Back to resources

Charge of the compassionate brigade

Civil Society | Jan 26, 2012

Modern society is classified into different segments. First you have the state, as represented by elected officials and lawmakers, politicians, ministers, bureaucrats and other organs of the state. Then there are the commercial bodies — companies, chambers of commerce and other market players.
The third segment (there is a fourth, the underworld and the mafia, but let’s not talk about it) is civil society, comprising “the arena, outside of the family, the state, and the market where people associate to advance common interests,” a definition coined by Civicus, the World Alliance for Citizen Participation.

View PDF

More like this

Water  |  Civil Society

Insider-Outsider-Insider

Rohini Nilekani moderates a discussion on delivering large-scale transformational programs, impact on the ground, and the implementation of such programmes in a large and diverse country like India. The discussion draws on the learnings from the Swachh Bharat Mission, the world’s largest successful behaviour change programme, which drew over 55 crore rural Indians out of […]
Apr 8, 2021 |

Education  |  Civil Society

Childhood Interrupted

This is an edited version of BIC Streams session titled ‘Childhood Interrupted’, a discussion that looks at the impact of the pandemic on children, especially between ages 8 to 18. Hosted by Rohini Nilekani, the participants included Dr. Shekhar Seshadri, professor of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NIMHANS; Kavita Gupta, founder of […]
Sep 17, 2020 |

Civil Society  |  Active Citizenship  |  Strategic Philanthropy  |  Others

Rohini Nilekani on why India’s wealthy need to do more to boost civil society

At a time when the government and the marketplace have assumed enormous power over our lives and choices, Rohini Nilekani argues that now is the time for civil societies to be boosted, and that India’s wealth creators need to do more about it. In this episode, she joins host Sandip Roy to discuss her latest […]
Sep 4, 2022 |

Water  |  Civil Society

IIHS-UC Berkeley Conference | Building Urban Infrastructure in India

The “urban” economy plays an increasingly vital role in India’s economic development. The joint two day conference hosted by IIHS and the University of California, Berkeley on 26th and 27th March, 2013, brought together leading scholars from India and globally to discuss the many critical questions relating to the effective and equitable functioning of the […]
Mar 26, 2013 |