For Rohini Nilekani, making the money was the easy part. The Bangalore-based wife of Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani, Rohini owns 1.67% of the Indian outsourcing company, and her personal fortune soared to about $300 million along with the meteoric rise of its stock. She calls her windfall "a quite frightening amount of money." And as soon as it started rolling in, the social activist and journalist began to look for ways to give enormous sums away.
That's been the hard part. With little guidance available for the country's would-be Rockefellers, Nilekani became a self-taught philanthropist, building two foundations from the ground up. So far, she has provided a total of $37 million to Akshara Foundation, which is dedicated to education, and the Arghyam trust, which tackles water issues.
But the entrepreneurial zeal she brings to the organizations she runs is as striking as the size of the checks she's been signing. The source of her inspiration? "We're learning from the Bill Gates Foundation, and ones like it," she says, referring to the Microsoft co-founder's famously hands-on, results-driven charitable institution. "It's about accountability and sustainability now. We want to make improvements on a level that no one else has done before."
[Excerpt of an article by Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine]
[Excerpt of an article by Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine]
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