Most wealthy Indian families want to give back. The intent is genuine — often deeply personal, rooted in gratitude, dharma, or a family elder’s long-held wish. But intent, however sincere, is not an institution. And the distance between wanting to give meaningfully and actually running a functioning philanthropic organisation is far greater than most families anticipate.
There is a verse in the Bhagavad Gita — Chapter 17, Verse 20 — that describes sattvic giving: that which is given to a worthy person, at the right place, at the right time, with no expectation of return. Dātavyam iti yad dānam. Giving as a duty. Most of the families I work with feel this instinctively. They do not need to be convinced that giving matters. What they struggle with is something else entirely — the gap between the impulse to give and the institutional machinery required to give well.
I have watched this gap swallow good intentions more times than I can count.
How It Usually Begins
The pattern is familiar. A patriarch who has done well — genuinely well, across decades of building — reaches a point where the accumulation begins to feel incomplete. Something is missing. He has provided for his children, secured the business for the next generation, built the house, and performed the rituals. And now there is a restlessness. A sense that something is owed — not to anyone in particular, but to life itself. To the circumstances that allowed the accumulation in the first place.
Sometimes it starts with a conversation at a temple, sometimes after a health scare. Sometimes it is the matriarch who has been quietly giving for years — to schools, to hospitals, through her own networks — and who now says to her husband: let us do this properly.
And so the family decides to “set up a foundation.”
What happens next, in most cases, is well-intentioned chaos. The CA is asked to handle the registration. A Section 8 company or a trust is formed. A name is chosen, usually the family name followed by “Foundation” or “Charitable Trust.” A bank account is opened. Perhaps a small team is hired — a coordinator, an accountant. Some donations are made. A few cheques go to schools and hospitals that the family already knows.
And then, within a year or two, the energy fades. The coordinator doesn’t know what the mandate is. The family loses interest in the operational details. The donations continue but feel scattered, purposeless. The patriarch occasionally asks “how is the foundation doing?” and gets a vague answer. Nobody is unhappy with it, exactly. But nobody would call it a functioning institution either.
I have seen this version of events play out in families worth fifty crores and families worth five thousand crores. The amount changes. The pattern doesn’t.
The Part Nobody Tells You About
Here is what I have learned from building the Vedicology Foundation with my wife Vandana Praveen — and this is the part that no amount of well-meaning advice can fully prepare you for.
The hard part is not registration. It is not funding. It is not even finding the right beneficiaries. The hard part is governance.
A family foundation requires the same quality of governance that a family business does. The mandate must be clear — not “we want to help children” but a specific, defined area of intervention with measurable outcomes. A board that meets, reviews, and holds the organisation accountable. Financial controls that separate the family’s personal giving impulses from the foundation’s strategic priorities. And people — not just employees, but people who believe in the work and who have the authority to execute without calling the patriarch every time a decision needs to be made.
Most families underestimate every one of these requirements. Not because they are careless, but because they approach philanthropy with the same instinct that made them successful in business — personal conviction, decisiveness, a bias toward action. Those instincts built the enterprise. They are not sufficient to build an institution.
An enterprise can survive on the founder’s charisma and decision-making authority for a surprisingly long time. An institution cannot. An institution, by definition, must be able to function without any single person, including the person who founded it. That requires systems, documentation, succession planning within the foundation itself, and a culture of accountability that does not depend on anyone’s personal authority.
The irony is sharp. The same families who struggle with succession in their business also struggle with succession in their philanthropy. The governance challenges are structurally identical — and yet most families treat the foundation as somehow simpler, less demanding, a place where good intentions can substitute for institutional rigour.
They cannot.
What We Got Wrong — And What That Taught Me
I am not writing this from a position of having figured it all out. When Vandana and I started the Vedicology Foundation to support orphaned youth transitioning out of Child Care Institutions in Tamil Nadu, we made mistakes that I now recognise in the families I advise.
We underestimated how long it would take to build operational relationships with CCIs. We assumed that having the funding and the intent would be enough to open doors. It wasn’t. Institutions that care for vulnerable children — rightly — do not hand over access to their wards because someone well-meaning shows up with a chequebook. It took time and repeated showing up. It took demonstrating, over months, through action, that we were serious and would still be there next year.
We also learned something about the difference between giving and sustaining. A scholarship is given once. A scholarship programme — with selection criteria, disbursement timelines, follow-up mechanisms, and renewal assessments — is an operational commitment that runs year-round. The romantic version of philanthropy is writing the cheque. The real version is the Tuesday morning call about whether a student’s hostel fees were processed on time.
These are small things. But they are the things that determine whether a foundation is real or decorative.
Dāna as Discipline, Not Impulse
Our tradition has always understood this, if we care to look closely. The Dharmashastra literature does not treat giving as a simple act of generosity. It treats it as a discipline — with conditions, with appropriate recipients, with considerations of timing and method. The Mahabharata’s Anushasana Parva devotes entire chapters to the ethics and practice of dāna. Who to give to. How to give. Giving itself can cause harm if done carelessly.
There is a reason for this. The rishis understood that unstructured generosity can do as much damage as indifference. A donation to the wrong institution entrenches dependency. A grant without accountability disappears. A foundation without governance becomes a vehicle for tax management rather than impact.
The families I advise through philanthropic advisory often come to me after the first wave of enthusiasm has faded. They have a registered entity. They have made some donations. And they are sitting with a quiet dissatisfaction — a sense that what they are doing is not yet matching what they intended. That is actually the best moment to begin the real work. Because the illusion that it would be simple has passed, and the family is ready to build something that will outlast the founding impulse.
The Question Underneath
The deepest question in family philanthropy is not operational. It is existential. Why are we doing this? Not the polished answer for the annual report. The real answer. Is it gratitude? Guilt? Legacy? A genuine response to suffering? A desire to be seen as generous? Some combination of all of these?
Every family I have worked with carries a mix of these motivations. And that is fine — human motivation is never pure. But the clarity matters, because it determines what kind of institution you build. A foundation built on legacy will look different from one built on guilt. A foundation built on genuine engagement with a specific problem — orphaned youth, rural education, healthcare access — will outlast one built on a general desire to “give back.”
The work I do with families at this stage is not about judging their motivation. It is about helping them see it clearly, so that the institution they build reflects what they actually care about, not what they think they should care about.
That is the difference between a foundation that functions and one that merely exists.
Praveen Saanker is the founder of Vedicology Advisors, a boutique advisory practice serving Indian UHNW families across succession, governance, wealth psychology, and Vedic consultations. He and Vandana Praveen co-founded the Vedicology Foundation, a Section 8 non-profit supporting orphaned youth in Tamil Nadu. Consultations are available in Chennai and Dubai, and remotely for clients internationally.
