Inside the 25-Year Mission to Give India’s City Dwellers a Voice in Government

You and your wife Swati have been fighting to address the issues facing India’s cities for 25 years. How did you come to do that work?

It connects to our experience of the Yale SOM community and a New England town meeting.

When I applied to Yale SOM, I was a smart guy from a poor country and a middle-class background. I didn’t know anything about the world. Friends had gone to the U.S. for school and then became management consultants, so that’s what I wanted to do. But when I got to SOM, the nature of the curriculum, the nature of the friends we made, and the career choices they made all left a deep mark on me.

I was getting the degree to go into the private sector. It surprised me when I met students who were at Yale SOM to move from the for-profit world to nonprofit work. There was someone who ran a community health center, attending SOM not as part of a career switch but to acquire tools to bring back to that work. The other students were unexpected, and it was unexpected for me that we became deep friends. Swati and I had our first child while I was at SOM. We’ll never forget the baby shower that our friends threw for our daughter’s birth. That community was amazing.

As was the curriculum. I took a finance course. I loved it. I had unbelievable professors in finance; their classes shaped and honed that love. And redirected me toward banking. I got my internship at Citibank and went back to join them after I graduated.

But one of the most impactful courses I took was Charles Perrow’s organizational behavior class. I literally carry the class notes even now; it was that important to me. His teaching and his passion helped me let go of preconceived notions and barriers I had imposed on myself around how I saw the world. I came away with a different sense of the possibilities in institutions and engaging systems to create change.

Where did the town meeting come in?

I started my career in banking; it went well. We moved to New York. Swati had audited classes at the Yale School of Design, but we couldn’t afford tuition for both of us at once. When I had a job, she got a master’s in architecture at the Pratt Institute. Eventually we moved back to Connecticut.

One Friday evening, we attended a town meeting in the school auditorium. It was like nothing we had seen in India. The mayor stood up and said, “I want to invite the joint chairman of the finance committee to speak.” That guy wasn’t a politician. He wasn’t a bureaucrat. He worked at Merrill Lynch and volunteered to help out his town.

He got up and said, “We have a budget surplus and have to decide where to allocate it. I’m going to invite the parks committee chairman to talk about a proposal to add lighting.” The parks committee chair spoke and then there was a show of hands on whether to allocate money to parks lighting. Swati and I were standing in the back saying, “What’s going on?”

People being engaged, people having a say, civic systems that made that possible—it was a huge inspiration.

It got us thinking. I had concluded that my success at work was because I’d worked hard; it was the result of my effort. But I came to believe that a great society is a springboard built by prior generations. When I was given a chance to drop onto that springboard, rather than just the bounce from my efforts, I reached escape velocity.

Realizing the importance of that infrastructure of opportunity, we decided we owed it to our home country to go back to India to help address the societal challenges that kept Indians from accessing a similar springboard.

We’re both from Bangalore. We both believe cities are the economic engines of India. So we returned home and set up a nonprofit focused on public policy. Our first campaign was inspired by New England town meetings. We wanted the people of Bangalore to have some say in the city’s budget.

To get attention we recruited four icons: Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of Infosys; a World Cup-winning cricket team captain; a movie star; and a heart surgeon. We put huge ads in the newspapers with “Here are some foolish people who believe they can transform Bangalore” over their photos. Then the copy said, “You’d be a fool to think you could build a great IT company, win the World Cup, star in a movie, or be a heart surgeon.” And then it said, “We think that people should have a voice in the budget, so if you’re a fool, call us.”

We got swept off our feet. Thousands of people called, saying, “I’m a fool, what do I do?”

We were campaigning to get just 1% of the city budget directed to fixing hyperlocal issues where people in each ward could have a voice.

The mayor hated the idea. He delayed the budget for three months, hoping we would fall away from exhaustion. We didn’t, and we got 11% of that budget allocated for citizens’ input. It was a great victory.

This was the start of the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, the nonprofit you and Swati founded in 2001?

Yes. A triumphant start, but the next year the allocation just disappeared because the system was now on full alert. They knew what to expect, and the citizens were exhausted. People told us, “I signed up to go from being a passive citizen to an active citizen. I didn’t sign up to be an activist. I can’t keep doing this.” That was a huge learning—we couldn’t create change just by catalyzing demand.

So we went to some well-meaning bureaucrats. “Why is this a problem? Isn’t it good for people’s voices to come into the budget?” We were told, “You’ve got to understand how the system works. We’re creatures of the law. Show me somewhere in the statutes that says that I need to do this. If you can’t, it is dead on arrival.”

Realizing we needed to change laws and statutes, that we had to engage with the system, we began a recalibration that defined, in many ways, what Janaagraha ended up becoming, which is an institution that works both with governments and citizens.

We also began to hear from other cities—Bombay, Kolkata, Delhi. “We like your approach. Can you come and work with us?” We realized, these are not Bangalore problems; these are problems facing many cities.

And over time we set up other nonprofits that each focus on different aspects of urban transformation: financial inclusion, affordable housing, urban planning and design. Some are more public-policy oriented. Some are more market oriented.

For example?

As a banker, I looked at the work Muhammad Yunus did to bring financial inclusion to rural Bangladesh—work that won the Nobel Prize—and saw principles that could enable market-based banking for the poor in urban India.

India has a beautiful institutional option called a Section 8 company which allows an entity to function with all the rigor of a corporation but for nonprofit ends. We used this organizational structure to create a bank focused on the poor. It grew to be the largest microfinance institution in India.

With things going well with the bank, we asked customers what else they needed. The answer was housing. Initially when we talked to developers in Bangalore, they said they didn’t build affordable housing because banks wouldn’t provide mortgages to the poor.

I said, “We can lend the money. Why don’t we do a pilot project?” At which point they said, “You know what? We really don’t have a competence in affordable housing, and we don’t want to dilute our brands.”

Swati and I spent months talking it through. “Can we take on another issue? If we don’t, will it fix itself?” And we concluded, “Let’s just try.”

We went in very gingerly because we knew nothing about building affordable housing. We created a Section 8 affordable housing organization. Over the last 14 years we’ve built about 3,000 homes and the organization is doing OK.

With all the organizations there are always ups and downs. During the Indian banknote demonetization in 2016, the microfinance bank was caught in a bureaucratic in-between, which led to huge losses and a difficult rebuilding. But it is again growing, serving millions of customers.

How have you and Swati navigated leading together for so long?

Swati and I are totally different in how we lead, but we have a common trait, which is brutal transparency. We used to have Monday-morning meetings which, about a third of the time, were disagreements between her and me on our priorities. We played them out for the whole team.

We did that because we believe process is supreme over a specific decision. Harmony isn’t the absence of conflict; it’s having a healthy process for resolving conflict. It was how we embedded a process for effectively and transparently handling conflict into the culture of the organization.

I think it also helped that with the various organizations we each had “yours, mine, and ours.” The bank was mine; urban planning was hers; and the others were ours because we each had relevant skills. It was valuable to each have our own space to infuse with our own personalities and some shared space as well.

How did your different personalities show up?

Swati is focused and disciplined. She digs in and breaks a problem down until she understands it. I’m much more the vision guy—talking about the shining city on the hill and getting people who can make it happen to join us. Even if it seems irrational today, the world conspires to help you to finish it.

For me, if we can build lasting institutions, we can take on issues that aren’t going to get solved in a short period of time, but maybe these efforts gather strength over years and decades, and there’ll be collective benefit that comes from all of it. It’s the arrogance of our ambition that wants to see the outcome of our efforts in our lifetimes.

Why so long?

Market-based solutions can move much faster. They can scale. But for complex issues that require public change, that’s harder and slower. And you can’t ever declare victory with public change.

Coming from the private sector, I was used to being able to say A leads to B leads to C. And we can estimate how long we will need to get to C. We may not get it right precisely, but we’ll get it more or less right.

None of that holds true when you come to public change, because none of the actors in the public-change arena, from the political leader to the bureaucrat to the civic activist to the citizen, fully control the levers of change. Initially, Swati and I didn’t understand how the various actors, each with limited control in a limited area, interact with each other. So we hammered our heads against the wall of frustration, not seeing change happen.

But we eventually understood there’s a rhythm to the process. We call it the social foxtrot—two steps forward, three steps sideways, one step back. That can’t be changed. It’s the nature of the beast, especially with systems issues.

While visible issues—traffic, garbage, pollution—can be fixed, we also care about the invisible issues: the statutes that say citizens’ voices must be heard, that budgets must be transparent. Getting those changes takes a long time, but if you follow democratic process to get them, if you refuse to compromise the means for an end, you put a virtuous cycle in motion. You create a system that can work well.

Would you share an example?

India’s cities face challenges that are hard to comprehend. The Bangalore that Swati and I grew up in was not even 100,000 people. It’s now a megalopolis of 14 million people. That change happened in one lifetime.

In Europe and North America, most countries urbanized at the speed of industrialization. India is urbanizing at the speed of the internet. And it will continue. In the next 15 years, India will go from 400 million urban residents to 700 million. Only China has seen comparable velocity of growth, and they’ve used a very different tool kit to manage it. India’s urban growth comes in the context of a democracy that is messy, immature, and doesn’t have enough financial resources.

The cities in India are starved of funds. New York has 8 million people to Bangalore’s 14 million. The budget of New York is more than $100 billion. If you take purchasing power parity into account to make an apples-to-apples comparison, the budget of Bangalore should be $40 billion to $50 billion; it’s not even $4 billion.

India’s cities don’t have any direct source of income. All taxes are collected at a federal level. Those funds get distributed through a formula between the federal government and all the state governments. Local governments, cities and villages, have to bow and scrape before state governments for funding.

The Finance Commission of India is a constitutional body that determines the federal-to-state distribution formula every five years. Fifteen years ago, Janaagraha made a case to the commission that the state distribution systems were so broken that the federal formula needed to include some distribution directly to cities. They agreed and set aside 5,000 crores [approximately $525 million] to cities. For the formula covering 2026-2031, cities will get 250,000 crores [approximately $26 billion]. I can say—totally immodestly—that our institution made this happen.

We’ve managed to speed up solutions from 5 miles an hour to 50, but the problems are running at 100 miles an hour, so we’re still falling behind. We have to provide a predictable source of revenue for cities. Yes, the bucket’s got holes in it—the cities are corrupt. But we’ve got to open the tap even as we fix the holes in the bucket.

And we’re working on both parts of that. We run the platform on which the funds are sent to the cities. To get the money, cities have to upload audited financial statements. Ten years ago, there was no concept of an audited financial statement. Today, we have 8,000 cities uploading their financial statements. That’s a win.

And while they aren’t using the money for perfect projects, we’re working with city and state governments to understand how to direct funding in ways that get the best outcomes at the city level.

This work—it’s not a marathon; it’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon of sprints. When there’s an opening you go as quickly as possible. Right now, we have four different teams in four different cities working on deep systemic reforms because there are openings to move ahead in those places. Unfortunately, Bangalore is not one of those cities, but I wouldn’t be surprised if two days from now we learn something has fallen into place and we can start our next sprint in Bangalore.

You mentioned enacting statutes as an important part of changing systems. How has that developed?

This is the social foxtrot, again. We drafted and got passed two laws that put conditions on funds going to cities. One required public disclosure and led to cities putting out audited financial statements. The other was a law for citizen participation.

Well, the system still finds ways to subvert the rules. Each ward or neighborhood is supposed to have a sabha, essentially a town or council meeting, where everyone in the community has a chance to hear how money will be used and sign off. But rather than enacting the law as intended, politicians will call the sabha with two hours’ notice so no one knows it’s happening. Or they pack it with their allies. The good news is that now we are solving the next problem, not the first problem.

Twenty-five years ago, there was no traction for the conversation itself. Today, there’s an extraordinary recognition from people in the system, the politicians and bureaucrats, that we’ve got to fix cities’ problems and that they don’t have the tool kit they need. Democracy inherently has feedback loops; its systems respond. That’s what we are tapping into.

You mentioned wanting the organizations to endure for the long term. How have you and Swati approached that challenge?

The transition has been underway for more than a decade. As of two years ago, we had stepped back from everything but the Jana Group, the foundation that is the umbrella for the other organizations.

With the two market-based institutions, the leadership transition was easy because the methods of that transition are more mainstream and well-understood.

For the nonprofits, it was more difficult. First because founders tend to get very connected to their nonprofits. And second, the skill set required to lead a nonprofit is not as commoditized or as clearly defined. It requires not just understanding political economy and public policymaking but a sophisticated sense of how to engage with government.

When we work with government we aim for constructive engagement—a middle ground between aggressive confrontation and toothless collaboration. In practice, that means things like when you disagree, you do it in private. Winning kudos in the newspapers for being tough won’t help you stand in the swamp beside your government partners to solve a problem.

Creating a pathway for a new leader to come in and practice skills it took us 20 years to learn wasn’t straightforward. So when we promoted Srikanth Viswanathan from within Janaagraha to the role of CEO, we also mentored him for five years. Then he became director of the other nonprofit, Jana Urban Space, too.

There is a theory of leadership transition for nonprofits that says that founders have got to decisively step back to create a vacuum, however uncomfortable that may be for the founders and potentially for the institution. It’ll look like the organization is wobbling, but that’s how the new leader has space to truly take on the role. At this point, it’s clear we’ve moved through that phase too.

Together the nonprofits are among the largest in India. They have support from global philanthropies, including the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation. And increasingly they have an incredible group of Indian philanthropists who are not just bringing capital; they’re bringing intentionality, a desire to see change, and convening power. Srikanth has taken the institutions we built to new heights, which is exactly what we hoped for.