Deep confabulations: ISDM students join government, consulting firms, impact funds and NGOs

Over the last few centuries, the imagination of what a business can do has changed dramatically — from mom-and-pop shops to transcontinental organisations, declares Gaurav Shah, co-founder of Indian School of Development Management (ISDM), an institute with a rather unique focus. “And this journey of the business sector has coincided with the mainstreaming of business management as a discipline,” he continues.

Similarly, the idea of structured governance in the world has also transformed. Again, that has coincided with the establishment of public administration as a discipline. “Both businesses as well as government have management institutes catering to them,” says Shah.

Third pillar

So why not for civil society, the third pillar of society? This vision was the starting point of ISDM, which was set up in 2016 by Ravi Sreedharan and Shah (both of who worked in the corporate sector before moving to the social sector and meeting each other at Azim Premji Foundation) along with Sharad Agarwal and Suparna Diwakar. Founder patrons include Ashish Dhawan, CEO of the Convergence Foundation, and Chairperson, Ashoka University, who brought in Pramath Sinha early in the fold too. Also playing a mentoring role was Amit Chandra, Bain Capital India’s private equity chief.

There is plenty of technical knowledge catering to the needs of civil society, points out Shah, but not management knowledge. “Our dream was to mainstream development management as a new-age, modern profession and discipline with its own body of knowledge,” he declares.

To put forth his arguments on the need for such an institute, Shah drops a few statistics. “Every year, the civil society sector contributes to the well-being of at least 70-80 crore people in this country. There are at least two-three lakh active organisations employing anywhere between a crore and two crore people full time working on the most complex problems facing humanity – ranging from education, healthcare to climate change.”

Significantly enough, says Shah, the social sector benefits from almost $15-20 billion of private philanthropy and “is in a position to influence close to $250-300 billion of government spend on issues of of social change”.

Different philosophy

But why does the sector need a different management philosophy or curriculum? Can’t the extant MBA work?

Shah argues that business management and development management’s goals are quite different. The former caters to short-term profit maximisation for investors, while the latter caters to longer-term value creation for society and the planet. “Business management is based on the fundamental premise of competition, while development management has to be based on collaboration. Business management is based on the idea of intellectual property. Development management has to be based on the fundamental premise of commons,” he lists.

He points to how NID made design education cool; NIFT did it for fashion, the National Law School franchise made legal education aspirational. “Higher educational institutes play a pivotal role in making professions aspirational. ISDM hopes to do the same for development education,” he says.

The first year — 2016 — was spent in designing curriculum and talking to a wide variety of people. Says Shah, “Pramath advised us to focus on creating the category and then think of a campus and accreditation, etc.”

So ISDM started in rented premises in Noida and has graduated seven batches (the eighth batch is finishing now) with about 418 alumni. Now, it is building a campus of its own at the Knowledge Park on the Noida-Greater Noida border.

“Our first programme — a PG programme for development management — has reached a certain level of maturity. On an average, every batch has had students joining from upwards of 20 States and Union Territories – so it has a national character,” says Shah. Except for the third batch, which was during the Covid lockdown, all batches have had 100 per cent placement with students getting an average salary of ₹6-7 lakh . “It’s not a bad salary to start with in this sector,” adds Shah.

Today, ISDM students work across the entire spectrum of the social sector from government ministries to consulting firms, impact funds and non-profits, though the biggest number are in NGOs. A few have gone on to found their own NGOs. Take Ravalli P, who has founded The Esther Foundation that works on women rights, or Sandeep Kumar who founded DigiSwasthya.

New verticals

A few years ago, the institute set up its second vertical – the practice vertical, which does custom programmes as well as open programmes. “We have done custom programmes for HCL Foundation, Lupin Foundation, Sun Pharma, Language and Learning Foundation, among others,” says Shah.

Among the open programmes is one that trains women to be ready to join an NGO board. “We’ve now graduated six batches of women (about 130 of them) and then placed them on the boards of non-profits,” says Shah.

The other open programme is on programme management which, Shah says, is the core skill most needed in the social sector and trains people to design, implement, manage and evaluate good-quality social change programmes. It is a three-month virtual instructor-led course with the objective of creating a cadre of professional programme managers for social change. Two batches have graduated.

The third vertical is the knowledge vertical. “But we don’t do pure academics. We are pra-cademics – with one leg in practice, one in academia,” says Shah. “We published India’s first sector-wide talent management and compensation benchmarking study two years ago in partnership with Ashoka University. And now, we are raising money to do the next edition of that.” As he sums up, unless they themselves do not keep pushing the fact that the sector needs better compensation, the talent will not be attracted.

Published on March 31, 2025