Mumbai: Over dinner one day in 2004, Venkat Krishnan, founder and former CEO of GiveIndia, was chatting with Ingrid Srinath, then CEO of CRY, and Matthew Cherian of HelpAge India. While brainstorming about improving the culture of giving in India, they came up with the idea of having a national giving day, an occasion which could be used to build support for a particular cause.
At the time, none of the three had the time to take the idea forward, and it kind of fizzled out. In 2008 however, a larger group of people — groups and individuals ranging from the NGO Goonj, to ICICI bank to independent hoteliers — met to discuss the idea; they were all in favour of the concept, but there was a difference of opinion about which day of the week would be best. “Corporates preferred weekdays,” Mr. Krishnan told The Hindu . “Others wanted to have it on the weekend, when there was more time. And so eventually, rather than a day of giving, it became the Joy of Giving week that was launched in 2009.”
Now in its ninth year, the Daan Utsav festival — as the Joy of Giving Week was later renamed — kicked off on Monday. Mr. Krishnan says, with some pride, that it has taken on a life of its own. “I remember that I had gone to Kodaikanal recently and was trying to tell people about Daan Utsav. To my surprise, I heard people there tell me that they had been celebrating for the past three years.”
From an event that became popular in big first in big cities, primarily those in the South, the past few years have thrown up some stories of events and volunteer bases being organised in smaller cities and villages across the country.
Take Odisha. Since 2013, entire blocks of villages have come forward to celebrate. “It started with the local media bringing to light some incredible acts of giving since 2009,” says Bipin Mohanty, coordinator for the State. “Small stories, like two people who had been providing free care to cows and other cattle, or an old woman who had planted nearly 70,000 trees, were highlighted and it created a buzz.”
By 2013 that buzz was strong enough for Mr. Mohanty to organise a team of volunteers to go to rural areas and explain the concept of giving more thoroughly. The volunteers first tried to understand which institutions, like schools or hospitals, needed to be helped and what they needed in terms of materials and then conveyed those needs to the people of the villages. “We never wanted to push the festival by organising big events,” he says. “We just tried to keep it as simple and local as possible, encouraging the idea that everyone can be a giver.”
Nevertheless. last year on October 3, there was a huge public event: around 18,000 people from the Daspalla block in Nayagarh district came together to organise a day of giving to each other. A smaller event with 5,000 people was held in the block of Vadamba. With news of those events having spread, Mr Mohanty says, this year similar events are being planned in Bari and in Puri.
Lucknow is another recent Daan Utsav success story. Last year, there was a spurt of activity thanks to a strong organisation of over 100 volunteers, and 60 large events supplemented by numerous smaller celebrations. Coordinators Rahul Aggarwal and Jyotsna Kaur Habibullah, who had both organised small events of their own in 2014 and 2015, say they intend to scale up celebrations this year, but rather than do a big event, they decided it would be more valuable to have more small events. What they tried to push is the idea of that everyone should take a stab at organising their own event rather than contribute from the side-lines. In their outreach, they encouraged people to keep it simple. “We wanted each person to personalise the event,” Mr. Aggarwal says. “To just do it for themselves, as they would do on Diwali. Just keep the focus on how you can spread a few smiles around you rather than thinking big, because ideas fizzle out more of often than not.”
The philosophy around Daan Utsav has always been that the spirit of generosity is intrinsic to all Indians; sometime all it needs is a channel, and a little encouragement. “It’s a bit like a marathon,” Mr Krishnan says. “You have 40,000 people running on one day, and that visibility inspires millions of other people to take up running. That one act creates a habit and that’s what we aim for with this festival.”
