Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies

Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies (RNP) is the personal grantmaking vehicle of Rohini Nilekani — Indian author, former journalist, and one of India's most prominent civil-society philanthropists — formally constituted as the Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies Foundation, registered under Section 8 of the Companies Act 2013 (CIN U85100KA2022NPL159639) and headquartered at WeWork Galaxy, 43 Residency Road, Bangalore. The Section 8 entity dates to 2022 but consolidates a philanthropic arc that begins much earlier: Rohini Nilekani founded Arghyam in April 2001 with a personal endowment of ₹150 crore for water and sanitation work, co-founded Pratham Books in 2004, co-founded the EkStep Foundation in 2015 with her husband Nandan Nilekani and Shankar Maruwada, and has chaired the Akshara Foundation for elementary education. RNP itself is the named vehicle under which her contemporary grantmaking now runs; the broader umbrella site for both Nilekanis' philanthropic activity, Nilekani Philanthropies, frames the couple's combined work as "a personal social responsibility" organised around the Samaaj-Sarkaar-Bazaar pillars, with Rohini's half centred on civic society and Nandan's centred on digital public infrastructure.

The foundation reports ₹118.22 crore in grants in FY 2024-25, 292 grantees since 2010, and 155 current grantees, organised across eight fields of work — Access to Justice, Active Citizenship, Climate and Environment, Laayak (gender equity), Mental Health, Arts and Culture, Ecosystem Building, and Research and Academia. RNP's stated grantmaking method distinguishes between "learning grants" to first-time grantees designed to give exposure in new programmatic areas, unrestricted multi-year support, and accompanying "support beyond grants" through learning sessions, research, and convenings — a deliberately trust-based stance that RNP traces to its five-value framing of trust, curiosity, redistribution of power and agency, safe spaces to acknowledge failure, and humility paired with ambition.

The Samaaj framework

Most distinctive about RNP among the corpus's funders is the explicit organising frame Rohini Nilekani has developed across her writing — most fully in her 2022 book Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar — in which Samaaj (society / the civic sphere) is treated as the precondition for healthy Sarkaar (state) and Bazaar (markets). The foundation's own framing is that "a strong Samaaj forms the foundation that restores balance in the system," and the choice to organise grantmaking around supporting "leaders who are passionate, committed and of high integrity" within civil-society organisations is treated as the operationalisation of that thesis rather than a sectoral preference. The framing matters for the corpus because it is structurally aligned with the corpus's own scope definition — engagement of non-AI audiences in shaping how AI is built and deployed — but applied across a much broader civic agenda than the AI-good movement specifically.

Position on AI

RNP is not a topical AI-governance funder; the foundation's eight current fields of work do not include AI, digital rights, or platform accountability as standalone programmes. Its AI engagement runs through three distinct threads.

The first is a published philanthropic position. In September 2024 Natasha Joshi, RNP's Associate Director, published "AI and Society" arguing that AI development should be "consultative, open and bottom-up" rather than steered by a small number of Global North organisations, and that "artificial intelligence might need to be steered by collective intelligence." The piece names favourably the work of Jugalbandi (an Indian-language conversational-AI platform), the Misinformation Combat Alliance, AI Village's Generative AI Red Team, and the Collective Intelligence Project as examples of the participatory model RNP wishes to see. In September 2025 Gautam John, RNP's CEO, published "The Limits of AI in Social Change" via India Development Review, arguing that "LLMs can play a role in social change, but must stay narrow, supportive, and grounded in connection" and that funders should prioritise "foundational layers — convening, accompaniment, group formation, and follow-through — over throughput." Together these two essays document a public RNP stance that is sympathetic to the AI-good agenda but explicit in its scepticism toward AI as an organising solution.

The second is RNP's role as a convener through its long-standing relationship with People+AI, the AI initiative curated by the EkStep Foundation (the latter co-founded by Rohini, Nandan, and Shankar Maruwada in 2015). The Joshi essay references RNP's co-convening with People+AI of a gathering of foundations, researchers, and non-profits on the implications of generative AI for the social sector. The structural distinction matters: People+AI is housed inside EkStep, not inside RNP, and EkStep is operationally distinct from RNP (Rohini is a co-founder of both, but the vehicles are governed separately) — so RNP's relationship with People+AI is partnership rather than parent-organisation.

The third is the Samaaj-side portfolio whose grantees sit directly in the grassroots-democratic terrain this corpus tracks, with AI as one cross-cutting concern rather than the main subject. RNP funded Khabar Lahariya, the women-run rural-news brand whose 25 reporters across 16 districts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh reach approximately five million readers monthly — the corpus's clearest example of an independent-journalism grantee whose work increasingly touches AI-mediated information disorders. RNP also funded the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation (IPSMF), the major Indian intermediary funder that re-grants to organisations creating and distributing "public-interest information to the public at large, using digital media, social media, mass media or any other form" — itself a regranting vehicle through which RNP capital reaches independent-journalism work that intersects with platform-accountability and AI-coverage questions. The Apprentice Project's TAP Buddy WhatsApp-based AI tutor for underprivileged students is a smaller direct AI-literacy grant in the same portfolio cluster.

Position in the AI-good funding landscape

RNP is the first India-based and first South Asian funder in this corpus, closing a geographic gap that has previously been filled only on the recipient side (Internet Freedom Foundation is the corpus's anchor India organisation, though it is community-funded rather than philanthropy-funded). Structurally, RNP sits closest to the corpus's other mediated, non-topical funder — Yield Giving — in that neither vehicle has an AI-governance programme, both express their AI-good positions through public donor philosophy rather than through topical AI grantmaking, and both connect to the corpus primarily through intermediary regranters working in adjacent terrains (independent media, gender equity, civic society) that themselves resource AI-relevant organising. RNP differs from Yield Giving in scale (₹118 crore = roughly US $14 million in 2024-25 versus Yield Giving's billions), in geography (India-domiciled, India-focused versus US-domiciled and increasingly global), and in approach to the donor framework: RNP has an articulated theoretical frame in Samaaj-Sarkaar-Bazaar where Yield Giving's is operational rather than theoretical.

Compared to the cluster of large US private foundations — the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Open Society Foundations — RNP shares the trust-based, civil-society-anchored stance but operates at substantially smaller scale and without the cross-foundation pooled-fund participation that anchors much of US AI-good infrastructure (RNP is not a partner in the European AI & Society Fund, the Public Interest AI initiative, or any other pooled vehicle that appears in this corpus). The funded_orgs field is left empty pending direct grant-to-corpus-entity records; the load-bearing relationships are documented in body prose only, in the same shape used for other indirect-resourcing funders in this corpus.