Today, I am visiting the Jain Samaj and the Maheshwari Samaj in Rajasthan. This completes my excel of fifty top non profits operating in India.
Interestingly the list does not include either the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foubdation, the Dell Foundation or even the Rockfellor foundation. These are small, insignificant and probably not even “non profits”. Most have had their FCRA cancelled by the govt and some are not even operational.
So the non-profit space is really an Indian phenomena. And it is not dominated by corporates. Or by CSR. It is dominated by the community groups.
The two states of Gujarat and Rajasthan are places of origin for a small community, colloquially referred to as “ Banias”. In practice this community comprises of Jain’s and Hindu Vaishnavs. The Marwaris come from Marwar and comprise of Maheshwari’s, Agarwal’s and also jains.
Personified by corporate groups like the Birlas, stock market successes – like Dmart and Shree Cement – and ibankers like Anand Rathi – the Maheshwari’s are a small community with a population of less than 3 million. Almost a rounding off error in a country with close to 1500 million people. Yet they seem to have an almost complete grip on the entire commodity ecosystem – be it cement or polyester or the arthi system for sourcing of agricultural produce. Our distinguished fellow R.L. Kabra , an eminent chartered accountant from mumbai has been a leading figure and multiple term President of the Maheshwari Samaj. He was the first to become a practising Chartered Accountant in the late sixties – and thanks to his pioneering efforts and remarkable PR skills, Maheshwari’s now dominate the accountancy profession in India.
The Jain Samaj comprises of almost double the population of the Maheshwari’s or around 6 million (say 1.2 million families). The Jain’s are a religion by themselves and are broadly divided into Oswal Jain’s and Digambar Jain’s. Amit Shah for example is an Oswal Jain. Here it is not the corporates but the Samaj which builds and manages the temples. I visited one being built in Jaipur with a budget of rs 1200 crores. In Rajasthan they have over 1000 temples and globally the jain temples probably have a gross block of rs 100,000 crores. Offshoots from the jain samaj include the Rs 50,000 crores JITO fund, Jaina Globak and players like Sanjay Mehta of 100x VC. Today I am with Subhash Jain the President of the Jain Samaj in their “corporate office like” headquarter in Jaipur and Vinod Jain, their executive board member. Earlier in the day I visited the Bahetis of the Maheshwari Samaj on a street aptly named Baheti Marg/
We discussed the possibility of both the Samaj’s working together for population scale impact alongside MegaFund.in with a small initial committed corpus of Rs 5,000 cr by each of the Samaj’s. With a path to 25,000 cr in ten years.