Back to resources

Uncommon Ground – Bringing The State Back In

Uncommon Ground | Mar 30, 2009

There are just too many millions below the scope of ‘efficient’ markets and beyond the reach of most NGOs.
Whenever the family travelled together, while most of us would admire the greenery, my father-in-law would sigh ecstatically over the beauty of the giant pylons striding across the fields. To him, they represented the engineering talent and achievements of the public sector, munificently straddling the commanding heights of the economy.

View PDF

More like this

Uncommon Ground

Land wars: Anand Mahindra debates Medha Patkar

Rohini Nilekani’s Uncommon Ground: Dialogues between Business and Social Leaders (Viking, Rs 499) brings together titans of business and civil society who are often on opposite sides of the polarized debate over development. It offers her words, a rare “platform of reasoned discourse ” be it on job creation, food security, or the environment, and […]
Oct 19, 2011 | Conversation

Uncommon Ground

Constructive Dialogues

The social responsibility of A business is to increase its profits,” wrote Friedman in the New York Times magazine in 1970. While there’d be fewer takers of his doctrine in the present day corporate world, the subject is still not a comfortable one to debate. And that’s precisely why Nilekani’s Uncommon Ground makes for a […]
Dec 11, 2011 | Book Review

Uncommon Ground

Negotiating Social Harmony - Uncommon ground - Rohini Nilekani

No servant can serve two masters: for either he wall hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” From Biblical times, this has been the conventional wisdom. But humbly correcting the dictum is philanthropist, journalist and activist, Rohini […]
Dec 5, 2011 | Book Review

Uncommon Ground

Uncommon Ground - Rohini Nilekani

This book of conversations between people holding different points of view has a deliberately misleading title. Because Rohini Nilekani has managed to show that in the most uncommon of grounds, between the most adversarial of positions, there can be found something in common if the two sides are willing to at least try and see […]
Jan 30, 2012 | Book Review