
No act of giving is too small
Meena and I were married in 1984, and chose not to have children for our own reasons. Mine were that India needed fewer children and not more!
We are a Double Income No Kid family and had always thought that after us, we would leave our savings and assets largely to a charity; assuming that increasing longevity and decreasing interest rates would allow us to leave anything behind at all! In any case, our will is largely drawn along those lines.
Around this time, I came across the Living My Promise initiative by Girish. The initiative was trying to enlist ordinary people who were willing to leave at least half their wealth for charity. Their objective resonated with us.
While we often associate giving with Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Azim Premji or Shiv Nadar, and such others, there is no reason why giving should not become a a part of the value systems of ordinary professionals, who have created some wealth, howsoever modest, beyond their lifetime requirements. And so, we signed up with Living my Promise, which is more a sharing of a genuine intent to give than an actual act of giving immediately to charity or other social causes.
But the intent to give is the easy part. Even the writing of a will is hardly a challenge. Any practising lawyer can help draft a will for a fee. The real challenge is in the execution of wills, especially for those who may have no children, or whose children, nephews and nieces — living overseas with lives of their own — may not have the time or the inclination to spend time executing a complex will of old and deceased relatives.
The challenges in executing a will in the circumstances, especially in our country, are many. Most of our friends or relatives whom we can entrust the execution of our wills to, may be our own age. Even if they are 10-15 years younger, they are bound to be fairly ageing themselves. Younger family may be busy with their own commitments.
Can the execution of the will be entrusted to a law firm? In India, few lawyers or even wealth managers offer such a service. The system hasn’t been too friendly either. We do not even have a good market for reverse-mortgages. Our bureaucracy is complex. Even shifting a bank account of a deceased is an uphill task, even for the bona fide survivors. But these things are nowhere in the horizon.
A challenge on another front is to whom to give? Today’s institutions/NGOs even if they are extremely well-governed now, may not be around or equally functioning two decades from now.
India needs to generate as much wealth as it can from such givers and needs to create a conducive environment for giving. May be creating a well-governed division of SBI or LIC (not that these are my idea of paragons of efficiency) for the execution of wills could undertake the challenge?
V Raghunathan is an academic, corporate executive, author and columnist, and a #LivingMyPromise signatory
The views expressed are personal

Espionage to smuggling, scandals spice up every poll in Kerala
- controversies and scandals were part of the state polity in the last three decades and mushrooming digital media also played its part in amplifying them, said a political observer.

Why 2021 political rhetoric is no match for 1962 fighting in Ladakh
- India and China came close to war last year after Indian army commanders atop Rezang La-Rechin La ridge threatened to fire at the advancing PLA tank regiment that sought to dislodge the Indian troopers.

J&K delimitation: Go by the population rule

Congress needs to worry more about rebels than opponents in Puducherry

Behind PM Modi’s stinging critique of the IAS, a Jan meeting holds the clue
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi had given bureaucrats an earful at a January meeting of the country's top officials and underlined the price that India paid for their slow pace.
_1612854353614_1612854362797_1613290108668.png)
Salute to Ghulam Nabi Azad underlined PM Modi’s personal ties with rivals
- Leaders from the Congress and other Opposition parties have many stories to show that the Prime Minister has maintained personal rapport with leaders cutting across political boundaries.

Not just climate change, Chamoli disaster was human-induced

Perception is the truth in information warfare over farm laws
- The Chinese were among the first to recognise the role of information warfare to weaken the adversary from within

A new confidence about India reflects in a bold Budget 2021

The life and times of a Patna intellectual

Jaishankar yellow-cards China for violating pacts, spells out the India way
- S Jaishankar’s speech on India-China ties signals India’s determination to continue to stand up to Xi Jinping’s expansionist plans for Asia as an equal and makes it clear that nothing that Beijing does against India will be overlooked, or allowed to go unpunished.

Jack Ma story: China’s deep strategic ambition

Republic Day raid was pre-meditated, planned well in advance

How unruly farmers tried to embarrass India on Republic Day
