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[Sid]

Hi, welcome to the exChange Podcast. Today I have with me Anand Rajan and Anjali Hans, I’ll let you guys introduce yourselves.

[Anjali]

Hi. I’m Anjali. I do a bunch of storytelling at C4EC. I am Anand, and I’m the founder and mission leader of Apurva AI.

[Anand]

Good to be here. Great. 

[Sid]

Anand, just to kind of set context for people who don’t know you, if you could just take us briefly through your journey up until Apurva, and then we kind of go deeper.

[Anand]

Sure. Sure. So I’ve been in the sector for about six years. Five, six years, I think. And a lot of the time was spent in and with EkStep Foundation, and the role really was to work with social entrepreneurs. And one thing which was so amazing is that it’s abundant of innovations. But the challenge was, how do you really unify them? So my role was really to look at the role of platforms. And how do you unify innovations and really let networks use digital infrastructures to solve these problems? o I come with a background of technology, but always put technology behind the problem. So problem is so critical to solve. And so that’s really how I looked at my work. 

[Anjali]

And when you speak of problems what do you think is the problem that you’re trying to solve in the context of the work that you’ve done and are doing?

[Anand]

It is kind of domain agnostic, but I think the nature of the problems is that these are complex Problems. And if you look at complex problems, if someone says that they have an answer to a complex problem, I would seriously doubt that. If you go with the mindset that we don’t have answers. I think something really amazing unlocks. Complexity is really about examining interconnectedness, examining diversity, the adaptive emergent behaviours. So if you can really design for those characteristics, then you have a way to design for complex problems.

[Anjali]

What are some challenges currently and especially in the context of Apurva, which will come to in a bit, what are some challenges you perceive right now in the sector in the way that it thinks, in the beliefs that people have while solving, stray us from actually looking at the complexity of the problem at large and solving it like that?

[Anand]

I would say that, one challenge is that ability or inability to imagine. And this is also a factor of the resources we have. I think we have to be very cognizant of the challenges we grapple. 

And so the byproduct of that is you see a lot of repetition. We see, I think, Harish Hande very nicely puts it, ‘Keep reinventing the wheel.’ And that’s a large problem. And on one end, we all recognise that the communities are the source of value, but many times we keep repeating the same thing across different problems, different domains, different Initiatives. On one side, it becomes so exhaustive and extractive for the communities. 

On the other side, you don’t design meaningful solutions or you may design something and you are So indexed on the fact that this is personal to you and you don’t necessarily collaborate. And so that synergy just never emerges. And this cuts across. It cuts across right from communities to the civil society and the funders. 

So the challenge is, how do you collaborate in this sector? And so is there a way to not to design for non-threatening collaboration so that it’s not a zero-sum game and all of us win? So how do you design for such systems? These are challenges for sure. And many times we, the resources and the byproduct, are, you know, not optimised on resources. 

So how do I know I’m investing on the right program? When programs are competing, not complementing. So, how do you ensure that we kind of get a broader view of things?

[Anjali]

Is there something that you kept in mind while Apurva emerged? And I’d also like you to tell the story of how it came about. I was part of that journey for when you were tinkering with it, when it became a full thing. I’d like you to tell it.

[Anand]

No. None of these is by design. So I think at least the thing is to be prepared for the unknown. So none of these are planned, designed. It’s all learnings. But the journey of Apurva is very funny. Interesting. In fact, three years back as part of the journey of Societal Thinking, we had completed about, I think five years and we said, what do we have to do for the next 15 years or 20 years? 

Because problems in the sector are not small time. It’s a long-haul, long-tail kind of hard engagement. And so we even went to a bunch of our well-wishers, Sanjay, leading this and asking this question of, are we doing the right things? How do we look at the next five years? And, the intent was to take all of this, ingest and see how we do better. And so I was I usually duck away from being the note taker in this world. So this time, I think everybody said, ‘You have to be the note taker.’

So I went with these notes, Excel documents and then started tracking these actions and while others were also documenting in the sheet. But then something very interesting happened. And that was, there were so many diverse points of view on one end and many of them said, this is phenomenal. There were also some who said, I don’t know, I don’t think I agree with this. Now,  how do you converge this diversity? 

When you converge different diverging viewpoints, you’re losing something. You’re losing the essence of that knowledge because you take a position, you take a position that I think aligned with this. And that’s where bias starts. And we said, rather than doing that, can we preserve this knowledge? Or can we preserve this collective wisdom of this 100-150 and see what emerges from that? 

And we said, can we build 150 small brains and connect all of this as a collective wisdom and offer it back? That was kind of a very counterintuitive hypothesis to where we started. And so we built that first version, all accidental. And in this we also said, hey, I don’t think we should even name this stuff. It was, I think it was like midnight types and we are building this thing. We didn’t have any clue before this ChatGPT business, two years before. 

And we said something interesting is emerging. And at that time we said, I think we should not name it. Let’s give the agency to the machine. What do you want to be called? And it came back with a few names. I remember two of them. One was obviously Apurva, while the other was Tara. Tara is a constellation. And then for whatever reason, we said, let’s go for Apurva..

[Anjali]

She used to have, like, this plait and all also. Like a full figure. It was really cute. 

[Anand]

So that’s where this whole journey started. So accidental journey. Then we started building on accident. On accident. And something interesting emerged.

[Anjali]

What was the most rewarding part of it? Or like a moment you remember where light bulbs went off in your brain and you were like, this is something I want to like, go down the rabbit hole of?

[Anand]

The ability to, in some sense, express without expressing the collective wisdom of 150 folks was brilliant, where it was able to summarise very diverse viewpoints, and offer it back to us. The first version was what we created, we kind of put it in a document, but then we also said, can we create an instance of this and give it back to the 150? 

And the way they responded to it was so amazing. And then we learned from that. We kept trying stuff out. So I think the whole journey was pretty interesting. And this could not have been possible without the technology. I think it’s so important that we kind of, recognise that you need such technologies. 

We didn’t have this few years back. So it’s very important that we understand how to use technology, We never lead with technology, but if there’s a way to bring it in, a lot of very interesting thing happens.

[Sid]

How much of that mindset of making sure that there are viewpoints that converge, and you need to hear all sides, plus the fact that bias can’t be in the room when you’re having a conversation, How much of that has shaped you as Anand, the leader, who leads a particular mission?

[Anand]

Apurva is a great listener. So, many times as leaders, we keep talking and not listen. And so I think at least I can personally speak for myself. I do 5% of the talking and let the rest of the people in the, in the kind of audience talk. So I think that’s a very important sense of direction. And, purely from a value perspective, diversity is very important. So how do you give spaces for all of us to have a kind of viewpoint? Or we may think it’s right or wrong, but I think giving that space to offer those viewpoints becomes critical. I don’t know if this is kind of what you’re looking at here.

[Sid]

Yeah, because I want to understand how that also comes into the kind of work that you do, because at some point, it kind of helps you evolve into a, you know, an organisation. I know absolutely. It shapes the mission that you’re on.

[Anand]

I think you’re bringing a very interesting- now that you bring this up and see, I think today most AIs are very centralised. Which means that it’s built somewhere in the West and deployed in the rest of the world. Leadership is also very centralised many times. Somebody takes a very dominant position. It may be dominance of knowledge, maybe dominance of position. 

But you take a dominance, you can hold that space and in some form try to diffuse that- what you call as a Sarnoff model. I’m sure we heard this in this network. It’s a broadcast. I believe this is right. I think that’s aligned. But if you kind of take a more, a flip of this is whatever said and done, the wisdom of the ecosystem trumps. 

They kind of have a better view of problem-solving. And so you’re right – that really shaped the way we said we have to design Apurva, we started with some of the centralised models, but then we moved to a very decentralised model where we said every ecosystem, every problem solver needs to bring his viewpoints, and that becomes his source of truth. And how do we provide spaces to accept that and learn from that?

[Anjali]

I want to touch upon when you said, flipping. And I think that’s a very interesting thing that’s coming up when I think about Apurva and when I see the work that you’re doing. On the one hand, when you’re bringing in these diverse points of view and you’re even if you’re bringing them to convergence, it’s not the ultimate truth. That’s an insight to move forward further. And that’s a very interesting way to rethink how people solve or even how the role, wisdom plays in solving. So I want you to touch upon that. And even when, first of all, what is collective wisdom? Because I hear this a lot, and I would like you to demystify it a little bit. And what is the role it actually plays in solving?

[Anand]

I think the core of Apurva was to design for complexity. And complexity by definition, has few characteristics. Complex problems and so the need to solve complex problems need to have an interconnected kind of a lens to it. And so by design these are interdependent. So there is a lot of mutual dependance. We would kind of look at the lens of climate. 

There is an angle of education to it, an angle of health, the angle of livelihood. And it is so globalised yet so localised. So there is so much of polarity. And it’s so emergent. What solutions may work in one part of the world for, say, pest attack because of climate change could be very different from different part of the world. So there is a diverse emergent behaviour, right? And so at least our thinking is if you have to tackle such complex problems, you have to think of complexity from a solution mindset. And so surrounding the problem with the wisdom of that community is so sacrosanct. How do you design for that? 

And hence the need for complex or the need for collective wisdom. We look at this from what you call as both horizontal collective wisdom and vertical collective wisdom. So which means how do we connect communities? It could be a community of, say, farmers. And there is so much of diversity across different farmer groups. If you take a farmer in say, Hosur, which is right here, the practices he adopts would be so different from a farmer 50, 60km away, right? So how do you bring that together and how do you design for emergent behaviours, learnings across that group? 

And then there is vertical collective wisdom, which is the changemakers social entrepreneurs system orchestrators. Because there is also knowledge across their way of problem solving. And then take it to the enablers, which could be policymakers, funders, orchestrators. How do you connect all of them? Because once you are able to do this horizontal and vertical connections, I think something beautiful emerges. You do very small atomic actions, what you may call as fractals, repeated actions. 

And that repeated action leads to global kind of, ability to see things. At least our belief is it is, so I think, again, you become very arrogant when you say you can solve for complex problems. I think it’s so important to have a humble mindset of saying, can we even examine and look at complexity? And can we tackle, can we engage, can we act on complex problems? Because if you, by definition, if you have an answer to complex problems, then it’s not a complex problem. So it’s either a simple or a complicated problem. So I think that mindset is so important. The mindset of being humble. So that’s what we do.

[Anjali]

But it’s also a very big shift in how solving usually happens, especially from what I’ve noticed, it’s mostly I build a solution, I have some answers, and I will give it to you. And the inverse is rarely true. It’s also a big shift for people, especially in positions of power, to, be open to learning and then using those learnings to design solutions and co-create them. How did you infuse Apurva with this kind of mindset or how do you carry it forward in the work that you’re doing with Apurva in specific domains?

[Anand]

Yeah. So firstly, this is kind of a paradox or it’s very, Unfortunate the ones with the most power, co-create the least. But then you kind of expect the next layer to collaborate and co-create, and they expect the next layer. So the communities are the least incentivised to collaborate because in some sense it’s a zero-sum game. 

If I produce a lot of something, the prices reduce of a produce. So I am not incentivised to share my methods with you because all of start are doing the same thing, the prices drop. So I lose out on the practices, but then they are the ones who collaborate the most. So it’s like your whole Airbnb Model. You probably would have expected this to be the model which could never have taken off.  How do I trust a stranger in the house? 

But then it took off. So at least in our say, that’s really how we started- where if we can in some sense create the radical abundance across all the layers. So at least our belief is that there is a clear intention to want to come together. But if you do not address my problem, if Apurvadoes not address the problem of a changemaker, a social entrepreneur, a system orchestrator, there is really no chance for them to offer it back. 

Because if my value is not- if I am not gratified in my way of problem solving, I will not necessarily come together to solve it. So we look at it from two lenses. How can I create abundance from the lens of efficiency? which is really what AI does well. Can we do speed and scale? Can we do more? So which means that your cost to realise value reduces, the time to realise value drops. There is really good incentive for you to participate. 

Only then can you solve the effectiveness problem, which is for us to come together to solve. So in some sens we measure Apurva as a ‘T’. Can you do better and faster in your mission, your program, and then offer a portion of that for co-creation or connecting to a larger wisdom of the network?. You cannot start with the other way around.

Very rarely can you start. I can speak for myself if I don’t see value for myself. I don’t think I will come to offer value for the rest. So you will have to solve the problem of an organisation and then get them to connect in the ecosystem. And that’s really how we have designed Apurva So, if we can really do that 100 X for every organisation, then there is an incentive for them to collaborate. 

On the other side, in the network model for a unit I offer, you get 100x back. Even when you offer it back to the network, there is a lot of abundance which comes back to you in the connect. Many times it’s very difficult to realise that from day one. So you really have to drive for efficiency.

[Sid]

Do you think it’s also like the way organisations build a tech stack?

[Anand]

You should call it the Collective Wisdom stack. So I’m liking this now. Yeah. See, I think very interestingly, so there are three layers, or could be more, the the ground layer is the layer of communities. And then you have the layer on top which would be the changemaking Organisations. And then you have the layer on top, which is the enabling organisations. Each of them perform one action and only one action and do it repeatedly. And that is, or one set of actions, which is, what we call as the ability to listen to their networks, their communities, enable the communities to learn, or they learn to act on the problem. 

So we call it as Listen, Learn, Act. Why Listen, Learn, Act? Because it’s super integral to everything we do as humans, right? We perceive, we process, we respond. It’s a sense, sense-making and acting. And in fact, this conversation is if you think about this, we are listening, learning and acting, acting in terms of knowledge, collaboration whatever. So the thinking is if we can connect our listens, if we can connect our learns, and our acts, then an emergent behavior comes. And then the horizontal, like I said, the stack is horizontally connect and vertically connect. Then you’re starting to see things at scale. It’s as simple as that.

[Anjali]

Makes me think of how, or it gives me a sense that you’re infusing systems and the people in it with a sense of agency. And I also know, like, from whatever, I know you, that you’ve always had the knack of bringing us back to agency every time we stray from it, as the North Star for everything that we’re doing. Are there any stories where you’re just built like this, or are there any stories anywhere that have kind of move you closer to keeping that at the heart of the work that you do as an individual and as a mission leader?

[Anand]

Okay. So I’m also a farmer, mostly a failed farmer, the all of the mangoes are a bit of byproduct, but, with challenges you get pulled from two extremes. On one side, you know that you keep doing this, you still fail. And that’s the challenge every farmer kind of encounters. So they hardly kind of meet their ends. On the other side, we really talk about scale, problem-solving, reimagination. 

So this kind of, this polarity, challenges me a lot. But on weekends, I go there and see nothing is working on. Many times things don’t work. But there’s so much of beauty in that, stories there. And then the other side, when you really start building this and look at statistical models and you have the ability to express yourself, we have narratives, we have the ability to tell stories. But how does it translate on the ground? So always indexed on communities, always indexed on problem solving. 

Because at least my belief is, it has to solve. So I always take a solution mindset and not a- so that’s why I need to solve. If it doesn’t solve there, then this side doesn’t matter. So, by design, everything in Apurva closes back to the communities. If you do not have the ability to give it back to the communities, with many times, two things which happened or there are two things which are so abundant which we leverage in Apurva is the voices of people and then the interactions which happen between civil societies and the communities. But I would say many times that the interactions are very extractive. 

You take something back to build your programs. I don’t say it always, always. But many times you never give it back to the communities. So how does that knowledge which are offered back to you close the loop? That’s one part. The second part is the fact that the community is the most proximate to solving the problems. And how do we close the loop, the reverse, just how do we learn from them? And how can you codify the learnings into your program so that that’s really where AI comes in, and informs your hypotheses, informs the way you design your programs, and really enables all of us to see what’s emerging from the ground?

[Anjali]

How do the communities have this? If I can just go back, the Learn, Sense, Act, you know, the cycle, do the communities also have, the ability to do this?

[Anand]

Yes, absolutely. So, for example, the work with, say the Ministry of Agriculture, where, we were able to sense what’s happening on the ground, and we found that there is a lot of local knowledge, and, that’s where we started this prototype with the State Government of Tamil Nadu. And we said, how do you unlock the innovations from the ground and make it available to the farmers? 

And that’s where we kind of look at them as the first-mile innovators and not the last-mile recipients. And that knowledge is so amazing. And the reason it’s so amazing is because they are constraint-bred. So they design on constraints and such constraints are where innovations happen the most. And since I kind of come from the AI side, you know, the DeepSeek, right. This DeepSeek is built on Constraints. You see that kind of amazing, kind of innovations which they’ve done for a different, deeper podcast, which challenge the status quo of how traditional way of building AI models is kind of questioned. So how do you unlock? 

There is so much abundance. And can we make this real? And how can the innovations in the ground inform the programs or inform the larger system and not the larger system informing the communities? Of course there’s merit, but how do you create this feedback loop? Like Donella Meadows says, how do you create these leverage points or you feedback loops? What are the points in this network in that 13 points of leverage do you have to start thinking of designs? Very integral to how we design. So to your point, the earlier point, systems thinking is very integral, in the way we have looked at Apurva and agency. How do you close the loop with communities?

[Anjali]

But where does Apurva fit in in the AI landscape currently? And what is the potential do you see, in terms of how AI can give us more hope in solving right now or open up a host of possibilities that we haven’t considered before?

[Anand]

So by design, in the website, the only world that you see AI is in the URL. We don’t talk about AI, but we’ve taken a very different position that, like I said, right. So, there is massive opportunity to connect the dots. And we’ve, we kind of designed AI from a lens of bottom up problem solving. Again, if you look at scale today, most levers of scale comes through government- policy and government. That’s really where scale usually happens.

And you call that as a Gaussian curve, Bell curve. I will try to simplify this and see. So the point is in a Bell curve you work towards the averages. You work towards an average population. But then when you look at complex systems you don’t work on averages. You have very extreme sides of things. You don’t have one size fits all. And so top-down models only don’t solve. So we have to think of bottom-up models. So in our mind we don’t look at Apurva AI to be a tool. But how do you really build infrastructures which can solve for large complex problems? 

So that’s really how we look at things. And the real solving happens in the communities. The real solving happens in the networks. And we are not here to design for zero-sum, which means your AI is better than my AI, can we come together to solve? So can AI play a role in bringing us together, by offering value to you, value to all of us, and then connecting all of that? And the other side to all of this is how do you build this- On one side, the communities are proximate to the problem. Can the AI be proximate to the community? 

That’s kind of the framing. And if you can build this, the context which the AI picks is coming from the community and it is not polluted by the rest of the ecosystem, by the internet. And that proximity to the community becomes very, very defensible. And then now think of the fact that this is so diverse, so many communities, so much of context, and can we create this unifying space for all this context to come together? 

And emergence happens. And not with the mindset of problem-solving. But from a mindset of creating this space for us to even see things at scale. And hopefully the layers of actual problem solvers come and solve for it.

[Anjali]

So AI as a connector, not the solution.

[Anand]

AI is the connector, AI is an assist. AI can do things which humans may not be best at doing. And be an enabler of problem solving.

[Sid]

From what I sense, Apurva isn’t the product. Then what would it be? How will you kind of if it’s not a product?

[Anand]

See eventually, we build some experiences. So there is a product lens if you want to put it out. But the intent is not to build the product because by definition, if we build a product, I think I have an answer. Versus can you create a space for reflection? So we kind of look at this is as building blocks. 

With the ability to experience and do things with it, like your Lego blocks. And the other side to this is also the fact that, the power of combinations is so powerful, it kind of creates exponential effect. So how do you kind of allow different forms of knowledge to come together? And through that, can you combine and see things like a kaleidoscope. So turning it around, seeing new configurations, new configurations, each one different to the one before. 

So yeah, never designed to be very kind of linear or one way of seeing things because you don’t see, for example, one version of Apurva where we deployed and the communities which used to not have internet or smartphones. So the way they configured, not in a digital form, is the people on the other side, talked through their feature phone and this organisation was on this side. And, they had a version of Apurva running on speaker. And so that knowledge flowed through into Apurva on this side and then go back into the system. So we have no idea how people use it. And different manifestations and learnings.

[Sid and Anjali]

You’ve been a part of C4EC for, Not just C4EC, you’ve been – Like Societal Platform days – origin days.. Some time in between. Chief Advisor. Oh, yeah. I mean, from then the Anand then to Anand, mission leader, Apurva AI, what are the mindset shifts that you’ve kind of gone through?

[Anand]

See one thing I still hold very strongly is the need to look at agency. But then the other side is how do you measure it? Okay. This is very important. We have design systems and values. In fact, the first version of Apurva which we tried, we kind of brought the value system. So I think that’s a huge learning is how do you build on values and purpose? 

So I think, for sure learnings and how do you simplify complexity I think is also something I’ve learned. So I don’t know if I purged stuff out. And maybe there’s a different journey now of looking at more of technology-led Innovations that becomes very central. So, I don’t know, maybe there’s something. 

[Sid]

The reason that I asked it was because it’s been such a long journey with being here, and I’m sure there has been so many conversations, and that has led to a moment of saying either, ‘Aha! Wow!, I should incalculate this’, or maybe even saying, ‘This is not something that I want to do.’ And all of those choices can lead to you being Anand that you are now. 

[Anand]

I think one thing which I’ve been so fortunate to be part of is the ability to talk to so many or engage with, not talk but engage with more than hundreds of organisations and something which really stuck was the fact that each of them were such amazing innovators in their own way. And something which has always bothered is how do we unlock those innovations? So that’s been so central to me as a person. Is, being more hands on. 

So I kind of always appreciated what they did. So I’ve always wanted to see how do we get them to the next best space in their journey? Places where I’ve been challenged is, unrestricted thinking, is a great thing to do, but I always put it back in the organisation and do they have the agency and choice to do it? Unrestricted reimagination is a very empowering way of design, but how do you apply it and get them in the journey, is something which I have not been able to apply. So what is the right Reimagination, so that we are able to get them to move in their journey of change? 

This is how we design in Apurva. What is the next best movement, while being observant of a larger purpose, a goal? But in some sense it’s a mix of where you need to be and working backwards, but also being realistic on where you are. Because this is my offer. So I need to move from where I am. And so kind of bringing all of this together. A kind of a byproduct of this is how do you build for low cost, high value immediate ROI?. 

And give them abundance to solve. So these are all things which, so in some sense more Actionable, more problem solving, more solution oriented is how we look at things, but also seeing what would be the right Reimagination. So reimagination without a redesign does not help. So what does that even mean? So those are kind of maybe lessons I’ve taken back.

[Sid]

Where do you see Apurva going from where it is now? 

[Anand]

See there is a product evolution. But I think more importantly what is the purpose of evolution? I think we started by saying this is more mission driven. And our goal is to impact 750 organisations, by using Apurva. 750 organisations. Again, it’s a number.

We don’t know what it means, but can we really create meaningful networks of organisations using Apurva? And can these organisations come together, say, across health, livelihood, climate, and can that collectively tackle complex problems across the global South? That’s at least how we are thinking of this. We don’t know. We are trying to see if we can get to 50 go-lives this year. And then build from there. It’s emergent. It is emergent! There you go.

[Sid]

In an ideal world, once you’ve kind of said that Apurva has achieved what it set out to do, what would be your goal next and how would you kind of look at Apurva and say, this is what I want to take it to next?

[Anand]

That’s 5 years from now. My roadmap changes every five days. I think it’s not the technology. If we can leave this space with a framework because at least I believe, everybody is aligned with the need to index on communities, solve for scale. But I don’t know if there are efficient and effective ways to do it. If Apurva can fill that space. And technology plays a very critical role.I think one thing which I am continuing to do is how do we bring other Technologies? Outside of AI, what else is is happening in this ecosystem? Is there something more fundamental in the role that AI can play? 

That’s something I’m investing personally. So if I can leave this space with, with a very useful DPI, which, community can hold and adopt, and also a framework to think of problem solving, which can complement systems thinking or design thinking or the work we do in systems in Societal Thinking, any of these, can it really amplify the way they look at problem solving? That’s really what would be a good exit for Apurva..

[Sid]

And Anand, anything that you want to probably say to people who are looking at complex problems and how your experience could help shape their narrative as well, in the sense that how they could look at complex problem and how AI could do this too? 

[Anand]

And these are changemakers? 

[Sid]

These are changemakers and young changemakers. I mean, maybe some we are just getting into it and is probably looking at day one. Or Day 0.

[Anand]

I think, be obsessed with the problem and also believe that there are many, many solvers. One person cannot solve. And how do you come together to solve is a very important framing. In this sector, look at technology as a very important driver of change. You don’t lead with technology, but technology is very relevant for change. So it is really important for us to adopt technology. Problem first, amplified by technology, becomes very important.

[All speakers] Thank you, Anand.

Thank you.

I hope I get mangoes.

Lovely. Amazing conversation.

I hope to see this frame in your office.

And of course.

This is now my IP. All right. Thank you guys.

Thank you so much.