The Hindu Business Line : Will charities overtake govts?

It is possible too, that, in due course, the resources and programmes of private charities will overwhelm Governments' budgets. The former will function with greater efficiency and accountability for results. After all, who's in charge in the Gates foundation?

Suddenly it's fashionable. Giving away money, that is. It all started with George Soros, the billionaire investor - who made his billions in the crash of sterling post its exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) - setting up a foundation for charity and good causes in East Europe, after the collapse of Communism in that part of the world.

(Besides a genuine desire to help the region from which his forefathers came - Soros is a Hungarian Jew - there might have been just that tinge of remorse on his part at the obscene profits from currency speculation).

Then it was the turn of Bill Gates. His Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports healthcare and education programmes in the third world. It has a corpus of several billion dollars. Read that as had.

For, it has now jumped several fold with Warren Buffett, one of the world's richest men, deciding to gift as much as two-thirds of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. That is $30 billion - or about Rs 1,40,000 crore at current exchange rates - a staggering amount by any stretch of imagination. (Buffett's heirs will not be exactly poor after the donation; they will still be left with $7-8 billion to play around with).

It is more than likely that Buffett and Gates are the forerunners of a trend. Our own Mr N.R. Narayanamurthy, the founder of Infosys, has hinted as much in a recent interview, in which he says the best thing to do with a massive fortune is to give it away.

Worthy causes

The pressure is now on charitable foundations to spend their large amounts of money on the worthy causes for which they have been given.

That can hardly be done overnight. There simply aren't enough readymade or well-thought projects to absorb the funds.

Charity spending (on such a huge scale) entails an organisation structure, budgeting, performance measures and evaluation from corporate to field levels. Tailor-made for management consultants? The head of the Gates foundation in India is believed to be an ex-McKinsey employee.

New career option

With such high-powered players, charity management could even become the preferred career option in top business schools. Time to say, `move over McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, welcome Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation'?

Why, none other than Bill Gates himself, who has recently divested his Microsoft responsibilities to devote himself to the foundation. With his genius at their disposal, the poor of the world need ask for nothing more.

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