there are many naysayers, it's just they've been kind enough to not tell us to our face.

👉🏾 But maybe we'll find them on Twitter or some social media platform. Honestly, it's been incredibly validating. I think what was proven quite quickly was that the sector really was aching for a product to come in, that made information and insights and the latest thinking available to a vast number of people. And I think that actually really helped with our initial traction, because when you fill a vacuum it's very easy to get validated and to do really well and so that was in the initial years. But since then, what's been interesting is that we've had a lot of mainstream media pick up our articles, which is never something that we expected. So more than half of IDR articles are actually republished in Scroll, Times of India online, The print, et cetera, a number of different publications. And that has really shown us that even people outside the sector are interested in these topics. IDR Is a little bit different from a mainstream journalistic outfit, in that we see our role not just in informing, but we very carefully track what happens as a result of an article being published on IDR.

👉🏾 So we want people to either think or act differently after reading something on IDR. And that doesn't always happen, but when it does, I think it shows us the ways in which what we publish is being used by people. So I'll just give you a couple of examples, early on when we started IDR, we had somebody write a piece on critiquing the social sector as not being caste diverse. And the piece was published both in IDR, as well as a much more established online news media publication. And then after the piece was published, the author got a lot of feedback, saying I read your article on IDR and you pointed to this problem, what about the solution, how are we gonna solve for this? And the author actually came back to us and said I want to do a follow on piece. But I wanna publish it on IDR because I know that decision makers who can actually do something about this are your readers. And then it kind of cuts through the noise a little bit, and for us, that was incredible because this person was actually choosing a much smaller, lesser, known publication to write what they wanted to write, because of what might come out of it. And our articles have been used for sort of internal strategy changes, they're used in academic curriculum, we've had it used extensively for policy advocacy, especially during COVID 19 and a lot of the policies that were being pushed out, we had a lot of people from the social sector, kind of writing in and saying, look we wanna publish because we wanna take it and say, this is why this is not working, or that is not working. So I'm sure we're making a lot of mistakes as well, but so far the response has been really positive. 

👉🏾 Sudha I think you laid out all the big issues, I mean you're absolutely right, there are definitely issues with funding, with talent, with the reputation of the social sector within sort of the larger narrative. But I think right now the issue that's gonna have the most long term implications is really the regulatory climate. And just to tell you a little bit and to tell listeners a little bit what it's doing to the sector, right? So the FCRA is an act that actually covers international donations to nonprofits. And over the last decade, or so there have been various changes to the act that are making it increasingly restrictive and onerous for nonprofits to comply with. Nonprofits have to apply for a license every year essentially. So even if they have the license to accept international donations, they have to keep getting it renewed, and there's no guarantee that it'll be renewed. 

👉🏾 And if I were to just make an analogy, if you think of what sort of water is to human beings, right? And you compare that to for instance, the FCRA and accessing international funding. Now, imagine if somebody came and told you that in order to get water, you need to apply for a license and you may or may not get it, and then even after you get the license, there's an authority that's gonna tell you how much water you can use for what purposes in your home. So how much can you drink? How much can you use to wash your vegetables? How much can you use to have a bath? If you run out of water, you can't get water from a neighbour or somebody else. And there's only gonna be one location in India, no matter where you're based, through which you're able to access the water. How long do you think this fictitious human being is gonna survive for?

👉🏾 So if you were to think of this from the context of nonprofit organisations and the historic reliance on international donations, it has created a huge vacuum. A lot of domestic giving still tends to be towards direct service delivery, which means working in schools or, health delivery system.

👉🏾 And so when organisations that are doing different things, for instance, research or academia, these organisations have historically relied on international funds. And now when that source has been entirely cut off it's making it incredibly, incredibly difficult. And then you layer on top of that, the pandemic and so many organisations struggled and many of them didn't survive. And so you have a domestic giving situation that isn't perhaps where it could be, you have international funding increasingly under threat, and then you have people reeling from a pandemic in a sector that is anyway already underfunded and under-resourced. 

👉🏾 So , there have always been ebbs and flows when it comes to policy and the society space but I think especially now it's extremely difficult. And I actually know organisations, very established large organisations that when they get their FCRA renewal, it is such a relief, they're almost throwing a party because it's literally just out of "oh great we're gonna survive". 

👉🏾 Absolutely. So the SDGs have 17 goals, 169 indicators, and these are not going to be achieved without collective effort and without collaboration. I mean, that's what SDG 17 is all about, right? So whether it's ending poverty or it's ensuring access to clean drinking water, organisations in the social sector are gonna be crucial to this effort, because like you said, they're the ones that have been embedded in communities, they're the ones that have been delivering services and fighting for basic fundamental rights of people at the last mile, for decades.

👉🏾 So I think that's a given, but now let's come to the Indian economy right? More than half of our population is under the age of 35, and we've known this for a while, but still, we're nowhere near leveraging our demographic dividend. I think with the pandemic, we really saw how poor our public health system is to serve the kind of population that we have in India. How inadequate our social security system is, our governance is, every year the ASER survey publishes how abysmally our students perform and all the evidence is pointing to how the pandemic has set us so far back, not just in terms of education, but in terms of health and so many other indicators.

👉🏾 And so we might have in schools, for instance, a hundred percent attendance, but if kids aren't really learning then how are they going to grow up and go on to study in higher education. Or how are they going to be sort of active, positive contributors to the economy. And the social sector works across these areas, right? Whether it's education, whether it's healthcare, whether it's livelihoods, and it plays a very crucial role in filling the gap wherever government services and the markets don't reach. And they're the ones that really fight for people at the margins. So I think there are a hundred reasons why the social sector and the work of civil society is so crucial to India's growth as an economy. But really even if you just look at human capital, the civil society space is crucial in ensuring that the basic fundamental rights of people that today are not perhaps where they should be, are upheld and that basic services that allow you to function in society are delivered at a quality that they should be. That is really I think what's gonna be crucial if we want to get there. I mean, of course, there's a major role for industry, and government and there are systemic changes that need to happen, but I don't think any of it is gonna happen at the pace that it's gonna happen without civil society.

👉🏾 And then of course there's the role that the social sector plays in sort of ensuring a healthy democracy, holding government to account and to ensure that policies are inclusive and democratic. So it is as important a sector as the business sector, as a private sector and as the public sector and I think perhaps it doesn't get as much importance by the media or generally in sort of dinnertime conversations. 

👉🏾 There are a ton of collaborations at a subnational level, whether it's at a state level at a district level, the nonprofit sector and local government actually works very closely together. So a lot of times nonprofits will pilot a program and then get an evaluation done and have the evidence to prove that the program achieves the outcomes that it's stated. And then we'll sort of go to the government because ultimately if you wanna work at scale, the government is the only partner. And there are examples of this across the country where the government will say, okay, your education program is working, I want you to scale it to all schools in 10 districts of this state. 

👉🏾 And this happens at all levels, not just nonprofits. It happens with foundations that co-fund or will partner with the government to execute these massive programs. So there's definitely collaboration on the execution side, but then there's also a lot of working together on technical support groups and advising on policy, and essentially supporting the government, wherever support is invited. And some of the biggest successes in India have actually come out of such collaboration, so the whole polio eradication campaign, right? It was a combination of the Indian government, but Rotary international, which is a foundation, UNICEF and other civil society institutions. And there are many examples of programs like this. 

👉🏾 I think idealism and cynicism are actually two sides of the same coin. I am very idealistic and I have so much hope alive in me that I think it makes me that much more frustrated when I see , the state of things today. So I think it's very easy actually to not wear rose-tinted glasses and I think the people that have a romanticised view of what it means to work in this space are probably new to it or are sitting outside of it. But once you're in, it kind of exposes itself to you when you see it for everything it is warts and all. 

👉🏾 We've been very passionate about this at IDR and we actually have a feature series called Failure Files, and the purpose of it is really to normalise conversations about what's not working. And so it's actually both a text-based series as well as a podcast. And the idea is to get leaders from across the sector, social entrepreneurs, heads of foundations, non-profit leaders to talk about professional failures as well as ways in which we as a sector might be failing at certain things. I think it's crucial to be able to have these conversations because ultimately the work that so many organisations are doing it changes lives. So we need to be honest about what's not working. 

👉🏾 I wanna share this story. So it wasn't easy to get to Failure Files. Right? We launched Failure Files in year four of IDR being around we're five years old...