Vinod Khosla urges rich Indians to donate
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 06 October 2010, 20:26 IST
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New York: Indian-American Co-founder of Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla, who has recently named among Vanity Fair's 100 "most influential people of the information age", wants to challenge rich Indians to donate more to make India a super power, reports Vikas Bajaj from The New York Times. "It surprises me that in India there is not a tradition of large-scale giving and helping to solve social problems and set a social model," said Khosla. India's fast growth over the last decade has helped enrich many here - Forbes estimates that India now has 69 billionaires, up from seven in 2000 - but only a few have set up large charities, endowments or venture capital funds. Charitable activities and venture capital investing has been a mainstay for some Indian business families like the Tatas and for technology entrepreneurs like Azim Premji of Wipro. But many others have given little. A recent Bain & Company study estimated that Indians give much less as a percentage of the country's gross domestic product than Americans. Moreover, individual and corporate donations account for just 10 percent of the charitable giving in India, compared with 75 percent in the United States and 34 percent in Britain. The balance comes from the government and foreign organizations. Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist, aim to start a venture capital fund to invest in companies that focus on the poor in India, Africa and elsewhere by providing services like health, energy and education. By backing businesses that provide education loans or distribute solar panels in villages, he says, he wants to show that commercial entities can better help people in poverty than most nonprofit charitable organizations. Few years ago he has invested in SKS Microfinance, a lender to poor women in India. The recent success of SKS's initial public stock offering in Mumbai has made him richer by about $117 million - money he plans to plow back into other ventures that aim to fight poverty while also trying to turn a profit. Khosla is not alone in worrying about the state of Indian philanthropy. Bill Gates, the Microsoft Co-founder, who was in China last week with the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, said that he and Buffett might come to India as part of their campaign to get the very rich to give away half their wealth.

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