As I ponder over the question, Dhawan pops up on my Zoom screen. In his second avatar post Chrysalis, he has spent the last decade fully vested in setting up two organisations — the Central Square Foundation (CSF), an education space advocacy body he has created, financed and built a strong team to run, and the Ashoka University in Sonepat, a joint effort with many cofounders. Both the organisations have now come of age to some extent. CSF is a neutral and credible body working in the K-12 education space, guiding, assisting and steering government policy towards greater goals and public good, whereas Ashoka has carved out a niche for itself as India’s answer to the American liberal arts degree education. While the first has been largely a smooth, non-controversial sail, the latter has given anxious moments to all its founders.
But even as CSF (2012) and Ashoka (project began in 2010 and the first undergraduate batch was admitted in 2014) found their feet, Dhawan was not exactly putting his feet up. In 2017, perceiving a wide gap, he partnered with Ravi Sreedharan to set up the India Leaders for the Social Sector (ILSS), an organisation aimed at building leadership capacity in the nonprofit sector. The air pollution in Delhi, where he and his family spend a substantial part of time, led him to launch the Air Pollution Action Group (APAG) in 2019, focussed on reducing air pollution by 25-30% by 2025 in the Indo-Gangetic plain states. In 2020 and 2021, in partnership with economist Karthik Muralidharan, Dhawan launched the Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS), an organisation that hit the ground running as it began working with the Telangana government to drive a range of reforms in the state.
During the pandemic, as Dhawan and his team at CSF watched schools across the country shut down and the delivery of education to millions of children fall apart, they decided to set up an organisation to leverage edtech for this segment. The outcome — the ACT Edtech Ambition Fund, which aims to provide quality edtech to 50 million underprivileged kids by 2025.
Currently, in incubation stage, are three organisations — Foundation for Advancing Science and Technology (FAST India) , Accelerate Indian Philanthropy (AIP) and Circle In. In partnership with Varun Aggarwal of Aspiring Minds, Dhawan has conceptualised FAST India as a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening the science ecosystem in India to advance scientific research and to create, disseminate and translate new scientific knowledge. Jayant Krishna, former TCS honcho and National Skill Development Council (NSDC) chief, has been inducted as the CEO. It already has an impressive list of mentors, including Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and virologist Gagandeep Kang.
Circle In — an offshoot of an effort that began under the aegis of Ashoka, based on a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant — will work on women’s economic empowerment and will be spun into an independent entity, specifically looking at how to increase women’s labour force participation. Dhawan is also in search of a CEO to head AIP to support and guide the growing Indian desire and proclivity to give. He saw this closely when Ashoka was being set up for which 116 founders contributed Rs 2 crore and above, and 40-odd among them, including himself, committed over Rs 10 crore.
From scientific research to changing the narrative on dyslexia, is there anything that Dhawan doesn’t want to tackle? At what stage does convergence descend into chaos? I put that question more diplomatically by asking whether he wasn’t spreading himself too thin. He is but he remains quite a realist. “I don’t expect everything to work. My thinking is that if I launch around 20 organisations aimed at resolving around 20 big problems, some will succeed and some may not,” he says. Moreover, it’s not as if he will lift the full load on his own — Convergence Foundation will be the umbrella under which all these organisations will incubate and thrive, “a hold co foundation” with a “private equity-like structure”. Five experienced operating partners have been hired in the Convergence team to work closely with the entrepreneurial CEOs. In the initial stages, funding will be provided by the foundation but eventually the organisations will work towards becoming self-sustaining.
I ask him if what he has done so far in the last 10 years or so were worth it. Can he really hope to solve so many of the problems that governments collectively have failed to in over 75 years of Independence?
He says he often asks himself this very question as it is always “easier” to achieve results in the corporate world as so much more is “under your control” with its well-defined key performance indicators and targets. But he feels “good” about working from the outside and bringing a new perspective to many problems at a macro scale. “Have we achieved a lot through CSF in improving learning outcomes in India? No. But have we been able to get the needle moving on some critical issues like foundational literacy or numeracy? Yes,” he says, adding that he is much more hopeful of the next 10 years of CSF as it now knows what works and what doesn’t.
Like CSF, if some of the 20-odd organisations he is in the process of setting up under Convergence get up and running and make some difference in their identified niches, he would consider his work done. The doer in him does not allow him to just sign cheques and hope problems would get solved. Nor is he really interested in leaving some sort of legacy for posterity. Making India a better place during his lifetime may sound like a lofty goal but he is putting more than just his money where his mouth is.
Bhargava is a Goa-based journalist.
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