Through an annual summit and special events/seminars in the year, the members have a continuous opportunity to learn and interact with experienced philanthropists, dynamic social entrepreneurs and leading policy makers in the field.  The Club helps connect donors to social issues, to effective giving strategies, and to other like-minded philanthropists.

Mr. Azim Premji, Chairman, Wipro

Mr. Azim Premji delivered his keynote address through video conferencing from Bangalore. He talked about his initiation into the concept of giving and how he had grown with it. “People like me who have amassed wealth have enormous responsibility to do something. It is also essential to commit time and not just money. Personal leadership on the field is critical and cannot be reduced ”,  shared Mr. Premji. He currently spends 15% of his time on philanthropy. “I will increase this as we scale up”, says Mr. Premji.  He shared his decade long learnings from working in the sector with the members:

1. Start small and commit some time and not only money. It is very critical to give personal leadership. Many people can contribute money, but what really makes a difference is the leadership in using that money.
2. Everyone must contribute. More successful must contribute more. A society needs all the contribution which we can really mobilize and you must see that this is our government and is for our people. You cannot be pointing fingers to the government all the time.
3. In the social sector you must have tenacity and you must have patience. The tenacity has to be unending and the tolerance for frustration has to be unending.
4. Don’t court publicity if you want to be effective. Give the publicity, give the attention, and give the glory to your partners. If you can further their commitments, if you can further their ambitions to the work you do you have them on your side, having them on your side makes job so much easier. Do not seek publicity. You get far more value out if it, if you do not seek it (publicity).
5. Social issues are more complex. Transformation and change is complex. You have to do the measurement on the ongoing basis to be able to constantly recycle your learning to be able to improve what you are doing or change what you are doing going forward.
6. You cannot adapt everything that you learn in business to the social context. Parameters are different, time-scales are different. The hurdles the degree of sympathy, empathy, and feeling is different.

Mr. Stan Thekaekara

Stan Thekaekara first became involved in social activism through a national student movement in India. He went on to live in a tribal village in Bihar for a number of years. Subsequently he founded a number of grassroots NGOs in various parts of India. In 1986 he and his wife Mari co-founded ACCORD, and have spent the past 20 years mobilising the adivasis of the Nilgiri Hills of Tamil Nadu in South India to fight for their social, political and human rights. Adivasis are an indigenous people outside the Hindu caste system and represent about six per cent of the Indian population.He currently works as the Director of JUST CHANGE, which seeks to create a new model of fair trade. He has also worked as a consultant and trainer on community organisation, group dynamics, leadership and other development issues, is the first trustee of Oxfam GB from a developing country and a Visting Fellow at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School, Oxford University.

Mr. Indrajit Gupta

Indrajit Gupta, 43, is the Editor of Network18’s premium business magazine, which was launched in May 2009 in alliance with Forbes. Within a short span, Forbes India has emerged as the most influential business magazine in the market and set new benchmarks in journalism. Gupta has been able to assemble some of the finest editors, writers, designers and photographers in the business and also create a newsroom culture that rewards initiative and a deep passion for the craft of journalism.

Before joining the group, he was the Resident Editor of the flagship edition of The Economic Times in Mumbai. He served as National Business Editor at The Times of India during the big newspaper war in Mumbai in 2005. In 1994, he switched from a career in advertising at HTA (now JWT) to join Business Standard, where he edited The Strategist, a prestigious management and marketing weekly as its Deputy Features Editor. He then joined Businessworld as part of its leadership team and played a key role in transforming BW into the country’s leading business magazine.

Indrajit was nominated for the British Chevening Fellowship for Print Journalists awarded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1999. He also won the Polestar Foundation Award for the Best in-depth feature Story of the Year last year.

He is an alumnus of the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai and also holds a B.Com (Honours) degree from St Xavier’s College, Calcutta.

Dr. Abhijit Banerjee

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan and remains one of the directors of the lab. In 2009 J-PAL won the BBVA Foundation “Frontier of Knowledge” award in the development cooperation category. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. J-PAL received the inaugural BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award for world-class research, and Professor Banerjee received the Infosys Prize 2009 in Social Sciences and Economics. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory.

He is the author of three books including Poor Economics (www.pooreconomics.com), as well as a large number of articles, and is the editor of a fourth book. He finished his first documentary film, “The Name of the Disease” in 2006.

]]> http://firstgiversclub.giveindia.org/2011/07/19/abhijit-banerjee/feed/ 0 giveindia2000 Abhijit Banerjee http://firstgiversclub.giveindia.org/2011/07/01/rakesh-jhunjhunwala/ http://firstgiversclub.giveindia.org/2011/07/01/rakesh-jhunjhunwala/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 04:47:17 +0000 First Givers Club http://firstgiversclub.giveindia.org/?p=1140 Continue reading →]]>

Mr. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala

Rakesh Jhunjhunwala is an Indian Chartered Accountant by qualification but an investor / trader by profession. In 2010, Forbes rated him India’s 51st and the world’s #1062 richest man with wealth of $1.0 billion.He is a famous equity investor in India and manages his own portfolio as a partner in his asset management firm, Rare Enterprises. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala was described in a magazine as the “pin-up boy of the current bull run” and by another as “Pied Piper of Indian bourses”. He is tagged by the media as “India’s Warren Buffett”. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala stays at Malabar Hill and works from his office at Nariman Point in South Mumbai. He regularly appears on various business channels on television to share his ideas and opinions on the Indian markets. He is well known among the investing circles as ‘Rocky’ and among his close associates as ‘Bhaiyya’. He considers Mr Radhakrishnan Damani as his guru (mentor) and best friend.

Mr. Ramji Raghavan

Ramji Raghavan is Founder and Chairman of Agastya International Foundation, the world’s largest mobile hands-on science education program for disadvantaged children and rural teachers. As Chairman of Agastya, Mr. Raghavan leads a grassroots initiative to support and transform education in India. Agastya has reached almost four million children and 150,000 teachers in rural India.

Mr. Raghavan was a member of the Prime Minister’s National Knowledge Commission and in 2009 was elected Senior Fellow by Ashoka. He has written articles on education for Indian and foreign journals and spoken in India, the UK, the US, and China.

Before Agastya, Mr. Raghavan served as a senior executive in organizations around the world. He left a career in banking and finance in London to found Agastya.

Mr. Raghavan has an MBA from London Business School, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Development Studies from The Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands, a Diploma in Accounting from City of London Polytechnic, and a B.A. in Economics from Delhi University.

Dr. Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT and a founder and director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research network specializing in randomized evaluations of social programs, which won the BBVA Foundation “Frontier of Knowledge” award in the development cooperation category. Duflo is an NBER Research Associate, serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and is Director of the Center of Economic Policy Research’s development economics program. Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health and policy evaluation.

Duflo completed her undergraduate studies at L’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1994, received a master’s degree from DELTA in Paris in 1995, and completed a PhD in Economics at MIT in 1999. Upon completing her MIT PhD she was appointed assistant professor of economics at MIT, and has been at MIT ever since, aside from being on leave to Princeton University in 2001-2002. 

Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes including the John Bates Clark Medal (2010), a MacArthur Fellowship (2009), the American Economic Association’s Elaine Bennett Prize for Research (2003), the  ”Best French Young Economist Prize” (Le Monde/Cercle des economistes, 2005), the Médaille de l’Innovation (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 2005), and the Prix Luc Durand-Reville (Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 2008). In 2008-2009 she was the inaugural holder of the international chair “Knowledge Against Poverty” at the College de France. 

After being a co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics, she currently serves as the founding editor of the AEJ: Applied Economics.

Mr. Azim Premji

Azim Premji has led Wipro since 1966. Then a USD 2 million hydrogenated cooking fat company, Wipro Limited is today a USD 5 billion revenue IT, BPO and R&D Services organization with presence in over 50 countries.

Business Week listed him amongst the top 30 entrepreneurs in world history (July 2007), and featured him on their cover with the sobriquet ’India’s Tech King’ (October 2003). Financial Times included him in the global list of 25 people who are “dramatically reshaping the way people live, work or think” and “have done most to bring about significant and lasting social, political or cultural changes” (October 2005, November 2004). Time listed him as one amongst the 100 most influential people in the world (April 2004). He was named by Fortune as one of the 25 most powerful business leaders outside the US (August 20030, Forbes listed him as one of ten people globally, who have the most “power to effect change” (March 2003). He was adjudged the Business Leader of the Year 2004 by the Economic Times.

In 2005, he became the first Indian recipient of the Faraday Medal. The Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee and the Manipal Academy of Higher Education have both conferred honorary doctorates on him, while XLRI, Jamshedpur has conferred the Sir Jehangir Ghandy Medal for Industrial and Social Peace. In 2000, the Visvesvaraya Technological University conferred the Sir M. Visvesvaraya Memorial Award on him and the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers conferred on him its highest honor – the Honorary Fellowship. He is a non-executive Director on the Board of the Reserve Bank of India. He is also a member of the Prime Minister’s Committee for Trade and Industry in India. In January 2005, The Government of India conferred upon him the Padma Bhushana, one of the highest civilian awards in the country.

In the year 2001, Premji established the Azim Premji Foundation, a not-for-profit organization with a vision to significantly contribute to quality primary education for every child, in order to build a just, equitable and humane society. The financial resources to this foundation have been personally contributed by Premji. The current programs of the Azim Premji Foundation engage 2.5 million children in more than 17,000 schools across India. In October 2006, the Foundation was recognized as the Corporate Citizen of the year by the Economic Times.

Azim Premji is a graduate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, USA.