Sowing the seeds of change

Suri Sehgal sounds tired. It’s 9am and he’s spent the last three days at the World Food Prize, an event that honours those who have improved the world’s food supply. This year it was presented to two former presidents, Ghana’s John Agyekum Kufuor and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, for the work they’ve done to reduce poverty and malnutrition in their home countries.

It’s been a busy few days for 77-year-old Sehgal, who has spent most of his life working in the food industry, carrying out pioneering research as a scientist, running some of the world’s cutting-edge crop companies and developing his own seed businesses. Now, like Kufuor and Lula, Sehgal is working hard to reduce poverty in the country of his birth – in his case India. He made millions during his career, now he and his family are trying to give something back. “After achieving some wealth, we thought it was a good time to help our country of origin,” he says.

Sehgal might have sounded weary initially, but once the focus turns to poverty and India, any fatigue vanishes. He is passionate about his birthplace, and about improving the lives of people there. Of course, standards of living are improving for many Indians. The country’s economy is booming – its GDP grew by 7.4% in 2009/2010. But India’s newfound wealth is mostly concentrated in its cities, despite up to 70% of people living in rural areas. A 2009 government report said that a third of Indians live below the poverty line.

The Sehgal family’s first step to help tackle this was setting up the SM Sehgal Foundation in 1999, which then established the Institute of Rural Research and Development in 2008. It works with about 100 villages in northern India, about 150km away from New Delhi.

Sehgal is modest about its work. “There are 300 million people in India who are living in adverse poverty. Our foundation is making a small contribution,” he says.

Small it may be, but IRRAD’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed. It was singled out for praise at the 2010 Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change and by the 2010 Global Development Network Awards. It has also received accolades at the awards run by Water Digest, a respected Indian magazine, and Unesco. He received the Leadership in Philanthropy Award from the American India Foundation in June.

IRRAD’s approach is based on the philosophy of giving people a leg-up, rather than a handout. It uses what Sehgal says is a holistic approach called “integrated sustainable village development”, which focuses on getting communities involved in the development process, particularly women and those in poverty. For example, in one village a 25,000 litre water tank was built, attached to a bore-hole, which means girls do not have to spend so long queuing for water and can go to school.

And that school also now has a rooftop water tank, meaning that students don’t have to go home to drink and can spend longer learning. This approach – seeing the links between water-shortages and the effects on education and therefore prospects – is typical of IRRAD’s work. “Empowerment is crucial to long-term success, says Sehgal. “We’re developing models to give people the skills and information they need to get out of poverty.” He adds: “We’re making them aware of their rights.” Sehgal mentions rights a lot – the right to education, the right to work, women’s rights, a child’s right to a free midday meal. “People aren’t aware that they have a right to information,” he says. “IRRAD is using a rights-based approach.”

This focus on rights is perhaps inspired from his time as a refugee. Although born into the relative comfort of a land-owing family in 1934 in the Punjab, in what was then part of India, the partition of the country in 1947 changed his life utterly. As religious tensions erupted, his Hindu father and Sikh mother decided to send their eldest children from their home in what was now Pakistan to India.

Sehgal was meant to stay behind with his parents, but in the chaos he was pushed on to a train heading across the new border with little to his name except the shirt and shorts he was wearing. The next two months were spent searching for an uncle with a former neighbour near New Delhi. He ate in refugee camps, slept in empty railroad carts and listened to Mahatma Gandhi. Finally, 12-year-old Sehgal found his uncle. His siblings had survived and, after a few months his parents also got out of Pakistan, but they had to leave everything they owned behind.

A little over a decade later, Sehgal, a promising student who had studied under streetlights when power outages left the family’s new home in darkness, set off for the US. He did a PhD at Harvard under geneticist and agronomist Paul Mangelsdorf and later worked at companies such as agricultural technology company Pioneer, becoming one of the main figures in the worldwide distribution of hybrid seed. He then started a series of his own seed companies in various countries including India and Egypt.

But by the late 1990s, Sehgal was ready for a change again and decided to sell most of his businesses. Along with his German-born wife Edda, whom Sehgal met at Harvard, he donated around $60 million to the family’s foundation.

Initially, the family had planned to act as a funding body for other non-governmental organisations. But they soon changed tack after realising the foundation could be more effective and money used more wisely by establishing its own programmes. “So much of aid money never reaches the villages,” he says. “Only 15% of money allocated for the rural India actually reaches villages.”

The Sehgal Family Foundation donated several million dollars to nonprofit organisations, focusing on conservation and biodiversity in the US and on good governance, water management, income enhancement through agriculture, family-life education and health awareness in India’s rural Gurgaon region.

The charitable work is a family affair. Both Sehgal and Edda are trustees, while other family members including the couple’s sons Ben and Oliver are becoming increasingly involved. Sehgal’s nephew, Jay Sehgal, has been an executive director of IRRAD for 10 years and is also currently the executive vice president of the Sehgal Family Foundation and a representative of the SM Sehgal Foundation in India.

The Sehgals have big plans for IRRAD. “We want to move away from the family name and make it a public foundation,” says Sehgal. To do this, more than 50% of finance must come from sources other than the family. He is hoping to appeal to the Indian diaspora and estimates that at least 20% of non-resident Indians have surplus money, which could be used “to bring about a positive change in rural India”. IRRAD would be more effective if a greater number of non-resident Indians were involved, he says, adding there is no reason why so many Indians should live in poverty.

“We are not billionaires, but we have adopted about 100 villages where we are developing our models,” he says. “We look to partner with other individuals and organisations to replicate these models across the country. If all the Indian diaspora millionaires would adopt a village, then India would not have to remain a poor country.”