Financial Literacy in India
An interview with Santosh Kumar Reddy Dinne, the founder of the Indian financial literacy nonprofit Svatah
For this edition of the Fintech Explorer, I was very excited to do a Q&A with Santosh Kumar Reddy Dinne, founder of a nonprofit in India called Svatah that teaches basic financial literacy to lower-income mothers and children. I was introduced to Santosh through our Teach for India connection; I am on the board of Teach for India’s US arm and Santosh was a former Teach for India fellow. Svatah is taking a clever approach to solving a significant problem for India’s population; as the country grows wealthier, today’s Indian children will have wealth and opportunities their parents might not have had. Svatah is focusing on building good financial habits in children through financial education programs across schools in India. Svatah focuses on financial education for three segments of the Indian population: children, young entrepreneurs, and mothers.
Q: Santosh, could you start out by telling us a little bit about your background prior to starting Svatah?
A: I am a dental professional by education. I did my Bachelors in Dental Surgery from Government (Osmania) Dental College & Hospital, Hyderabad, in South India. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the dental college (Sept 2013-Nov 2018) and loved helping patients, but I always had this thought at the back of my head, saying, ‘You can do more’. I was not quite sure what more I could do, but that feeling never really left my mind.
Once I was done with my bachelors, it became quite clear to me that I could not spend my entire life in a (dental) office. I wanted to do more. During that period of time, I came across Teach For India. Having worked in the social sector in the early ages of my life (I started and ran an NGO while I was 16 years old), it felt like a good way to test my determination. I could experience the social sector for two years and understand my interests and passions while developing my leadership skills. Thus, I joined the Teach For India fellowship in June 2019.
I was placed in a government school and taught 5th & 6th graders for two years. I was on the ground when the COVID lockdown in India was announced. We (I along with my co-fellows) piloted digital learning initiatives for our students, and also ensured that student families' needs were met. I started SVATAH as a side project while doing the fellowship.
Q: What inspired you to start Svatah? What issues were you observing that motivated you to solve problems around financial literacy?
A: In the early days of my Teach For India fellowship, I had a conversation with a mentor. I was trying to understand what the best way would be to choose my Be The Change Project (BTCP). A BTCP is a side project that fellows can do to solve problems in their class, school or community. I wanted to do something around health, as I had a health background. That conversation changed my view towards BTCPs. One question that Revanth (my mentor) asked me changed the way I thought about problems forever. He asked me: “What is the biggest impediment between ‘Envisioned Reality’ & ‘Most Probable Reality’ for YOUR students?” He said that my solution (or BTCP) should try to solve for that biggest impediment!
After that conversation, I went back determined to find out that problem. To do so, I, along with some volunteers, surveyed the community. We interviewed 50 families, and spent one hour with each of them trying to understand them better. This helped us realize that a majority of them (75%) had active debts in the informal sector, while none of them had any savings. They had very little access to learn about managing their finances. This made me realize the need for someone to help them manage their finances.
Around the same time, I came across an incident that pushed me further to work on helping communities manage their finances. A few months into my Teach For India fellowship, one of my student’s fathesr called me up. He was visibly upset. When I asked him what was wrong, he mentioned that his son (my student) had hurt himself while playing on the ground. His ankle was broken and needed to be immobilized. The whole treatment was costing around Rs. 2000. The father was distressed as he did not have any savings to get his son treated. His attempts to borrow money from his friends and family were in vain. They did not have any emergency savings. My friends and I pooled money and were able to help them out. After that, I could not stop thinking about the fact that a person who works for an airline and is earning Rs. 20,000 was not able to spare one-tenth of his month’s salary towards his son’s medical emergency.
These two incidents really pushed me to think about the need for interventions in personal finances. So, I tried looking for organizations that were working on promoting the same, and realized that there were few groups working on this. I started working on building SVATAH, largely because I found a clear need for a solution here.
Q: Why did you decide to focus on mothers and their children for financial literacy efforts?
A: Since I was a teenager, I have spent a lot of time in the community, and that has helped me develop insights into how people from marginalized populations were thinking. Over the years, I have observed that working with adult men is difficult for two reasons. One, they are always working hard to ensure that their families have food on their tables. Thus, they do not have time to upskill themselves. Two, sometimes they tend to think that they have already experienced everything and thus there is nothing more to learn.
While it comes to women, we have seen that they spend a lot of time thinking about how to make their family's situation better. By working with a woman, I personally believe that we will be upskilling her, and all of the generations that come after her. Also, as a majority of them in the communities we serve are still homemakers, they have the time and the bandwidth to learn and implement our guidance. During my Teach for India fellowship, I realized that a lot of the things our students do at school are actually imitations of what their parents and other elders are doing at home. Students learn a lot by observing! Thus, they were learning the same things their parents were doing: For example, taking a loan from a money lender to celebrate a birthday. The students would also borrow money from their peers to eat lavish meals. Having said that, I also observed that they imitated good practices. Once, I had a student in my class who started saving money at home for herself after seeing the results of us doing it in class. This made me realize that by working with students from a young age, we will be able to inculcate the right habits and behaviors, while upskilling them on the skills their parents do not possess.
Q: What financial behaviors have surprised you the most as you’ve observed people learning from your program?
A: Over the span of three years (including our pilots), we saw a lot of changes that we had not expected.
After our initial pilot with women, one of the mothers became an entrepreneur, and started her own tailoring business in the community. She said, ‘All I needed for more than a decade was just one push, and I got it from SVATAH:’. She now runs her own shop and trains others in tailoring, sometimes earning more than her husband.
During my Teach for India fellowship days, we as a class decided to save money for an upcoming farewell party so that we did not need to ask parents for the money. We made a piggy bank out of a plastic bottle and decided that the money saved in the kiddy bank would be used for the whole class. We ended up saving more money than we needed. What is interesting is that after that, a few students started saving money at their home without any external motivation.
Post our first Svatah Junior Summer Camp, we asked students to share some artifacts, and this is what a student shared. It is a story about her and her mother:
Recently, we worked with Teach For India, and implemented our SVATAH Junior program in a few classes. The fellows taught the nine hour curriculum in their classes, which covered topics ranging from the necessity of financial literacy to the importance of formal banking to insurance. After our intervention, the fellows reported that some of their students have opened joint bank accounts so that they can save towards their ‘emergency fund’. Two girls were also selected for their district level financial literacy quiz competition. Click here to watch a testimonial of the student.
We are piloting something known as Svatah School Bank, trying to bring a bank-like structure into the schools. We have seen that students understand the concepts behind banking very quickly. Just within a couple of days, we are able to help students understand how banks function and they are able to carry on banking-related activities on their own without any external help!
Q: Can you tell us about Svatah’s scale-to-date and your plans for the next 12-18 months?
A: We are a young organization working on a previously unexplored area in India, and we are still trying to figure out what the best way is to drive financial literacy in women and children. As such, we have a myriad of pilots and projects that we are working on, ranging from simple classroom interventions to state level collaborations with different governments.
We started off working directly with children and women, our intended beneficiaries, but soon realized that it would be difficult to reach scale with these models. Thu,s we have started working with governments and collaborating with different organizations to work at scale.
In the next 12-18 months we intend to continue working on the projects that are already in progress and learn from them:
We are currently working with the Madhya Pradesh Department of School Education, and are curating personal finance resources for 3 Lakh (300,000) government teachers. We will make these courses available on our platform as well, giving access to all the individuals who intend to learn the basics.
We will soon be working with the Pankh foundation to upskill women with financial literacy skills (sponsored by Zerodha)
Our tech team is currently developing a tech solution for the Svatah School Bank and are trying to decentralize the process. We also intend to try to build a physical product that can be placed in schools, completely automating the creation of a school-level banking solution.
We intend to work on curating a grade-level financial literacy curriculum and get workbooks ready which could be used by teachers to teach personal finance in their classrooms.
We will be working with governments across India to scale all of these interventions.
Here is a booklet that gives you a better understanding of the projects we are doing (updated March 2023).
Here is a short documentation of our milestones to date:
Q: How can readers of this blog help support Svatah? Can you share how we can donate or otherwise support the cause?
A: As noted above, we have been recently approached by the Madhya Pradesh Department of School Education asking us to develop a financial literacy curriculum for the government teachers of Madhya Pradesh. The Madhya Pradesh government has been working on developing and upskilling teachers on the job under their CM RISE Teacher Professional Development (TPD) Program. Through the collaboration, the goal is to upskill 3 lakh (300,000) Govt teachers in aspects related to personal finance.
We, at SVATAH are working on curating 6-7 online courses on personal finances (through our Svadhyay program), which will be uploaded on the DIKSHA app giving teachers the freedom to learn at their own pace and time.
We estimate that we would be requiring around Rs. 4.5-5 Lakhs (~$6,000) on the whole to acquire the resources, software, and human personnel required for the project.
As a young organization, we would be grateful if we could get financial support for this cause. You can donate to Svatah at this link; we ask that all donations come from Indian citizens in Indian rupees at this time. Thank you!