The Catalyst
September 2025
When oriented towards tackling the toughest challenges of India’s development, we believe institution-building represents one of the highest returns on investment and effort for philanthropy in India today.
Ashish Dhawan,
Founder-CEO, The Convergence Foundation
Ashish Dhawan,
Founder-CEO, The Convergence Foundation
Building pioneering institutions lies at the heart of The Convergence Foundation’s (TCF) approach. Institutions enable people to work together to solve complex problems at a systemic level, and to drive outcomes at scale over long periods of time. When oriented towards tackling the toughest challenges of India’s development, we believe this represents one of the highest returns on investment and effort for philanthropy in India today.
TCF incubates new institutions as well as facilitates the growth of existing ones whose goals mesh with its own: rapid and sustained economic growth and inclusive development. We do this through a variety of means, principal among which are helping find or attract talent, building funding, and helping foster government partnerships.
Thus, we help in CEO searches, looking for dynamic and passionate entrepreneurs with the right skill sets to lead these institutions. We also render assistance in setting up advisory boards that can provide effective governance and support for the growth of these institutions. We are extremely grateful to our advisory board members, council of mentors, champions, partners and friends—you all know who you are—for helping build these institutions together with us.
TCF is an early-stage funder—we often provide a bulk of the funding for the first few years, giving organisations the space and flexibility to build their teams, develop and test their theory of change, and demonstrate proof of concept. Once they have demonstrated real-world impact and sustainability, our goal is for organisations to fully transition off TCF funding, allowing us to redeploy resources into backing new, bold, and risk-tolerant ideas.
1.5-2%
Of India’s GDP is lost annually due to legal uncertainty and procedural delays
A few new institutions that TCF is partnering with are TrustBridge, Maker Bhavan Foundation (MBF), and India’s Translational Research Initiative (ITRI).
Conservative estimates suggest that in India’s case, legal uncertainty and procedural delays impose a direct cost of 1.5-2% of GDP each year, with the total opportunity cost estimated to be two to three times greater. TrustBridge works on issues of rule of law, economic regulation, and contract enforcement that would lead to a more favourable business climate for sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
Likewise, it has often been observed that there is a gap between the scientific and technical learning imparted in India’s educational institutions and their practical application. MBF is working to remedy this by building tinkering labs and cutting-edge maker spaces within Indian universities, designed to deliver immersive project-based learning experiences to students and ultimately to cultivate a generation of engineers who can translate ideas into real-world solutions.
1.4%
Of global tourists visit India, despite its unmatched biodiversity and heritage
A related issue holding back R&D in India is the tendency for academia and industry to operate in silos, leading to the lack of sufficient translation of cutting-edge scientific research into products for the market. ITRI is a philanthropic initiative to address this gap by setting up 50 translational research centres at premier research institutions across the country, thereby catalysing the lab-to-market journey of academic innovations through partnerships between academia, industry and mission-driven funders.
Apart from supporting organisations, TCF also incubates organisations in certain white spaces and then spins them off. The two areas that we have identified are high-value tourism and district-led development models.
The travel bug today is global, making tourism an essential engine of inclusive economic development. And in a season when the Indian economy has been buffeted by steep tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, tourism is a growth sector that is largely immune to tariffs. India’s tourism sector makes a contribution of about $200 billion to its GDP currently. With focused efforts, it can take this to a $3 trillion tourism economy by 2047, with interim goals of $500 billion by 2030 and $1 trillion by 2036 – requiring an annual growth rate of about 12% for the tourism sector.
12%
Annual growth in tourism is required for India to reach $500 billion by 2030, $1 trillion by 2036, and $3 trillion by 2047
To help realise India’s tourism potential, TCF is incubating the ATITHI Foundation. This foundation will seek to enhance India’s tourism landscape and maximise the sector’s contribution to economic growth through strategic planning, stakeholder collaboration and building policy muscle.
TCF has also launched the Middle India Development & Advancement Strategy (MIDAS), which aims to accelerate the economic growth of India’s underdeveloped districts. MIDAS is helping implement a pilot project in Deoria, a backward district in eastern Uttar Pradesh, in partnership with MP Shashank Mani who represents the region in the Lok Sabha. The Deoria initiative has been branded as Project Amrit Prayas. Its goal is to raise the district’s per capita growth rate to ~10% annually over the next decade, as well as to develop a template for driving district-level growth that can be replicated at scale in similar regions across India.
TCF is currently looking for dynamic enterprise leaders to set up and develop these two young organisations: Maker Bhavan Foundation and ATITHI Foundation. To share interest or referrals for these roles, please do write in to us at [email protected].
With just 20 years to realise India’s demographic dividend, Build With Us is TCF’s initiative to support visionary leaders in building institutions that unlock growth, shape policy, and expand opportunity. With a sharp focus on accelerating economic growth, it supports ideas that power the direct engines of growth and provides tailored support, ranging from patient capital and recruitment assistance to strategic mentorship and government partnerships. We work with institution-builders across policy, industry, startups, and the public sector to drive systemic change in deregulation, skilling, urban development, exports, capital markets, dispute resolution, and innovation.
If you have a bold idea to accelerate economic growth and are ready to build a pioneering organisation around it, reach out to us at [email protected].
Highlights from our Network
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System Support Organisations (SSOs) attempt to address the root causes rather than local symptoms of a problem, and achieve population-scale impact by shifting the conditions that are holding the problem in place. They tackle the toughest development challenges by transforming incentives, mindsets, values, and ways of working, with the goal of achieving a higher-order equilibrium of improved lives, one that will sustain even after the specific SSO intervention ceases to exist.
Through stories of frontline workers navigating broken scales, endless registers and invisible children, Kiran George, Senior Program Associate at the Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS), shares insights from a field visit in Raichur, Karnataka, reminding us that true governance begins with empathy and that listening can be a radical act. Read the full story here.
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