Start small, commit your time, is the advice of one of India’s premier philanthropists and IT entrepreneur, Azim Premji, to other budding philanthropists.

Azim Hashim Premji, Chairman, Wipro Ltd., was recently in the limelight when in the largest act of philanthropy by an Indian, he gave away $2 bn (Rs. 8,846 cr.) to improve school education in India.
Premji, India's third richest man with a net worth of $18 billion, will transfer 213 million equity shares of Wipro Ltd, held by a few entities controlled by him, to the Azim Premji Trust. It will fund educational activities of the Azim Premji Foundation (APF) which works mainly with schools in rural India. He had previously transferred over Rs 700 crore to the APF.

Mr. Premji’s background is well known but is interesting to recount in light of his philanthropic initiative. He was studying Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, USA when due to the sudden demise of his father, he was called upon to handle the family business. Azim Premji took over the reins of family business in 1966 at the age of 21.

At the first annual general meeting of the company attended by Azim Premji, a shareholder doubted Premji's ability to handle business at such a young age and publicly advised him to sell his shareholding and give it to a more mature management. This spurred Azim Premji and made him all the more determined to make Wipro a success story.

Under Azim Premji's leadership Wipro has metamorphosed from a Rs. 7 cr. company in hydrogenated cooking fats to a Rs. 7000 cr. pioneer in providing integrated business, technology and process solutions on a global delivery platform. In 2005, the Government of India honored Azim Premji with a Padma Bhushan.

And now having earned it all from wealth to glory to fame, he decided to give it back. Mr Premji has never been vocal about his giving but having donated away more than 10% of his wealth so far we think he will give most of it away in his own lifetime. Just like the challenge he faced after the death of his father, he faces plenty of challenges in his philanthropy, the learnings of which he recounted in an excellent article in the Mint newspaper:

1. Start Small, Commit Time – Getting personally engaged in one’s own giving gives one the confidence and learning to try and do more.
2. Be Democratic, not Autocractic - Legitimacy of social purposes and directions can only come through the democratic process. Well-respected people and large organizations, may have a disproportionate influence on these purposes and directions, without having any real democratic and social accountability.
3. Be Patient - Things do not change and improve quickly, and when they do, they can unwind for unknowable reasons. One must not lose the sense of urgency, but one must be prepared for this reality.
4. Understand the complexity – Unlike the business world with well-defined metrics of success and defined areas of work, the social sector works with multiple interdependent parameters to influence communities. For example, if the water conditions are poor, it leads to a poor health situation in the village, which in turn affects attendance in school, which in turn affects learning outcomes.
5. Adapt your skills to the context - Methods and learning from the corporate world have limited application and use in the social sector and that too after modification to suit the ground realities. But be prepared that it will certainly not have the same kind of effect as in the corporate world. 

For over 25 years, V. Ranganathan (72), a retired automobile engineer, cherished the dream of educating underprivileged young children in rural Tamil Nadu. But it was not until his retirement in 2002 that he could realise his dream, when he established the Vidyarambam Trust, a non-profit organisation which provides basic, free-of-charge education to poor and needy pre-primary and primary children. Since then the trust’s after-school learning centres have multiplied to 450, spread across 12 districts of Tamil Nadu.

Born into a large family of eight siblings, Ranganathan was deprived of collegiate education as his father died when he was 15, and he assumed responsibility of managing the family’s grocery store and agricultural property. Simultaneously, he signed up for a distance learning programme in economics of Bhagalpur University followed with a one-year diploma in automobile engineering from a private institute in Chennai. “The institute was very good and equipped me with the skills to set up an automobile service/repair workshop in Kumbakonam. Though I established a sound business, it couldn’t provide enough income to my family. So after six years I closed the workshop and signed up as a foreman in George Oakes, a Simpson Group company in Madurai,” recalls Ranganathan.

He got his first lucky break in 1970 as chief foreman in Larsen and Toubro (L&T), Mumbai. “L&T honed me into a good manager by sending me for training programmes across the country,” he gratefully acknowledges. While helping an agent in Mumbai in his spare time to recruit shop-floor workers for the Middle East, he sufficiently impressed the head of police in Qatar who invited him to work as foreman in his department. “It was a challenge to be in charge of 120 mechanics without knowing Arabic. So I enroled for Arabic classes in the evening and could read, write and speak the language within three months.” In the dawn of the new millennium he returned to India and registered the Vidyarambam Trust.

Today, the trust has grown to 450 centres, runs eight programmes and has provided supplementary education to 500,000 children, trained 4,500 teachers, and receives an annual grant of Rs.80 lakh from Mumbai-based NGO Pratham as well as donations from corporates and philanthropists aggregating Rs.20 lakh per year. In June 2008, the Vidyarambam Trust signed an agreement with the Rotary Club of Madras Central to fund and run a full-time K-V English medium school (affiliated with the Matriculation Board of Tamil Nadu), in Nagapattinam district for children who were orphaned during the tsunami of December 2006.

“Our aim is to provide rural children good primary education. I travel 20 days a month supervising the trust’s centres. Retirement has ushered in the busiest and best period of my life,” says this social activist, who even if belatedly, has made his dream come true.

Source: Education World Online, http://www.educationworldonline.net/index.php/page-article-choice-more-id-2537
 
While participating in India Giving Challenge 2009, Mr. Ranganathan and his team raised more than Rs. 11 lacs (and received more than Rs. 4 lacs in matching funds from GiveIndia) from the community which has benefited from the work. It was a way for the community to pay back in their small way towards the effort of Mr. Ranganathan and his team. 

You can contribute to Vidyarambam, in one of the following ways:

Adnan Kapadia (President, GiveIndia Chapter, Bay Area, San Francisco) talks about a charity cricket tournament they held as part of their Joy of Giving Week 2010 celebrations.

The GiveIndia Bay Area Charity Cricket Tournament was held on 9-10th October, 2010. To qualify to participate in this tournament, the aspiring teams were asked to raise $900 to be pledged to a project of their choice, supported by Apnalaya. Once they qualified to play, 12 eligible teams would compete in a 10-overs-a-side tournament spanning two days, with qualifiers on Saturday 9th October and semi-finals and finals on Sunday 10th October, 2010, at Thornton High School, Fremont, CA.

We pulicised the event through Facebook, email, word-of-mouth communication and flyers. Cricbay, one of the biggest organisations promoting tennis ball cricket in San Francisco and the Bay Area, helped us in organizing the event. They were a big help in providing us with the resources required to host this tournament and booking the grounds, without which organising the tournament would have been very difficult. They were also our means to get in touch with over 66 cricket teams who could be potential participants of the tournament. Besides Cricbay’s teams, we also got in touch with the local Indian cultural organisations in the Bay Area and invited them to participate in the tournament.

However, the response received was much less than what had been expected. Teams found a wide variety of reasons not to participate in the tournament. It was a steep learning curve for the GI team and we know what to expect the next time the tournament is organised.

Finally, 4 teams, Team Aptina, the Daredevils, 11’s and I-11, confirmed their participation and we decided to shorten the tournament to a single day, Sunday 10th October.

The day proved to be ideal for cricket, with clear skies, bright sunshine and temperatures in the late 70’s! All four teams and the GI volunteers arrived well on time, which was commendable since it was 9 am on a Sunday morning! Teams picked from a hat by a neutral umpire played two qualifying matches. Special thanks go out the umpire, who very kindly volunteered his time and umpired two matches, one qualifier and the finals. Team Aptina played the Daredevils and I-11 played the 11s. Both proved to be exciting matches and after 20 intense overs, the Daredevils and I-11 were victorious in their respective matches. After a 15-minute break, the Daredevils played I-11 for first and second place, and team Aptina played the 11s for third place. Both matches again, proved to be extremely close and all the teams were well matched. By 1 pm we had the results, I-11 won first place, the Daredevils were second and the 11s were third. The players were provided lunch and water, kindly sponsored by an anonymous donor, whose condition for donation was that we promote the cause of GiveIndia, which is what the whole day was about.

Following the prize distribution ceremony, the players were invited to pledge amounts they planned to raise by the end of the year and the response was very heartening since a number of them pledged sizable amounts, all directed to Apnalaya. Players from the tournament raised and donated a total amount of $2385.81 on the spot.

Cricbay has announced that they will partner GiveIndia once again and help organise the next tournament, to be held tentatively in March 2011.

It was encouraging to see all the players participating the right spirit and we believe that now that the tournament has taken place once and the cause of GiveIndia has been spread, more players will be keen to participate in the next tournament. The GiveIndia team will need to begin publicity for the tournament earlier than we did this time and will probably need to set a more modest target to be raised by each player, but we believe that it will happen again and will be much bigger and better the next time.