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India at the Crossroads

Speakers

  • Founder & Partner, Dasra
    Neera Nundy is Partner and Co-Founder of DASRA India which started in 1999. Her overarching goal is to enable social entrepreneurs and funders with the support they need to achieve big goals in areas such as gender, urban resilience and sanitation through system change and collaborative philanthropy. Neera plays a crucial role in bringing capacity building, knowledge, funding and networks to the sector. She holds a MBA from Harvard Business School and is a fellow of the third class of the Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellowship of the Ananta Aspen Center and a fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She is a Board Member of The Hunger Project, American School of Bombay and Aangan Trust. She is Canadian, has lived in Mumbai for 21 years, runs Dasra with her husband Deval and busy raising feminist sons – Ayush, Laxman and Akbar. – all teenagers!
  • CEO, Digital Green
    Rikin Gandhi is chief executive officer of Digital Green. His interests include sustainable agriculture and technology for socioeconomic development. Rikin received a master's in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from MIT and a bachelor's in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. Rikin is a licensed private pilot and received patents for linguistic search algorithms that he helped develop at Oracle. Born and raised in the U.S., Rikin ventured to rural India to start up a social enterprise to develop biofuels. He then joined Microsoft Research in Bangalore, India as a researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets team that incubated Digital Green. Digital Green is now an independent, not-for-profit organization with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID, USAID, Google, and others.
  • Chairperson, Arghyam
    Rohini Nilekani is Founder-Chairperson, Arghyam, a foundation for sustainable water and sanitation, which funds initiatives all across India. From 2004 to 2014, she was Founder-Chairperson and chief funder of Pratham Books, a non-profit children's publisher which has reached millions of children with indigenous, attractive books in multiple languages. She sits on the Board of Trustees of ATREE- Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment and serves on the Eminent Persons Advisory Group of the Competition Commission of India. She is also Director on the Board of EkStep, a non-profit education platform. A former journalist, she has written for many leading publications such as Bombay Magazine, India Today, Sunday and the Times of India. Her first novel, Stillborn, was published by Penguin Books, which also published her book Uncommon Ground, based on a TV Show she conceptualised. Under the pseudonym 'Noni', she has also authored several books for young children. Rohini Nilekani continues to fund work in areas such as governance and accountability, independent media, education and research and environmental sustainability.
  • CEO, Chandler Foundation
    Tim Hanstad leads the Chandler Foundation as its first CEO. The Chandler Foundation seeks a world of shared prosperity in which nations are well-governed, businesses help drive economic growth and societal well-being, and all individuals have the opportunity to flourish. Tim previously co-founded and was the longtime CEO of Landesa, the world's leading land rights organization. Tim led Landesa’s growth from a 2-person operation to the #1-ranked human rights NGO in the world. He is a Skoll Social Entrepreneur Awardee and a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur Fellow. Tim has a particularly strong affinity for India where he lived for many years, but also has strong ties each of the more than 20 countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America where he has worked. Tim has co-edited and co-written two books, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Washington Post, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Foreign Affairs, Huffington Post and beyond. Tim is the proud spouse of Chitra and a father to four adult children from whom he draws inspiration. He also draws strength and inspiration from working with others on racial justice issues in his Seattle community. He has two law degrees from the University of Washington and has completed certificate programs at Harvard Business School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.