by Samar Srivastava
Tech billionaire Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande is helping NGOs scale up and sustain philanthropy initiatives on their own steam. His formula for self-reliance is relevance followed by innovation
In 1996, when venture capitalist and entrepreneur Gururaj Deshpande started his first innovation centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, he was clear about two things. First, his philanthropic activities would not involve merely funding grants. Second, he would approach his giving in much the same way as he approached his life as an entrepreneur. “An idea does not have an impact unless it is directed at some burning problem in the world,” the 64-year-old tech billionaire tells Forbes India during a phone conversation from Boston.
Deshpande applies this core tenet to every project he works on, including Akshaya Patra, a non-profit organisation that is very close to his heart. He is the chairman of the US chapter of the NGO, which provides free lunch to more than a million schoolchildren across India. The scale of its operation at Hubli, Karnataka, is impressive.
At 6.30 am, the town’s largest industrial kitchen was busy preparing mid-day meals for 1.75 lakh schoolchildren in 800 government schools across the districts of Hubli and Dharwad. The building, spread over a three-acre campus, is fitted out with industrial-sized tumblers to prepare rice and sambar. It’s also equipped with its own heating plant to provide fuel needed for cooking. That’s 14,000 kilos of rice, 12,000 litres of sambar and 5,500 litres of milk every day. By 7.30 am, trucks are loaded with food.
Feeding 1.75 lakh children costs about Rs 15 lakh a day, and while the government helps with rice supplies from the Food Corporation of India, the programme relies on donors to fund the bulk of its operations.
Partnering with initiatives like Akshaya Patra has made Deshpande—or Desh as he is popularly called—something of a messiah in his hometown, Hubli. A decade ago, the billionaire and his brother-in-law, Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy, donated $1 million (then Rs 5 crore) to set up the kitchen. It remains, to date, the largest of all the 18 kitchens across India in Akshaya Patra’s network.
But Deshpande does not contribute any of the funds needed for the day-to-day running of the kitchen. An entrepreneur to the core, he is clear that most organisations must be able to support themselves. He does not want to be seen as a mere grant maker. “I chair its fundraising committee in the US, but don’t contribute to daily expenses,” he says.
This philosophy sets the tone for how the Deshpande Foundation, which he founded with his wife Jaishree in 1996, approaches its philanthropic activities. It may have started out by supporting initiatives in the US but, in 2007, the entrepreneur decided to expand its reach to his birthplace, Hubli. One of its primary goals is to support entrepreneurship at the bottom of the pyramid.
Spend time in the town, and it becomes apparent that the foundation has a refreshingly different take on what philanthropic organisations need to do to succeed. There’s active support for ideas that can make a difference to society. And, most crucially, it helps innovators and other organisations scale up these ideas.
It’s a learning that has come out of Deshpande’s experience of over three decades as an entrepreneur. This enables him to examine his philanthropic activities with the same lens through which he looks at entrepreneurship. “As an entrepreneur, you need to identify a problem and scale up. The same holds true for this (philanthropy) space, except that people are not very good at scaling up. That is where we step in,” he says.
When the foundation started operations in Hubli, locals slotted it as a donor.
“People would come to us and tell us that they didn’t have electricity or that the roads were not good. And I would say to them, ‘Well, I don’t even live here. This is not something that I can solve’,” says Deshpande.
Source: http://forbesindia.com/article/philanthropy-awards-2014/how-desh-deshpande-is-helping-indian-ngos-scale-up/39277/1
