Give, India

Charity is not exactly new to India’s well-heeled . So why should they bother about the campaign by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, urging billionaires to give away at least half their fortunes? There are two things that are novel about the campaign, which has prompted 40 Americans to pledge $150 billion to charity. One, the scale: at least half their net worth is significantly more, to say the least, of what Indians are used to, committing to charity. And two, the efficiency and accountability of spending by charities demanded by the scale of giving.

Mr Buffett, Bill Gates’ friend and bridge partner, has committed to give away the bulk of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but attached conditions on the performance of the foundation. The foundation itself adopts fairly business-like methods to ensure that the money it spends on immunisation, AIDS, other healthcare and education gets the maximum bang for every buck. This is entirely as it should be.

There are some departures that the Indian approach to charity would need to make from tradition. One is to move away from religion. Building temples, donating to temples, funding religious functions, etc, has been the mainstay of traditional Indian philanthropy. This is not to ignore the funding of key research institutions by the Tatas or the education initiatives of the Birlas, and, more recently, of our tech entrepreneurs at Infosys, Wipro and HCL. This trend must become mainstream.

Another departure is to scale up the amounts given away. Sociocultural , don’t even mention tax, factors in India might preclude generosity laying claim to half anyone’s fortune, but a significant step-up is still possible. There also has to be a new focus on how efficiently donations are put to use. Echelons close to the funding source eating up a large part of the charity corpus in administrative expenditure is commonplace, but has to be excised.

An effort to prioritise the areas of organised benevolence could help fill vital gaps in our social infrastructure: mental health, skill formation , the teaching of maths, Indian languages and English , for example. Let charity begin at home, in earnest.