Indian Philanthropy –

A Personal Journey

24 JANUARY 2023

Sara Kalim is a Fellow and Director of Development, Somerville College, at the University of Oxford. She studied Classics at Somerville at a time when the college was still all-female. She spent seventeen years working in the media, with a special interest in long-form documentariescentered on narratives around women and education, including a three-year long series for Channel 4 focussing on the lastall women’s college at Oxford University. As Director of Development, Sara oversees Somerville’s fundraising strategy and development.

Sara has a long-standing family connection to India, with family coming from Patna, Bihar where her passion for the furtherment of education in India was inspired by her Indian grandmother, a politician who spent her much of her life campaigning for social welfare and education of women. Outside of her work for Somerville, Sara is a founding trustee of the Karta Initiative, a social mobility movement for young people at the base of the global income pyramid. Read more about Sara here.

Sara Kalim is a Fellow and Director of Development, Somerville College, at the University of Oxford. She studied Classics at Somerville at a time when the college was still all-female. She spent seventeen years working in the media, with a special interest in long-form documentaries centered on narratives around women and education, including a three-year long series for Channel 4 focussing on the lastall women’s college at Oxford University. As Director of Development, Sara oversees Somerville’s fundraising strategy and development.

I don’t know about you, but I find that as we get older, our heritage becomes ever more important to our sense of who we are. For me, the turning point was when I turned forty and started to reflect on the positive differences my Indian family had made to society from the time of India’s Partition. It was one of the nation’s most challenging moments as it asserted its independence and enshrined its extraordinary status as the world’s largest democracy, uniting a multiplicity of faiths by its unique secular status. My grandfather worked in education, as a professor and university leader, introducing new approaches to Urdu literary criticism and writing the definitive Urdu-English dictionary in seven volumes; and my grandmother in politics. She was one of the first women Members of the Legislative Assembly, not to mention a mother of five children, in the eastern state of Bihar. Aside from the love and respect I already held for my grandparents, a new motivation inspired by their achievements was born.

I felt that if I could make a fraction of the difference that they had made to the betterment of young Indian people, women and girls in particular, I would find deep rewards. So, the opportunity to help build a new institution, the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, at Somerville College (Oxford University) felt like a gift from heaven. If you are not familiar with Somerville, it is a bastion of women’s empowerment and education as one of the first Oxford colleges for women. It is also the alma mater of the first Indian woman at Oxford, Cornelia Sorabji, who attended in 1889, and India’s first female Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. The Hindu newspaper called us “Oxford’s Gateway to India”.

The goal: to provide resources for meritorious Indians to enable them to contribute to India’s development and success and to draw on Oxford’s global ranking for research and teaching, to offer a network and platform to these outstanding students so that their pathways back to positions of influence would add to India’s intellectual capital. Our scholars work on the critical issues of sustainable development from climate change to food and water security to gender equality. They deliver research with a positive real-world impact on the ground in India, in support of the United Nations sustainable development goals. Our university is enriched by their presence and perspective. The beauty is in the exchange.

The initial mission – which, in my naivety, I thought would be easy to deliver – was simple. Who wouldn’t want to fund brilliant Indian students to come to Oxford to enable them to return to tackle the big issues of our time at a high level? Brain gain for India was surely a no-brainer.

I hadn’t anticipated some of the challenges that lay ahead.

India may be the world’s fifth largest economy, but the ever-widening wealth gap has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which plunged 200 million Indians back under the poverty line. Meanwhile, there’s a fast-growing number of Indian billionaires, and according to Bloomberg, Gautam Adani surpassed Bill Gates and Warren Buffett on the wealth index in 2022. Last year’s Fortune India Rich list recorded 142 billionaires worth USD 832 billion.

But the wave of new wealth in India is still relatively recent history. It is only since 1990, when economic liberalisation opened up the markets, that a generation of brilliant tech entrepreneurs and service providers moved India’s GDP to record levels.

India has a long-standing charitable tradition, historically championed by a few business families – Birla, Godrej and Tata – with an approach which initially focussed on supporting local communities, but which has now expanded horizontally to a more strategic and scaled-up philanthropic industry. But, these families aside, the evolution of philanthropy hasn’t necessarily moved at the same pace, with the exception of a few catalytic lodestars who have taken the Indian equivalent of the Giving Pledge. (NOTE: For detailed and up-to-date analysis of the landscape, I highly recommend the annual Dasra and Bain & Co Philanthropy Report which this year has optimistically predicted that philanthropy in India will grow at 12% annually over the next 5 years).

Here are just a few challenges worth considering for overseas fundraisers before launching an Indian fundraising strategy:

Currency transfer restrictions: there are caps of up to USD 250,000 for Indian nationals wishing to make transfers outside of the country, making significant charitable donations such as endowment-level gifts impossible without special government exemptions.
Local competing interests: so great are the domestic needs and demands on philanthropists that making the case for investment outside of India can fail to persuade. Unless the individual has a specific intellectual or emotional connection to your overseas cause, be ready to be challenged on why they should give to your project as opposed to say, child malnutrition in India, which has some of the highest rates in the world.
Risk of being accused of neo-colonialism: in an age in which we are hopefully reckoning with our imperial past, there is little chance of success soliciting Indian donations without a sensitive awareness of history and culture. Your proposition should have a manifestly beneficial impact on India.
For UK causes, the negative impacts of Brexit: while pitching to the board of a top law firm, I was asked by the founding partner, why should we invest in a shrinking island?

Barriers aside, there is clearly enormous scope and growth in Indian philanthropy with more Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs), family foundations and corporates embracing a strategic approach, as well as a passion for helping to meet the most pressing concerns. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has grown exponentially in India thanks to the 2013 Companies Act enforcing all large corporates to give 2% of their profit to CSR activities. This has become a game-changer within the philanthropic landscape, notwithstanding inevitable ethical concerns of greenwashing and the like. My experience has been that, for example, the environment has risen up the list of competing funding priorities for Indians as never before and Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) has become the preeminent talking point amongst industrialists who can move the needle on sustainability concerns.

Keys to success:

Building trust by demonstrating cultural awareness;
Clarity of purpose;
Demonstration of impact at scale (remember India holds one fifth of humanity!);
Treating Donors with respect and intelligence – be ready to learn from them;
Remember to make the donor journey as joyful as it is purposeful.

Keys to success:

Building trust by demonstrating cultural awareness;
Clarity of purpose;
Demonstration of impact at scale (remember India holds one fifth of humanity!);
Treating Donors with respect and intelligence – be ready to learn from them;
Remember to make the donor journey as joyful as it is purposeful.

As I write today, our scholarship programme has become one of the most significant across international universities and has been enabled solely by transformative philanthropy from some extraordinary Indian benefactors. Many of them have helped shape our direction of travel and are committed to the Oxford India Centre at every level.

A photo of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD) scholars.

In all, Indian philanthropy is an exciting space to be working in. The challenges are many, but I have found the rewards to be absolutely priceless.

Indian Philanthropy –

A Personal Journey

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