2005

ARGHYAM FOUNDED: WATER ACCESS FOR ALL

200M+

CHILDREN REACHED THROUGH EKSTEP LEARNING PLATFORM

1M+

FREE BOOKS DISTRIBUTED BY PRATHAM BOOKS

3

NOVELS PUBLISHED AS ROHINI NILEKANI (AUTHOR)

WHO SHE IS

Rohini Nilekani is most often introduced as the wife of Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and the architect of Aadhaar. She has spent two decades making that introduction increasingly inadequate. She is a philanthropist who has redirected hundreds of crores toward water conservation, early childhood learning, and civic infrastructure. She is a writer who published her first novel in 2017 and her third in 2023. She is a thinker who has articulated a framework for how Indian civil society and the state should relate to each other that is cited in policy circles and largely unknown to the public.

She is not famous in the way that fame usually works. She does not court it. The work is the thing, and the work is designed, in many cases, to be invisible: clean water arriving in a village, a child learning to read on a tablet, a civic database that runs without anyone noticing because it runs correctly. Invisibility, for Rohini Nilekani, is often a sign that something is working.

“Invisibility, for Rohini Nilekani, is often a sign that something is working.”

WHAT SHE BUILT

The institutions Rohini Nilekani has founded or co-founded span a range that would be unusual for a full-time professional, let alone someone who also writes novels.

Arghyam

Water and sanitation philanthropy

Founded 2005. Funds grassroots organisations working on water access, sanitation, and groundwater conservation across India. The name means offering in Sanskrit.

Pratham Books

Children’s books in Indian languages

Co-founded to put a book in every child’s hand. Open-licensed content means stories can be translated and printed freely. Over a million books in circulation.

EkStep

Open-source learning platform

Co-founded with Nandan Nilekani. The infrastructure became DIKSHA, the national digital learning platform used by over 200 million students across India.

Societal Platform

Systems thinking for social change

A framework and practice for solving large-scale social problems by building open, shared infrastructure rather than individual interventions. The idea is structural, not charitable.

What connects these is a philosophy she has spoken about clearly: she is not interested in giving money to solve problems. She is interested in building systems that make problems solvable. The difference sounds small. It is not. A donation feeds someone today. A platform for open-licensed children’s books means that every story written for it can be translated into every Indian language and printed by anyone, forever, at no cost. That is a different order of change.

Also Read: The Women Who Went First – Part 40

THE FRAMEWORK

Rohini Nilekani has written and spoken extensively about what she calls the relationship between Samaj, Sarkar, and Bazaar: society, the state, and the market. Her argument is that healthy societies require all three to function well and to stay in their proper relationship to each other. When markets crowd out civil society, or when the state absorbs functions that communities should own, things go wrong in ways that are hard to diagnose and harder to fix.

This is not abstract theory for her. It is the operating principle behind everything she funds. Arghyam supports community-led water management, not state-delivered water supply, because communities that own their water infrastructure maintain it. EkStep built open infrastructure rather than a proprietary platform because open infrastructure can be used by everyone, improved by anyone, and owned by no one. The philosophy is consistent across two decades and dozens of interventions.

THE OTHER LIFE

Rohini Nilekani has published three novels. Stillwater (2017) was her debut, a story set in Bangalore about a neighbourhood’s fight to save a lake. Uncommon Ground (2019) followed. Once Upon a Curfew was her third. The fiction is not separate from the philanthropy. The same preoccupations appear: water, cities, what communities owe each other, what individuals owe the places they live in.

She wrote for years before publishing, and she was not publicly known as a writer until well into her philanthropic career. The writing was for herself, the way some people keep journals. That she eventually published is almost incidental. The work existed whether or not anyone read it.

THE GIVING PLEDGE

In 2017, Rohini and Nandan Nilekani signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give away the majority of their wealth during their lifetimes. The combined Nilekani philanthropic commitment runs into thousands of crores. Rohini has spoken about this not as sacrifice but as the logical use of resources she did not earn through individual effort alone. The wealth came from a system. It should go back to the system.

What is striking is not the scale of the giving. It is the deliberateness of where it goes. Every rupee Rohini Nilekani directs is aimed at infrastructure rather than outcomes, at systems rather than symptoms, at the kind of change that takes twenty years to see and cannot be attributed to any single donor. She is building things that are designed to outlast her name being attached to them.

“She is building things that are designed to outlast her name being attached to them. That is the rarest kind of ambition.”

CROSS-SERIES CONNECTION · ISSUE 40

Read alongside Zohra Sehgal (Issue 40), and two entirely different relationships with public recognition come into view. Zohra Sehgal spent decades doing extraordinary work while the world looked elsewhere, then received her recognition late and accepted it with amusement. Rohini Nilekani has spent decades doing extraordinary work while the world looks elsewhere, and appears entirely unbothered by the looking. One woman waited for the light. The other arranged things so the light would not find her. Both, in their different ways, understood that the work is not about being seen.

WHY SHE BELONGS IN THIS SERIES

The women in this series are usually remembered for a single moment: the flight, the goal, the speech, the film. Rohini Nilekani is not remembered for a single moment because she has spent her career making sure that no single moment is what matters. The water reaching a village in Rajasthan does not carry her name. The child reading a storybook in Odia does not know who made it free. The student logging into DIKSHA does not know who built the platform underneath it. That is exactly what she intended. She belongs in this series not despite the invisibility but because of it. Going first, sometimes, means making a path so good that no one notices the person who made it.

ISSUE 41 • CONTEMPORARY PORTRAIT • ABOUTHER MAGAZINE
THE WOMEN WHO WENT FIRST