ROHINI NILEKANI
Arghyam Foundation, EkStep Foundation, Samaaj-Raajya-Bazaar framework
Rohini Nilekani is what happens when someone with access to serious Infosys wealth decides philanthropy is not a photo-op. She founded Arghyam in 2001 with a personal endowment of Rs 150 crore to tackle water and sanitation — an unglamorous cause with no celebrity attachment. She and Nandan co-built EkStep, which became the backbone of India's national school education platform DIKSHA, now serving 150 million+ students. She developed the Samaaj-Raajya-Bazaar framework — a rare conceptual contribution from a philanthropist — which argues that civil society must check both state and market. She gives without naming rights, builds institutions rather than programs, and has put more thought into the mechanics of effective giving than almost anyone in India.
Net Worth
$1.7 Billion
Nationality
Indian
Time Horizon
Generational
Risk Appetite
3 / 10
Net Worth Context
- · Still a billionaire — just the quiet kind at the end of the table.
CAREER & BACKGROUND
Rohini Nilekani began her career as a journalist, writing for The Times of India and India Today through the 1980s, covering stories across the country. She stepped back from journalism to raise a family when her husband Nandan Nilekani co-founded Infosys in 1981.
As Infosys grew into one of India's most valuable companies, she turned her attention to strategic philanthropy. In 2001, she founded Arghyam with a personal endowment of Rs 150 crore — entirely her own — focused on water and sanitation.
In 2014, she and Nandan co-founded EkStep, an open-source learning infrastructure platform that the Indian government adopted as DIKSHA in 2017. By 2023, DIKSHA had served over 150 million registered users across India.
She co-founded Pratham Books, a nonprofit children's publisher that evolved into StoryWeaver, hosting 50,000+ stories in 300+ languages. She chairs the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) and she and Nandan signed the Giving Pledge in 2017.
In 2024, she received the Mother Teresa Memorial Award for Social Justice.
COMPANIES & ROLES
Arghyam Foundation — water and sanitation grant-maker she founded in 2001 with a Rs 150 crore personal endowment. Arghyam funds grassroots organizations working on water access and policy reform across India, with particular focus on groundwater depletion in rural areas.
EkStep Foundation — co-founded in 2014, built open-source learning infrastructure that became the technology foundation for DIKSHA, India's national school education platform operated by the government. Pratham Books / StoryWeaver — co-founded a nonprofit children's publisher that evolved into StoryWeaver, a digital platform hosting 50,000+ multilingual children's stories under Creative Commons licenses.
INVESTING STYLE & PHILOSOPHY
Rohini deploys philanthropy as patient capital for systems change, not charity. Her method: identify the public goods that markets ignore and governments underfund, then build or fund the infrastructure for both to work better.
She favors open-source architecture so that philanthropic investment gets multiplied by government adoption. She funds institutions over programs.
Her Samaaj-Raajya-Bazaar framework maps how civil society must be strong enough to keep both markets and the state honest. The EkStep model is her clearest expression of this: build open-source public infrastructure and let the state adopt it at national scale.
THE PLAYBOOK
Risk Approach
Operationally conservative — she funds proven approaches rather than moonshots, and wants evidence of impact before scaling. Time horizon is generational.
She has been running Arghyam for 20+ years and expects water security policy reform to take another 20. She is comfortable with ambiguous social returns that are difficult to measure precisely.
Financially, she holds Infosys shares rather than actively managing a portfolio into new ventures.
Money Habits
Rohini and Nandan signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give away the majority of their wealth. She has donated Rs 120+ crore in single-year tranches and appeared in India's top 10 philanthropists list in 2024.
She lives in Bangalore in a comfortable but understated home. She rarely grants personal profile interviews.
She does not seek naming rights on any of her giving — no buildings, no programs, no awards carry her name by design.
BIGGEST WIN
The EkStep-to-DIKSHA pipeline is the defining win of her philanthropic career. She and Nandan built EkStep as open-source public infrastructure for learning starting in 2014.
The Indian government adopted it and launched DIKSHA in 2017 — a national school education platform built on EkStep's architecture. By 2023, DIKSHA had 150 million+ registered users and hosted over 4 million pieces of learning content across multiple languages.
Getting sovereign government adoption of philanthropist-built open-source infrastructure at this scale is essentially unprecedented in India.
BIGGEST MISTAKE
Rohini has spoken about the early tendency in Arghyam's grant-making to fund activities rather than institutions — giving money to programs that ran once and left no lasting organization. She shifted toward building grantee organizational capacity over time, which takes longer but produces self-sustaining change.
She also acknowledges that the EkStep open-source infrastructure model requires a unique alignment of philanthropic ambition and government readiness that cannot be replicated on demand in every domain.
FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHY
Her framework — Samaaj, Raajya, Bazaar — says society, state, and market must all be healthy for civilization to work. The market creates wealth.
The state provides public goods. Civil society holds both accountable.
Her philanthropy is aimed at strengthening civil society precisely because it is systematically underfunded by both market incentives and political priorities. She believes philanthropy's highest use is to fund the institutions and ideas that no one else will.
FAMILY & PERSONAL LIFE
Married to Nandan Nilekani since 1978. Nandan co-founded Infosys in 1981 and later led the Aadhaar biometric identity project for the Indian government.
They have two children: son Jatan Nilekani, who is active in the family's social impact work, and daughter Nivedita Nilekani. The family is based in Bangalore.
Rohini and Nandan are among the most prominent Giving Pledge signatories from India.
EDUCATION
Rohini Nilekani studied at Sophia College for Women in Mumbai, one of the city's premier women's institutions, where she studied chemistry. She transitioned into journalism after college, training on the job at The Times of India.
She has no formal degree in philanthropy, economics, or public policy — she built her frameworks through decades of fieldwork, reading, and institution-building.
BOOKS & RESOURCES
) — her own volume bringing Indian business and social leaders into dialogue about where capitalism and civil society must work together
The empirical case for why inequality damages everyone, not just those at the bottom
On why top-down planning fails, and why local knowledge matters more than any central authority realizes
A framework for prosperity that does not treat GDP growth as the only goal
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QUOTES (6)
The job of philanthropy is to strengthen civil society so that the market and the state do not crowd out the spaces where ordinary people live their lives.
Open-source infrastructure for public goods may be the highest return on philanthropic capital we can achieve. When the government adopts what you build, your investment multiplies a thousandfold.
Wealth is a temporary custodianship. We are stewards, not owners. The Giving Pledge is simply an acknowledgment of that fact.
Arghyam's work on water is ultimately about dignity — the dignity of not having to walk four kilometers for drinking water, the dignity of a girl who can stay in school because her school has a toilet.
We fund institutions, not programs. Programs end. Institutions endure. If we are serious about systems change, we must be willing to build the organizations that will outlast us.
India's biggest risk is not poverty. It is the weakening of the intermediary institutions — the NGOs, the journalists, the universities — that stand between the citizen and raw state and market power.
NETFIGO SCORE
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