Rohini Nilekani

Rohini Nilekani is an Indian philanthropist and writer, formerly a journalist with Bombay Magazine and Sunday, who has spent more than two decades funding and building organisations in water, education, environment and governance. Her stated approach places society, rather than the state or the market, at the centre of solving public problems, an argument set out in her 2022 anthology Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar.

In April 2001 she founded Arghyam with a personal endowment of Rs 150 crore, directing it towards groundwater, drinking water and sanitation and funding work across several Indian states. She chaired it until stepping down in September 2021. In 2004 she co-founded the non-profit children's publisher Pratham Books with Ashok Kamath and Rekha Menon, serving as its principal donor and as chairperson from January 2004 until the end of 2013, a period in which the house built its low-cost multilingual list. She has also chaired the Akshara Foundation, which works on primary education, and is a co-founder and director of the education technology non-profit EkStep. She sits on the board of trustees of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment.

Her giving has been substantial and largely unrestricted. In 2013 she sold Infosys shares worth about Rs 164 crore to fund philanthropic work, and she and her husband Nandan Nilekani gave Rs 50 crore to the National Council of Applied Economic Research that year. She has pledged Rs 50 crore to ATREE, joined Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Kris Gopalakrishnan in a Rs 51 crore gift to Science Gallery Bengaluru in 2022, and in 2023 gave Rs 100 crore to the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru for research and treatment. Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies now supports around eighty civil society organisations working on climate, gender, justice, governance, independent media and animal welfare. In 2017 she and her husband signed the Giving Pledge, committing half their wealth to philanthropy.

She was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017, named Best Grassroots Philanthropist at the Forbes India Leadership Awards in 2022, and has repeatedly topped the EdelGive Hurun India list of women philanthropists. She has served on the Audit Advisory Board of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the Eminent Persons Advisory Group of the Competition Commission of India.[3][4][5]