₹60 crore mobilised.
The work is just getting started.
Fundraising and CSR strategist with 5+ years inside India's impact ecosystem — from national crisis response to corporate programme design. I work at the intersection of rigorous thinking and on-the-ground execution, asking not just what to fund, but how to build systems that make funding count.
The premise
I raised ₹50 crore during a global pandemic — coordinating 100+ hospital partners, 200+ influencer campaigns, a team responding in real time to a crisis with no precedent. It was the most operationally intense work I've done, and it taught me something uncomfortable: the machinery of impact is largely built to serve the moment of giving, not the moment of change. Donors felt good. Numbers looked right. But the constraint wasn't effort — it was how the system was designed.
"We don't lack solutions. We lack systems that can recognise and scale them."
Selected work
The brief was simple: raise as much as possible, as fast as possible. The harder question — which nobody was asking — was what happened after the money moved.
COVID-19 created unprecedented demand for medical relief funding. Give.do was positioned to be a primary aggregator, but the infrastructure to move money at this scale — hospital partners, verification systems, donor trust at speed — didn't fully exist yet. I built and led the national medical fundraising vertical from scratch.
The conventional playbook — large donors, institutional asks — would be too slow. I anchored the model on three parallel tracks: a hospital partnership network for credibility and volume, an influencer campaign engine for reach and emotional urgency, and internal team infrastructure to sustain execution under pressure. Trust at scale is manufactured through visible accountability — every rupee needed a clear line to an outcome people could picture.
₹50Cr+ raised. 100+ hospital partners onboarded. 200+ campaigns managed. A 4-member team built and mentored through the most operationally demanding period any of us had worked through. I emerged with a permanent scepticism toward the conflation of fundraising volume and actual impact — a scepticism that now shapes everything I design.
1 lakh people who already believed in the cause. Zero architecture to turn that belief into fuel.
Bhumi had one of India's largest volunteer networks — genuinely motivated, deeply embedded in communities — but fundraising sat in a separate silo. Volunteers gave time. The organisation asked donors for money. The two never intersected. Individual giving was sporadic, platform-dependent, and not growing.
A warm fundraising conversation is one where the asker already believes. Bhumi had 1 lakh of those conversations waiting to happen. The friction wasn't motivation — it was infrastructure and culture. I built peer-to-peer mechanics across Give, Donatejoy, and Ketto, automated donor engagement workflows, and worked on the internal belief system: asking isn't uncomfortable when it's framed as an extension of the mission.
Individual giving participation improved significantly across platforms. The volunteer network — previously untouched as a fundraising asset — became the primary distribution channel. The organisation didn't just raise more. It understood, for the first time, that its community was its fundraising strategy.
Things I believe
Fundraising
Most organisations treat fundraising as a tax on their real work. The ones that win treat it as the work itself — an act of institutional belief, not collection.
CSR in India
₹25,000 crore is mandated every year and most of it is spent, not invested. The difference is whether you're building anything that outlasts the reporting cycle.
Impact measurement
The sector measures what it can count and ignores what actually changes lives. Outputs are not outcomes. We've built an entire industry of comfortable data.
Youth mobilisation
Young people don't lack purpose — they lack architecture for it. The role of institutions is to build containers worthy of what this generation is trying to do.
Animal welfare
India's animal welfare crisis is a policy failure masquerading as a resource failure. The infrastructure doesn't exist because there has never been the political will to build it. I know this because I've spent years inside it — 21 rescue and rehabilitation interventions under resource constraints, studying every structural gap. Political will, unlike money, is a solvable problem if you approach it correctly.
Currently building
Started with pet health and technology. Went deep — problem definition, solution design, early market validation. Talked to vets, shelter operators, pet owners, policy researchers. Then hit a structural wall: the unit economics didn't hold, and more critically, we were solving a symptom. The infrastructure failure underneath was bigger and more important. So we stopped and redesigned the thesis from the ground up. What we're building now starts from a systems question, not a product one. India doesn't have an animal welfare problem — it has an infrastructure problem.
While the stealth venture takes shape, KTAK is where the work stays grounded. An animal welfare nonprofit built on the conviction that you can't think clearly about systemic change unless you're still doing the work — the unglamorous, resource-constrained, on-the-ground work that most strategists leave behind when they move upstream. KTAK operates across rescue, Trap-Neuter-Return, sheltering, and adoptions. 21 end-to-end rescue and rehabilitation interventions executed under conditions that taught me more about resource allocation and the politics of compassion than any consulting engagement.
Working in policy, philanthropy, veterinary systems, or animal welfare? I'd like to talk.
Anatomy of Doubt
A Substack for people who work in impact and are willing to interrogate it. No insider comfort, no sector flattery — just the attempt to see the thing clearly.
Let's talk
I work at the intersection of strategy and execution — fundraising, CSR, and systems design in the impact sector. If you're building something serious, I want to hear about it.