In the first of a weekly series of Skydeck episodes honoring recipients of the 2022 Alumni Achievement Award, finance veteran Naina Lal Kidwai (MBA 1982) talks about her second act as chairman and founder of the India Sanitation Coalition, an organization coordinating business, government, and nonprofit efforts to improve India’s water quality and health outcomes.

Photo by Alice Carfrae

Naina Lal Kidwai: This was not a sexy business. You don't want to put your name to toilets. You're much happier putting it to schools or education. So getting the donors and the corporate sector in is not easy today because there’s far more sexy stuff to work on out there. I think we have to just persist because it is such a critical area for the country, for just healthy living, clean living, and ensuring that our kids can grow up with the full nutrition and to the full size and development that they need.

Dan Morrell: Born and raised in New Delhi, India, Naina Lal Kidwai and her sister lived in a household where business and social issues were important family concerns. When she visited her father in his office, she sat in his big leather chair and dreamed of what the future might hold. For Kidwai, those dreams led to the United States, where in 1982, she became the first woman from India to graduate from HBS. But Kidwai always knew she wanted to return to help shape her country. Highlights from her long and extremely successful banking career include forming a new national stock exchange, leading early IPOs of Indian companies like Wipro and Infosys, and overseeing early diversity and inclusion initiatives in her role as head of HSBC India.

After retiring in 2015, Kidwai co-founded the India Sanitation Coalition, which uses a partnership model to bring the private, public, and nonprofit sectors together to work on making India cleaner and greener. In this special edition of Skydeck honoring recipients of the Alumni Achievement Award, associate editor Julia Hanna talks to Kidwai about how to change cultural norms around toilets, and how the campaign to make India open-defecation-free connects with a growing trend in green finance.

READ MORE

Julia Hanna: Naina, when you were leading HSBC, you had the opportunity to represent the bank at conferences, touching on issues around climate change, and more specifically concerns about water. Can you talk about how your awareness of these issues evolved?

NLK: India had a very sad story in sanitation—at these events I would almost feel like I had to hang my head in shame because whenever India came up, it was like, “Oh, the world is moving so far ahead in terms of health and sanitation, but as long as India didn’t get it and open defecation was still a given in India, and people didn't even own toilets, what do you expect?” So I knew that it was something that was not giving the country the need to do the right thing, but was also giving the country a bad reputation because we weren’t doing enough in this space. And so, I was determined to do something about it.

JH: In 2015, Naina cofounded the India Sanitation Coalition as a place where business, government, and nonprofits work to improve sanitation by increasing the number of toilets and changing cultural norms around their use.

NLK: We come at it from a health angle because we know that kids in India are suffering from malnutrition because they get diarrhea, and they get diarrhea because of poor sanitation, and that leads to poor nutrition and they grow stunted. I mean, the statistics were quite horrible. Fifteen percent of kids’ brains don’t develop to the full potential because of this. Thirty percent remain stunted and don’t grow to their full physical form because of this.

So this is a big health issue and it needs resolution. I consulted friends who were much more engaged in the space than I was. Not-for-profits like Water Aid and the Bill Gates Foundation, others in the country. The idea of starting the India Sanitation Coalition emerged from that. Because what was needed was a platform where everyone could share their experiences, and those experiences needed to be success stories where each was not just creating their own little success in some corner and others were just, again, starting from scratch, and we were not being able to benefit from each other’s successes in the space. The idea of creating a platform where everyone could come together, where we would document what was working, that we were enabling people to scale up, to be the platform for this exchange and to help partnerships where corporates could find not-for-profits, not-for-profits could find donors, so that the whole sector could grow.

Public Service Advertisement: “In a model sanitation city, every citizen must have the right to access a clean sanitary toilet at home and in public places.”

JH: The coalition has been involved in many local projects looking to improve sanitary conditions in their communities. One example is the city of Warangal, which closely studied the use of public toilets in their city, and then used their findings to make some concrete changes. One key finding: Usage of the public toilet was heavily skewed with respect to gender.

PSA: We've been collecting gender segregated data in all the public toilets and we realized that the footfalls by women were extremely low.

PSA: “If 600 men were using, only 10 women were using these toilets. That led us to think about exclusive toilets for women, or as we call the She toilets. Which are taken care of by a women caretaker, which have menstrual hygiene related facilities, and which are located in locations which are convenient.”

JH: In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office, and in a stroke of good fortune, he made accessibility to toilets a top priority in one of his earliest public addresses. “People may criticize me for talking about toilets,” he told the crowd, “but I am from a poor family. I have seen poverty firsthand. For the poor to get dignity, it has to start from here.”

NLK: The Indian government had seen a change when Prime Minister Modi came in. Four months into his prime minister-ship, on the ramparts of the Red Fort of India on India’s Independence Day, I almost fell off my chair because he began to talk about toilets and sanitation.

This was like, my gosh. I mean, the last thing I would’ve expected of a first speech by the Prime Minister on his first Independence Day speech. And so, there was no looking back after that because I thought we’d be pushing a lot against the government door, but in fact, this was now an open door. They needed us. We were in working with them. There was a wonderful team that was selected by the government to work in sanitation and the partnerships that we formed therein were just invaluable.

We were able to align on what I believe was one of the most successful programs that any government could have, which was the drive to make India open-defecation-free. India went from having about 40 percent ownership of toilets, as in only 40 percent of the households own toilets, to what the government now says is 100 percent, but I would say is probably nearer 85 to 90 percent ownership of a toilet or access to a toilet. So, you can build toilets, but how do you get people to use them? You have a huge communication exercise by government, by NGOs, by players, trying to ensure that people understood why they should use the toilet. Not just take the money to build toilets, but then use it.

JH: The coalition tries to educate the public with several kinds of outreach methods—from town meetings, to videos like these cartoons you can find on their YouTube channel. In this clip, a mother nags her two sons because they still go to the bathroom in the fields.

[Cartoon dialogue]

JH: I was looking at some of the animated cartoons on the ISC’s website about using the toilet because a lot of people are not used to doing that—and why it’s important, and how do you get people to change. It’s hard, right? You just have to keep chipping away at it.

NLK: And sometimes the messaging around health didn’t work. There is a case, for example, where we had a very good government officer who figured that for those 20 villages that refused to sign up, it became important to communicate differently. So, what she did was sit with the village elders and tell them that your kids are not going to be able to marry because the brides will all want to go to the villages which have toilets because women don’t want to go and defecate in the field. They can be raped on the way. You don’t want to find that you can’t use a toilet in the day because there isn't a toilet. So why would you go to a village that doesn’t have the toilet? It’s now more than an aspiration. It’s almost a requirement and women are beginning to want it.

So, is that what you want? That your sons are never going to find brides. So, don’t you think that you should move and change? The messaging was not around health now. It was around, if you want the brides and the women coming into your communities, you better make sure that you do the toilet. You have to find that little nugget which drives change. For that, you need a lot of local understanding which comes from people on the ground, from communication experts, from not for profits, so that they can get people to do the right thing.

JH: But Kidwai says that making toilets safe, sanitary, and convenient is just the beginning of an effort to improve health outcomes.

NLK: Toilets sprang up everywhere. It was going at a pace where we had to make sure that the toilets that were constructed will be constructed to the right standard so that we didn’t develop the next problem, which is what we’re working on now, which is the treatment of sewage.

Narrative: “India has 1.2 billion people. Only 20 percent of the sewage generated by them is being treated properly. Not being able to properly transport and treat waste has a wide scale impact. Forty-eight percent of all children under the age of five are undernourished because of bad sanitation. What’s more, India spends 15 billion a year treating waterborne diseases.”

NLK: So, you funnel all the shit into these toilets, but then what do you do with it? That treatment angle became very important as well. How do you maintain these toilets? Schools were having a real issue. They built the toilets, they built toilets for girls which didn’t exist earlier, but how do you make sure that there’s enough water to maintain them? Who looks after them? At every stage, there had to be interventions, and of course, the treatment to make sure that what is indeed finding its way into the toilets is treated. If treated properly, it can be used as fertilizer, it could be used as energy briquettes. The waste water that comes from there can be treated and reused for horticulture. How do you complete that whole cycle?

JH: Can you tell me a little bit Naina about how you see this world of finance and the environment coming together in the work you’re doing at the India Sanitation Coalition?

NLK: What we are seeing in terms of green financing emerging in the world is really quite significant and it started with green bonds. Can we get the global insurance companies in the world and the banks to begin to look at investing in products which would be deployed for green purposes? And so, we saw the start of the first green bonds, which have now taken off in quite a major way. I would love to believe the issuance is going to be much more significant than it has been thus far. But the good news is the trajectory is right.

In order to do that, we have to be able to understand what ticks the box in terms of being green. I think there’s been a lot of lazy lending because you plunk your money into a renewables project because you know renewable power is green. But the money is needed as much in areas to do of sanitation, in water efficiency, in the circularity of water and reuse. The measurement of what is green needs to be much broader and the finance flow into these sort of projects and proposals should go beyond just looking at the traditional sort of solar energy, wind energy, type of equations. So, a lot to be done in terms of how we define green and then make the money available for these projects.

JH: Naina Lal Kidwai continues to do her work at the intersection of business, government, and the environment, serving on numerous boards in addition to continuing in her role as chair of the ISC. She says progress can happen if we put our money where our mouth is when it comes to protecting our communities and our planet.

NLK: So when a Goldman Sachs or a BlackRock says, “We will not invest in companies that don’t get it in terms of environment,” it makes many companies in which they are investors change the way they work. Likewise with banks saying they will not lend to companies that don’t tick the box in terms of ensuring the right practice, the company has to then demonstrate that they are going to change for the better and move in the right direction. I mean, that’s where we see this convergence of financing and environment coming together. That finance, as is happening right now, can drive change very effectively.

This episode of Skydeck was edited by Jocelyn Gonzalez from PRX productions. Skydeck is produced by the External Relations Department at Harvard Business School. It is available on iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcast. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

Post a Comment