Lunch with BS: Omidyar's Roopa Kudva on staff involvement in corporate CSR

Kudva tells Anjuli Bhargava that mandatory CSR will work better if corporations engaged their employees more meaningfully with their CSR agenda

After a career grappling the tempestuousness of the Indian stock markets and leading India’s best-known credit agency for seven years, Roopa Kudva, the first woman to have headed Crisil, found herself at the crossroads at 50. 

Her Crisil assignment — the organisation played a key role in bringing transparency into the Indian markets — was one she often describes as the “best job in the world” and one she stumbled into through serendipity. Yet continuing in that assignment would have meant “doing more of the same” and not making way for Generation Next. 

Then, she felt that unshakeable tug of “wanting to give back” — even at the cost of it sounding like a cliché. She knew she wasn’t cut out for the NGO circuit and could never be one of the jholawalla brigade. Business and the commercial principles that drive it were ingrained in her.

That’s why when the US-headquartered Omidyar Network called her, it sounded like manna from heaven. It is an outfit that invested in early stage entrepreneurs who were using their business prowess and acumen to solve larger problems that society faced. What could be a better fit? It would be the perfect platform to leverage her own skills to make a difference. She knew a good balance sheet when she saw one and she also knew how to convert a not so happy balance sheet into a happier one. She understood industry sectors, what led businesses to succeed or fail and had an understanding of the power of business to do good if it so desired. 

In July 2015, Kudva bid her old life goodbye and moved into her new one.

Kudva and I meet for lunch at Mumbai’s Asian and Cantonese restaurant Yauatcha, a stone’s throw from her office in the Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC). It’s a place she’s familiar with and likes, as do most of the BKC office-goers, I note. Barring a few leisure lunching tables, the restaurant is packed with people holding business meetings. The place is far noisier than we had anticipated but the food is exceptional as we soon discover. Time is at a premium for both of us and we get straight down to business — order quickly and get on with our conversation.

She’s just returned from a global impact investor summit in Paris, where she learnt even more about what drives the sector globally, with impact assets of $240 billion today. She’s happy that the youngsters she saw and met at the summit — several of whom will inherit millions of dollars in wealth — are quite concerned with how they put their money to use. More than ever before, she sees young people keen on using their money to solve global social problems — not narrowly focused on increasing their own wealth. Globally, impact investing is an idea whose time has come.

Kudva starts telling me what she sees happening already in India, what she doesn’t and what she’d like to see more of. The country’s impact investing sector is nascent and comprises the smallest bucket of funds aimed at doing good and solving larger problems — the other three being government funds, philanthropic grants and donations and CSR money. 

While government funds often miss their target, a large number of philanthropists are wary of putting their money into impact investments as they don’t understand the dual advantages: The ability of the impact sector to solve problems at scale and on a sustainable basis. She argues that philanthropists who want to “give away their wealth towards a cause” miss the fact that if the money multiplies, it doesn’t mean they have to pocket the returns. She cites the example of Pierre Omidyar: The returns he earns through his for-profit investments are ploughed back into new start-ups that solve a new social problem or is given to a deserving not-for-profit.
 

“Impact investing offers an opportunity to philanthropists and investors in India to align their investments with their values,” she explains. Many charitable trusts and philanthropists in India are stuck in the old mindset where the NGO route is considered the only way to get to the nub of the problem. 

A second trend she’s delighted to note is that unlike some years ago, people from all walks of life — and not just social workers, activists and NGO stalwarts — are jumping in to solve India’s social ills. “I meet people from the IITs, IIMs or Harvard or MIT — most Indians wants to engage with the country’s most intractable problems. It’s no longer restricted to a certain section,” she adds. I can understand her delight because I meet such people often — be it in education, health care, social impact or waste management. It’s almost as if Indians have collectively woken up to the reality that relying on the government to deliver the goods is wishful thinking.

She’s also overjoyed to see a brand new wave of entrepreneurs who come from smaller towns and have personally experienced some of the problems they try to solve. 
 

“This helps them to relate to the problems and find solutions,” she says. In her view, it’s these entrepreneurs who will define the future of India in some sense in the coming decades. Besides the understanding of the problems, these entrepreneurs bring a new hunger and aspiration level never seen before. She compares the situation with the Indian cricket team. When she was growing up, most of the players came from Delhi, Mumbai and other big cities. Today, they come from the smallest towns and villages. “Places we have never even heard of,” Kudva smiles.

Our food has arrived and deserves total attention. She has ordered a chicken soup and I a vegetarian version of the same. The rest of the fare is vegetarian, which we are sharing. The food is excellent and the service is attentive without being intrusive. For bean lovers — if such a breed exists — I recommend a visit to Yautacha if only to eat the stir-fried beans there. The dish is good enough to convert die-hard carnivores.

As we eat, Kudva gives me a sense of where Omidyar has reached in the country. She tells me it is planning to double down on India. No surprises here, I think to myself: Which country can compare with ours in the sheer number of problems that need fixing? Omidyar has committed $250 million to 70 enterprises in India — both for-profit and not-for-profit — projects that are supposed to impact 300 million people in the country. The enterprises span a range of areas — financial inclusion, governance and citizen engagement, property rights, digital identity, education with a bias towards tech solutions and emerging technologies. Within this, she says, the organisation will focus on “white spaces” — virgin territory that others have not explored before. Going ahead, it expects to invest a further $55-60 million annually, largely on early-stage entrepreneurs. To make life easier, the parent has decided to let the baby fly and so Omidyar India is poised to become an autonomous unit soon, facilitating faster and more independent decision-making.

This, among other things, will add to the impact investing pie which is currently the smallest of all the money that is aimed at improving lives, including CSR funds. While she has nothing against CSR money, she feels that companies could do better by getting employees engaged more meaningfully in the overall CSR agenda. Making things mandatory, to her mind, is not really an answer as anything that doesn’t come from the heart cannot compete with something that does. “Eventually those who drive it give it energy and decide the shape it takes,” she argues. For whatever reason, corporate India is yet to put its heart into this, she feels.

Impact investment in India, she says, is at a tipping point. Currently, it accounts for only $1 billion of the total money floating around but it’s likely to grow the fastest once people become more aware of its potential. Citing her own example, she says, when Omidyar Network approached her back in 2014 she’d heard the name and was aware that Jayant Sinha (currently minister of state for civil aviation) had headed it prior to his moving into politics but she didn’t really know what it did. If someone like her who is reasonably up to date with what’s going on didn’t know, one can only imagine how low the awareness levels may be even today.

I know she has a meeting right after our lunch — as do I — so I shift gears and ask her what are her other interests. Is there more to Roopa Kudva than meets the eye? She enjoys travel — in particular to the northeast where she grew up — and reads — she’s partial to biographies — but nothing holds her attention the way her work does. 

It’s an addiction she doesn’t need to shake off.