Public-private philanthrophy

There was a time when Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, used to visit India just to promote his company's interests, with chief ministers competing to roll out the red carpet for him. The world's second richest man hasn't stopped visiting, but he and his wife now share the dais with chief ministers mainly as philanthropists. Their Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has since 2003 invested some $ 1.2 billion in India, much of it in public health programmes focusing on HIV prevention, immunisation and maternal, neonatal and child care. The Foundation, only last week, tied up with the Serum Institute of India Ltd for developing an injectable polio vaccine as an effective alternative to oral drops, having earlier funded the same firm and Bharat Biotech International to conduct trials for pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines. Even Ranbaxy's recently launched anti-malarial drug, ‘Synriam', was born out of a joint research programme with Medicines for Malaria Ventures, a Swiss not-for-profit largely funded by the Gates Foundation.

What is striking about the work by the likes of Gates Foundation is that they deal with areas traditionally reserved for governments, involving socially valuable output, and more significantly, yielding no financial returns for the private donor. There would, perhaps, have been no Green Revolution at all in India without the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter's support to Dr Norman Borlaug for developing new varieties of wheat was, however, by no means motivated by money, just as Mr Gates is unlikely to ever turn vaccines into a business. These represent purely individual philanthropic initiatives, independent of the companies or ‘core' businesses of the philanthropists concerned. Moreover, the very fields in which their charities are involved – public health or basic farm research – makes them work closely with governments. The Gates Foundation's latest project, for instance, is to work with the Rural Development Ministry and the Railways for designing a toilet that is low on maintenance and light on water use, to address the problem of open defecation — a major cause of several communicable diseases in India.

This kind of philanthropy, where businessmen ‘give' for production of public goods in collaboration with government agencies, is quite rare in India. Not that it is unknown. Take the Tatas, who provided the seed money to start two great institutions: The Indian Institute of Science and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. But surely with the number of Forbes billionaires that we have today – there are a dozen Indians among the world's 200 richest people – much more can be done. There are many areas from public health and sanitation to elementary education, which only the government can ultimately provide on a mass scale. But that should still not stop it from creating a ‘market' for wealthy individuals to chip in with their financial and managerial resources in such projects delivering only high ‘social' returns. A not-for-profit public private partnership, if you like. The donors, in this case, can even be given a say in how and on which scheme their money is spent.

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