What Would Gandhi Do if He Were Here Today?
By Desh Deshpande
Desh Deshpande delivered the keynote address at the October 2025 Philanthropy Summit organized by Indiaspora and the India Philanthropy Alliance. Below is an adaptation of his remarks in the form of an article. A recording of the full talk is available here.
Seventy-five years ago, it was completely unimaginable — that so many talented, successful people would come together in Silicon Valley of all places to seriously think about how everyone in India can do well. That’s remarkable. And I believe that wherever the mind goes, the action follows. So the very fact that we’re gathered here gives me real confidence that new ideas and new actions will come out of it.
But Gandhi would also have concerns. And I think those concerns would point directly at the work all of us in this room are trying to do.
Gandhi’s Compass
Gandhi’s principles are just as valid today as they were in his time. He believed in truth — not as a slogan, but as a way of operating. He believed in compassion, which is really at the foundation of everything that anyone in this room is all about. Without compassion, you really can’t do any good. And he believed in trusteeship, which is a concept I find myself coming back to again and again.
Trusteeship means this: sometimes people get lucky and make a little bit more money than they need. But that money is not really theirs. They are trustees of that wealth, trustees of the talent, trustees of the time that they have. The only question is how to put it to good use.
And finally, there is seva — selfless service. Whether you are in politics, nonprofits, business, or spirituality, it all comes down to the same question: how do you think about others instead of constantly thinking about yourself?
When Gandhi passed away in 1948, India had 350 million people, a life expectancy of 35 years, a per capita income of about $50, and a literacy rate of around 20%. If he were here today, looking at 1.4 billion people, a life expectancy of 70, per capita income of $3,000, and a literacy rate of 75% — he’d say, that’s pretty good. Free market capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. That deserves genuine credit.
But he would also be very concerned. The averages look good, but the divide between the haves and the have-nots is widening. Technology — AI and everything else — brings extraordinary promise, but the ethical issues surrounding it, the polarization it enables, the violence it amplifies: that would trouble him deeply.
Two Broken Systems
Gandhi would look at the two main ways we try to do good in the world — the for-profit sector and the nonprofit sector — and he would say: both are broken, but in complementary ways.
The for-profit world has execution excellence. Every Silicon Valley entrepreneur here knows how this works. You start with some crazy idea, and within two or three years, you have to find a sweet spot where someone is actually willing to pay for it. That feedback loop from the customer back to the idea is an incredibly powerful tool. And it never stops — you have to keep competing, keep improving. You have a restaurant, you serve bad masala dosa for two days, and you’re out of business. That’s execution excellence. It’s why capitalism has lifted so many people out of poverty.
But in that intense competition to keep up with the top line and the bottom line, businesses lose compassion. The human dimension gets optimized away.
The nonprofit world has the opposite problem. You cannot start a nonprofit without caring deeply about something — compassion is baked in from day one. But the feedback loop is broken. In a business, the customer pays, and if you fail to serve them, they walk away. In a nonprofit, the donors hold the purse strings, not the beneficiaries. You can always find a few people to give you a fantastic video. That’s not a big deal. So the pressure to actually perform — to execute — is simply not there.
The result? India has about three million nonprofits. The United States has about two million nonprofits. In India, fewer than twenty of them have a budget of more than Rs. 50 crores. In the U.S., fewer than two hundred have budgets over $50 million. Once you start a nonprofit, it doesn’t ever die. If you did a hundred things this year and can only do one next year, that’s fine — you just do one. There are no mergers, no acquisitions, no bankruptcy. It’s just a land of the living dead. A for-profit company without execution excellence is dead. A nonprofit without is totally useless. But a nonprofit, even without compassion, doesn’t usually go away.
The Gandhian Prescription
So what would Gandhi prescribe? It’s actually quite elegant. Inject compassion into the for-profit world. And bring execution excellence to the nonprofit world. Neither is sufficient alone. Together, they describe what effective philanthropy actually looks like.
This is also where the people in the philanthropy sector have a very specific role to play. All of you who have built highly competitive businesses, you know what execution excellence means — you’ve lived it. If you can team up with people who have compassion for helping others, I think you can contribute tremendously to making that happen.
And this connects back to trusteeship. Gandhi always said trusteeship, not charity. When you help other people, there has to be dignity to it. It’s not really money you’re giving away — you’re trying to empower livelihood and dignity. Any nonprofit that makes people more and more dependent on it is not doing the right thing.
Three Things Anyone Can Give
When people ask me how to get started, I tell them: there are only three things any of us can give. Money. Time. And expertise — your talent, your knowledge, your experience. A lot of people in this room have done startups. You understand how hard it is. Well, doing a nonprofit is ten times as hard. So I would say: start budgeting all three, to whatever extent you can. It can be as small as you like. But start now. Start tomorrow.
Whatever little you can give, you should just give it away every year. And it will take a long time before you actually learn how to do it. What you don’t want to do — and I’ve seen this happen — is wait until a liquidity event, then suddenly deploy a large sum, thinking it will solve the problem quickly. In nonprofits, problems don’t go away that quickly. And then those people become bitter. And once they become bitter and get burnt, they’re useless to themselves and useless to the rest of the world. Inch slowly and carefully into that sector so that you learn how to do it — and you enjoy it.
Co-Create, Don’t Just Deliver
There is one more idea I want to leave you with, and I think it’s the most important one for those of us working on problems at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
There is no way you can build a company if you don’t understand your customers. And none of us sitting in a room like this — with the standard of living we all enjoy — can ever truly understand how a person on a dollar a day lives. That’s just not possible. So you have to co-create the solution with them. You have to immerse yourself in that environment. You have to build the capacity within that community to come up with the right answers.
What I’ve found is that people at the very bottom of the pyramid don’t need the most earth-shattering technology. They need the most relevant technology. And the way you figure out what’s relevant is by being there. Start with the simplest possible intervention. Then keep perfecting it — making it better, cheaper, faster, every year, just like you would in a business. If you can help even one-third of the people graduating from villages in India, that’s millions and millions of lives.
We run our Sandbox program in about 75 colleges across India now, and increasingly the colleges themselves are stepping up to run it. Over the next five to ten years, I hope it becomes part of the standard curriculum, and we don’t have to do it anymore. That’s the goal. Every nonprofit exists to bridge the gap between the way things should be and the way they are. And once you bridge that gap — once governments and other partners embrace the solution — you want to happily give it away. You don’t want the market share. You don’t want the burden. You just want to help those people.
Gandhi Would Be Smiling
Gandhi was not anti-technology. He was pro-human. And I think that’s the right frame for everything we’re trying to do. Use technology to heal, not to harm. Build economies that can sustain themselves — self-reliance is becoming more important than ever. Build philanthropy that uplifts everyone, not just a few. And embrace trusteeship and service.
In our own way, my wife Jaishree and I have been trying to practice seva as much as we can — using entrepreneurship as the platform. E for All in the U.S. is now supporting about 2,100 companies at the bottom 20% of the income distribution, and we’re working to scale that to 50,000. The Sandbox in Hubli and Nizamabad, our university entrepreneurship programs across the U.S., Canada, and India — these are all attempts to live out the same principle.
Gandhi’s principles were just as valid today as they were 75 years ago. If we can inject compassion into the for-profit world, bring execution excellence to the nonprofit world, and approach this work with the patience and humility of true trustees — I think Gandhi will be smiling.