Corporate leaders for social impact

This article is authored by Anu Prasad, founder & CEO, India Leaders for Social Sector (ILSS).

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Ravi Trivedi sold the SaaS company he had co-founded and built across 150 countries, and turned down the next obvious chapter of his career. Five years later he was leading a 70-person technology team at a leading foundation building open-source digital public goods used by ASHA workers, scholarship systems that reach thousands of students, and that serve for effective governance. Today, he is a recognised expert and government advisor on AI for social good.

Corporate (Images: Shutterstock)

I share Ravi's story because it is one that today finds resonance with many others. Over the last few years, I have had a ringside view of senior corporate leaders who have felt genuinely rejuvenated by their engagement with the social impact space. And, the leaders willing to make this move today will shape what this sector looks like a decade from now.

India's development story is poised to be rewritten over the next decade. We have a median age of just 29 — one of the largest demographic dividends any country has had at this scale, a decade younger than China and two decades younger than Japan. But that window doesn't stay open forever. Within the next decade and a half, it begins to narrow.

Demography is not destiny. Institutions are. Whether this advantage becomes a genuine national dividend or a missed opportunity will come down to the strength of the institutions built during this window — and institutions are only ever as strong as the leadership running them.

This is exactly where India's social impact sector comes in. It operates at the intersection of policy and people, translating national ambition into change on the ground, often solving problems neither markets nor public systems can address alone. Organisations like Pratham have shaped national policy; Aravind Eye Care's cross-subsidy model is taught at Harvard; Akshaya Patra serves over two million meals a day as the government's largest nutrition partner. These serve as national infrastructure, built on what researchers have called a “radical frugality mindset.”

And the sector is enormous. There are over five lakh registered non-profits in India, employing an estimated 16 million people — a workforce nearly equivalent in scale to the public sector. Yet most of these organisations never grow to their full potential. Sixty percent operate on budgets under ₹1 crore, and only a handful ever reach the size of a mid-sized company. This isn't surprising once you realise that over 70% of non-profits struggle simply to resource their own institutional development.

It would be easy to read this as purely a capital story, and capital matters enormously. But scratch beneath the surface and you find something more specific: this is a leadership problem. Nearly half of India's NGOs struggle to recruit senior leaders, and just as many don't believe their own organisation is capable of developing effective successors. Leadership and institution-building remain among the least-funded areas of philanthropic investment. The sector's founder generation — the pioneers now in their fifties and sixties who built these institutions — is approaching a point where it needs successors, and there simply isn't a bench.

Leaders attract leaders. Talent attracts talent. Our country's development challenges need the best minds working on them, and right now, the social sector cannot recruit and retain that calibre of leadership at the pace the moment demands.

Nation-building can never be the limited ambit of one sector. The three levers of samaaj, sarkaar, and bazaar — society, government and markets — have to move together for a Viksit Bharat 2047. Corporate India is already a key stakeholder here. As one of the only countries with legally mandated corporate giving, India has established a real bridge between corporate leadership and social impact, and CSR funding has become the sector's second-largest funding source, ahead of foreign giving.

There are three established pathways for this engagement today. You can fund it — through CSR and strategic philanthropy. You can give time — through employee volunteering and mentorship programmes that bring operational rigour into organisations that need it most. And you can serve on non-profit boards, offering strategic guidance as a critical friend — close enough to govern meaningfully, careful not to run a mission-led organisation like your last quarterly business review.

A growing cohort, like Ravi, are going further for a full-time role in social impact. If you are one of them, a few things are worth keeping in mind. Purpose and culture, not compensation, are what sustain professionals through this transition. Rigid job descriptions rarely survive contact with a sector where priorities shift and role fluidity is the norm. Ownership matters more here, not less — successful leaders take responsibility not just for strategy but for execution, often with fewer support structures than they had in the corporate world. And impact is rarely immediate; the leaders who thrive are the ones who bring patience for long-horizon outcomes and stay engaged well past their first year.

There is a critical need to invest in leaders who can, in turn, build organisations that come together to strengthen the ecosystem of social impact as a genuine pillar of nation-building. We need leaders who deeply understand that this is not charity work and it is not a career sacrifice, and are willing to make a strategic, values-aligned choice. The opportunity to shape the social impact sector is one of the most consequential ways Indian citizens can shape the country they want India to become.

Ravi didn't have a playbook when he left the company he'd spent a decade building across 150 countries. His transition was prompted by an inner shift–a growing conviction–that his expertise could be leveraged to create impact at a larger scale and in service of the country. That is the leap this sector now needs, multiplied many times over.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Anu Prasad, founder & CEO, India Leaders for Social Sector (ILSS).