Q: Your journey from the corporate sector to development work began 25 years ago, building an organisation for children with developmental disabilities. How has this journey shaped your approach to leadership, impact and institution-building—and your understanding of creating lasting, systems-level change?
That lesson shaped how I think about building institutions. An organisation needs years of care, not a one-time setup. I often think of Gandhi’s idea of trusteeship — you hold something for a larger purpose, not as your own. That idea has guided every institution I have built or led since.
Impact looks simple to begin with: one child, one family, visible progress. It gets harder to see at scale. Numbers satisfy a board or a funder, but they don’t tell you if a life has actually improved. The real challenge over these years has been to ensure that you don’t lose sight of the “grain” for the scale, even as you work at the level of organization strategy, policy and government partnerships.
Today, through The Ability Network, we are trying to build something that works at a national scale but still keeps that early instinct alive — paying attention to the person – every one of them – and not just keeping count.
Q: Having spent more than a decade at Tech Mahindra Foundation, including conceptualising SMART and subsequently leading the Foundation, how do you think corporate CSR in India has evolved in the past decade—and what is the next transition CSR needs to make if it is to move from funding programmes to enabling sustainable impact?
COVID was another turning point. It forced a collective and uncomfortable realisation: no single organisation, however well-funded, can solve a problem alone. Collaboration became the word everyone used after that. But intent has moved faster than practice — most of us still talk about collaboration more than we build it. And systems change simply does not happen without it. You cannot shift a system by working in isolation.
The next transition for CSR has to move past counting outputs and celebrating success stories. It means looking at problems from the ground up, not from a boardroom. It means being far more strategic and focused about what we choose to do, instead of spreading thin across many good ideas. And it means treating grassroots wisdom as a source of solutions, not just a site for implementing them.
That, to me, is the real shift ahead — from funding programmes to building the judgment and the relationships that let impact hold on its own.
Q: TMF has made disability and inclusion an important part of its portfolio. Could you tell us more about The Ability Network (TAN)—its purpose and the thinking behind its recent launch in Japan—and how it seeks to address the persistent gap in access to credible information and support for people with disabilities (PwD), Disability support organisations (NGOs/CSOs) and their caregivers?
TAN began as a simple idea: build an aggregator platform. We started by onboarding solution providers, and we will soon open it up to solution seekers too, supported by an AI chatbot we recently introduced. TAN is also more than a discovery platform — we are already piloting ground-level work. In Basti district in Uttar Pradesh, for instance, a two-person team from the Foundation is working with the district administration to help it deliver better services to persons with disabilities.
Collaboration sits at the centre of all this. TAN grows by bringing together what other organisations already do well, rather than building everything ourselves. The Japan launch happened in that same spirit, almost by chance. Tomo-san from The Elements, a Tokyo-based organisation, saw what we were building and wanted to create a version of TAN for persons with disabilities in Japan. Given how collaborative our approach already was, joining hands with them was a natural next step.
What this opens up excites me. Many assistive technology solutions developed in Japan are simply not available in India, and I hope the Japanese chapter of TAN can help bring some of them here, and carry some of what exists in India to Japan. This could be the first of several such country partnerships — we are also working closely with the Zero Project, which shares much of this thinking.
Q: TAN is evolving from an information platform into a broader ecosystem, with verification and now AI-powered discovery through TANGENT. As technology becomes the interface between people and support services, how do you ensure that speed and scale do not come at the cost of trust, accuracy and human judgement?
To do this, we have a dedicated team at Tech Mahindra Foundation that reviews every application to join the platform. This is not a paperwork check — it includes direct conversations with the people running each organisation, so we know the work is genuine before we let anyone onboard.
As TAN grows and opens up to end users, we will add a second layer of trust: feedback from the people who actually use these services. Their experience with each solution provider will become an ongoing check, alongside our own verification, rather than a one-time gate.
That is really our approach to the question you’re raising — let technology like TANGENT handle speed and discovery, but keep human judgement firmly in charge of trust. The two need to work together, not compete.
Q: The evolution of TAN-Japan is an interesting example of an Indian social-innovation model finding relevance in another ecosystem. What have you learned from taking the model across borders, and what opportunities do you see for deeper India–Japan collaboration in disability inclusion, assistive technology and inclusive innovation ?
Where I do see opportunity is in the exchange itself — assistive technology that exists in Japan but hasn’t reached India, and possibly some Indian approaches that could be useful there too. That, along with our work with the Zero Project, gives me confidence there is a lot ahead of us. But this will take time to evolve, and I would rather let the model prove itself than speak ahead of the work.
Q: Assistive technology often faces a difficult journey from innovation to actual adoption—through affordability, awareness, verification, distribution and financing. Where do you believe CSR can play its most catalytic role in closing this gap, without becoming a substitute for a sustainable market?
The second role comes later, at the point of use — helping subsidise the cost for the end user, since many people who need these solutions simply cannot afford the full market price on their own.
What CSR should be careful about is knowing when to step back. Its job is to get a good solution to the point where it can stand on its own — through better pricing, awareness or distribution — not to keep propping it up indefinitely. If CSR support never ends, it usually means the market around that solution was never really built.
Q: TMF is organising the prestigious Zero Conference in Mumbai inviting global champions and leaders of Inclusion and Technology (AT). What message you would like to give to our readers and where do you see India becoming AT leader and Resource hub for the Global South?
My message to fast-track our search for solutions is this: we need to stay open to ideas that haven’t been tried before. Today’s emerging technology, AI in particular, lets us launch, scale and adopt new solutions faster than at any point in history. We must use that advantage — not just for ourselves, but for those who don’t have the same access we do. This takes real dedication and focus, and it’s why TMF has chosen to put its energy fully behind this purpose.
India is uniquely placed to become a resource hub for the Global South. Our scale alone makes us a market unlike any other for AT innovators. Many of the challenges across the Global South look similar, and with India’s strong civil society and start-up ecosystem, we are well positioned to help create, distribute and scale assistive technologies — for the subcontinent, and well beyond it.
Q: With your long leadership role, in the development sector, and now working at the intersection of corporate CSR, disability inclusion, technology and global collaboration, what is the one systemic change you would most like to see in India by 2047 for Viksit Bharat and what would convince you that we have genuinely achieved it ?
The first is a complete overhaul of public infrastructure to meet accessibility norms. A recent Times of India article pointed out how difficult something as basic as a commute on public transport still is for a person with a disability in Delhi, our own capital. This has to change, and it has to be built in from the design stage, not added on later.
The second, and perhaps harder, change is a shift in mindset — in how we, as a society, see the role persons with disabilities can play in building a better world. Our current benchmark on this is quite low, and raising it will take sustained effort across education, employment and everywhere in between.
I will know we’ve truly arrived at Viksit Bharat when persons with disabilities are visibly represented across public life, not sidelined from any sphere of development. Until that happens, the aspiration remains unfinished.
