The ten-month-old Aastrika Midwifery Centre (AMC) in South Bengaluru that she launched last September has so far seen 21 births. The six-bedded center follows a midwifery model of care that is woman-centric, promotes physiologic or normal birth while focusing on a range of non-pharmacological comfort measures for pain management and labour progression.
“Our (India’s) infant and maternal mortality rates are still very high, and far from the sustainable development goals. Morbidity is high,” said Nilekani, a developmental economist with a PhD from Harvard University.
The bootstrapped venture, which is entirely funded by her, is inspired by her own experience of becoming a mother, she added. AMC hopes to break even and deliver profits in the next two years.
Nilekani, the eldest child of
cofounder Nandan Nilekani, has a personal holding of 85.89 lakh shares in the software giant, which at the end of March 2022 had an estimated worth of Rs. 1,231 crore.
She is also the chairperson of the Aastrika Foundation, a Nilekani Philanthropies Initiative that was founded in 2019, with an aim to strengthen health systems through capacity building of healthcare workers countrywide.
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There are 65 hours of learning content on the Foundation’s online platform Sphere, which has approximately seen 8,000 users. As many as 2,035 certificates have been issued for completed courses to practicing nurses, nursing students and midwives.
In addition to working with the central as well as multiple state governments and nursing colleges, the Aastrika Foundation also works closely with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Our daughter Janhavi is working hard to transform maternity care and the birthing experience. Proud of her! https://t.co/a1KEVKpF4o
— Nandan Nilekani (@NandanNilekani) 1656998443000
Other collaborations include those with the United Nations Population Fund, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund and the Maternity Foundation, Jhpiego (an international, non-profit health organization affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University), amongst others.
Pointing to the strong influence of her parents’ philanthropic and development work combined with her academic training at Harvard that have combined to steer her towards work in the “NGO” sector, Nilekani said “sometimes I take tips from my father who has been an entrepreneur at Infosys.”
But “for many years now he has been focussed on public goods and my mother has been a philanthropist for thirty years so this (turning entrepreneur) is a bit left field for my family.”
On July 5, Nandan Nilekani had tweeted, “Our daughter Janhavi is working hard to transform maternity care and the birthing experience. Proud of her!”
Acknowledging the “strategic guidance” from her parents, Nilekani said they were curious about her decision to turn towards entrepreneurship. “But for me this is a combination of policy and strategy to work in the private healthcare space as well as a passion project. I am not really an entrepreneur. I wouldn’t set up a chain.”
Noting that both she and her brother, Nihar Nilekani, have gone down the academic routes, she said all her thinking at the (Aastrika) Foundation is “very influenced” by her parents.
“Aastrika Foundation’s entire learning platform for nurses is based on the digital public goods created by Nilekani Philanthropies’ larger ecosystem,” according to the AMC founder.
The centre is training 8,000 government nurses apart from its own inhouse staff. In addition, the centre also uses “the United Payment Interface extensively, the digital public good that my father is very proud of. We benefit from digital public goods as much as any other consumer in the market,” she pointed out.
“At AMC, medical interventions are used only when required. Our interdisciplinary healthcare team of doctors, midwives and nurses follows the latest evidence-based international guidelines, strictly adhering to clinical protocols,” said the healthcare founder who is married to financial services entrepreneur Shray Chandra, who has co-founded Capitalmind, an investment research and wealth management startup.
Nilekani, a 2018 alumna of Harvard University where she completed her PhD in Public Policy also holds a 2010 BA cum laude in Economics and International Studies from Yale University.
