This article is authored by Ankur Bansal, founder and CEO, GDi Partners.
India has a rich history of social institutions. From AMUL's cooperative revolution in the 1940s to SEWA's women-led movement since the 1970s, our country has shown the world that institutions rooted in collective purpose can transform lives at scale. These were not "projects" that shone briefly; they became institutions, trusted, resilient, and enduring.
Yet if we are honest, India has not created many such institutions in recent decades. The social sector is crowded with smart projects and inspiring pilots, but too few scale sustainably. Most depend on the right situation, charismatic founders, or government goodwill. Once these supports fade, so too does the impact.
After 12 years of working across government programmes, philanthropies, and social enterprises, one lesson has become clear to me: the future of nation-building will not be led by projects alone, or by governments alone. It requires building mission-driven start-ups that deliver public value as their core purpose while remaining sustainable to attract and retain the best talent of our country.
I have seen this fragility up close. Early in my career, I worked on a district level education initiative that delivered impressive results in arresting dropping enrolment. But within two years, the initiative shut down. The donor exited, the local system wasn't strengthened, and the impact evaporated. All that remained was data on what "could have been."
This is not unique. A 2024 Bain report found that over 70% of funded social projects in India fail to sustain beyond their grant cycle. The structural reasons are well known: short-term donor funding, a bias toward pilots over systems, and lack of financial self-sufficiency.
Projects are important as laboratories of innovation. But they are like sparks, they inspire, but they don't endure unless turned into fires that can sustain themselves.
Learning from Institutions that Endured
By contrast, AMUL and SEWA are masterclasses in institution-building.
AMUL was not just about milk collection. It created a cooperative business model that aligned farmers, professional managers, and the market. Today, it has over 3.6 million member-owners and powers India's dairy dominance globally.
SEWA began as a grassroots union for women workers. By deliberately investing in leadership pipelines, governance systems, and collective bargaining power, it now represents 1.5 million women across multiple states.
What made them last was not just their noble mission, but their ability to marry purpose with a sustainable model of delivery.
The Case for Mission-Driven, Self-Sustaining Enterprises
The time is ripe for the next generation of Indian social enterprises that combine nation-building as their core purpose with financial sustainability as their operating model.
Globally and locally, we see this shift already. Organisations like Safaricom (creator of M-Pesa) in Kenya or Aravind Eye Care in India have shown that service models can be both impactful and self-sustaining. Closer to home, social enterprises in agri-tech, ed-tech, and healthcare are experimenting with models that serve low-income citizens while generating revenues.
Why is this important now? Three reasons stand out:
Scale and complexity of Challenges: Climate change, skilling India's youth, and improving healthcare require investments far larger than what philanthropy or government budgets alone can support. These are complex issues which requires system thinking and not a piece meal approach.
Changing Philanthropy: Donors increasingly prefer catalytic, time-bound support. For initiatives to outlast them, they must stand on their own feet by involving stakeholders from financial institutes, technology, amongst others.
Citizen and system expectations: Today's ecosystem demands reliability. They are less interested in one-time "benefits" and more in whether the institution serving them will be there tomorrow.
A profitable business model does not dilute nation-building—it strengthens it by ensuring the institution can stand independently.
Two of the shining examples in India which are driven by passion but fueled by commercial capital are Wiom, a start-up with the mission to provide affordable internet to 500 million people by 2030 and Convegenius, an ed-tech start up which is today serving more than 100 million students in the public school system.
India has the aspirations, catalytic capital, talent and technology which are key requirements to build social start-ups and make social entrepreneurship cool.