‘The third sector cannot be derailed’

Khursheed N Khurody wears many hats and seems perfectly at home in any one and all of them. The journey she has undertaken — from schooling in the United Kingdom and higher education in the United States to moving to Mumbai and experiencing rural India at its most plaintive — has played a part in shaping Ms Khurody’s worldview, her passions and her immersion in the development sector.

Ms Khurody is the country chairperson of the Shivia Livelihoods Foundation, a British NGO that works with underserved communities in India, and an adviser and consultant to nonprofits involved with a spectrum of causes. She is the force behind a hospitality startup, a trained musician — she plays the piano, the cello and the violin — who performs at music festivals around the world, and an outdoors person with a “deep love of reading, writing, history, poetry and philosophy”.

In this interview with Christabelle Noronha, Ms Khurody talks about the continuing vitality and relevance of the third sector, as she calls it, about enabling the poorest of the poor in India’s rural reaches, and the leadership lessons that an understanding of music and the humanities can impart. Excerpts

The NGO sector in India has been hit by a host of issues in recent times, from the pandemic and regulatory changes to funding shortages and a general sense of uncertainty. What has the fallout of all this been on the ground?

Wedged between government and the private sector, broadly speaking, the third sector is the underdog and it, sadly, continues to remain undervalued and exploited. The immediate fallout of this is that human progress and development slackens, but who said change was easy?

The future, however, looks promising for the social sector. It cannot be derailed easily; its role is — and will continue to be — to reduce the imbalance of power and to decentralise it, be it monetary power in the private sector or bureaucratic power in governments. The social sector will become increasingly relevant in the context. Its role will continue to be human development, with a particular concern for social regeneration.

Having said this, many nonprofits, far from being agents of change, have lost their way. Others have placed themselves at the centre of their activities and have forgotten that their business is about beneficiaries. Still others think that this is a suitable pastime and don’t realise that it is harder to manage and run an NGO than it is to head a corporation.

What sort of challenges does Shivia Livelihoods Foundation face in the current climate?

We face many of the same challenges that not-for-profit concerns face. These chiefly are: harnessing resources; utilising digital technology (technological solutions can multiply social impact, but they are still out of reach for so many NGOs); finding and retaining talent; improving internal governance; partnering with corporate entities and other NGOs; and scaling up.

There are some not-so-obvious but equally pressing challenges as well: educating companies and philanthropies on how to assess, read and study an NGO before funding it, how to reap benefits from their partnerships with NGOs, and how to build symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationships with them. Then there’s the challenge of staying focused and never losing the essence and spirit of what the NGO was created for.

What made Shivia choose livelihoods as a sphere to focus on?

Shivia was founded by Olivia Belcher in the UK in 2009. Her grandfather and father had lived in Kolkata and knew Mother Teresa well. Olivia was so touched, when she was growing up, by the stories of Mother’s work that she spent her gap year between school and university living and working in the villages of West Bengal. 

From 2009 to 2010 Shivia’s focus was on microfinance; it was the flavour of the day. Olivia, however, soon discovered that microfinance put people further into debt. She decided that the way out of poverty was to turn microfinance on its head and provide, instead, ‘livelihoods with dignity’ for the poorest of the poor in rural areas. This became Shivia’s motto.

What Shivia does is provide underserved people with the necessary skills and tools to create livelihoods and become entrepreneurs in their own right. That is the fastest and most efficient way to help them help themselves out of poverty.

As has been seen in developing countries worldwide, agriculture will continue to decline as a means of livelihoods in India, fuelling ever more urban migration and, in our context, informal sector jobs. How do you see the country coping with this phenomenon?

Statistics certainly show that agriculture is declining in India and that public spending on agriculture has shrunk. But numbers rarely tell the whole story. Shivia works with small and marginalised farmers in ‘forgotten’ corners of India and what we have found paints a different picture. 

The widespread perception that the streets of India’s cities are paved with gold and, hence, urban migration — that’s just perception. We work at the grassroots and we see small businesses mushrooming in rural India, too, and we see that profits are coming to villages. Migration is in decline.

We all need food and food depends on agriculture. Together with pandemics, food and water scarcities are catastrophes waiting to happen.  Agrarian development has been hindered and thwarted by floods and droughts and chemical fertilisers that result in poor soil quality. Additionally, there’s the increasing cost of seeds, insufficient investment and the difficulty of securing institutional credit.

Philanthropies, NGOs and civil society have done worthy work in supplementing governmental efforts in social development in India. But are they doing enough, and how can partnerships with the government be crafted to ensure superior outcomes?

The world over we are witnessing an exasperation with the established order. Political and administrative practices leave a lot to be desired and governance has suffered. In this scenario, the third sector is burgeoning while reimagining our economic and social structures and, indeed, the very world we live in.

Civil society and philanthropies are becoming more engaged with NGOs, but the union between the three, to form an alliance or a coalition for a better world, needs structuring and honing. Above all, NGOs and the platforms that they have created need a great deal more exposure. Not enough is known about the extraordinary work that so many are doing, at the grassroots in particular. 

Partnerships and collaboration between NGOs and governments is the inevitable way forward, an imperative for development. However, the relationship is complicated and often fraught with problems as it involves the shifting, repositioning and sharing of power. But NGOs are well-positioned to share invaluable data and resources on development, to be a key source of social innovation, and to even influence government policies.

The third sector has the potential to help resolve diverse social problems, especially when it comes to the last mile. NGOs with solutions need governments to scale up and, god knows, governments need the services of the third sector.

As somebody raised and educated in Britain and the US, what made you come back to India and involve yourself in the social development sector? What has the experience been like?

I grew up in the heart of the English countryside, in Surrey and Buckinghamshire, and finished my formal education at Harvard University. Ideally, I would have liked to live a life steeped in academia and scholarship.

Then tragedy struck and I lost my mother to cancer. My father is a Tata veteran and had just taken up the reins as managing director of Voltas [a Tata group company] when this happened. At the time I felt he needed someone by his side and so I moved to Mumbai to support him and to take care of our heritage Parsi homes. 

Having never really lived in tall buildings and big cities, I found life in Mumbai challenging, not to mention the psyche of city folk. I was used to green fields and woodlands, to picking apples and riding horses. So I travelled the length and breadth of rural India with my dad in order to escape city life. 

You have spoken about how an education in the humanities and liberal arts and a deeper understanding of music can lead to the nurturing of good leaders. What’s the logic here, and why is such thinking not more prevalent?

I grew up in the heart of the English countryside, in Surrey and Buckinghamshire, and finished my formal education at Harvard University. Ideally, I would have liked to live a life steeped in academia and scholarship.

Then tragedy struck and I lost my mother to cancer. My father is a Tata veteran and had just taken up the reigns as managing director of Voltas [a Tata group company] when this happened. At the time I felt he needed someone by his side in and so I moved to Mumbai to support him and to take care of our heritage Parsi homes. 

Having never really lived in tall buildings and big cities, I found life in Mumbai challenging, not to mention the psyche of city folk. I was used to green fields and woodlands, to picking apples and riding horses. So I travelled the length and breadth of rural India with my dad in order to escape city life.