The longest surviving organisations on earth are neither companies nor states. The Catholic Church has held together for close to two thousand years, outlasting the very empire that once hunted its followers, because it grasped early that the office must weigh more than the man who fills it. A regiment carries colours and a code of honour laid down long before any soldier serving under them was born and passes both to soldiers yet to come. Oxford was teaching four centuries before the Mughals reached Delhi, and teaches still.
Each of these has achieved a carrying of knowledge, standards and trust across so many lifetimes that the founders themselves have faded into footnotes to the thing they made.
India once wrote a proud initiating chapter of this story. Nalanda and Takshashila were among the earliest great residential universities anywhere, drawing scholars from China, Korea and Persia, sustained across centuries by the endowments of rulers who understood that a seat of learning would outlast any throne.
We gave the world the form and then, through disruption, invasion, turmoil and long neglect, misplaced the habit of building it. A good deal of India's modern institutional thinness runs back to that interruption.
The societies that surged ahead did the opposite by deliberately turning private fortune into permanent public capacity, at scale.
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Andrew Carnegie, who believed a man who dies rich dies disgraced, seeded some 2,500 libraries and the university that carries his name. Rockefeller money built the University of Chicago, Leland Stanford built Stanford in his son's memory, and Johns Hopkins founded a hospital and a university that reshaped American medicine.
Alfred Nobel converted a fortune made in explosives into the prize that still orders global science. These gifts share a signature that the giver backed an institution that could outlive him, and each has since done far more for the world than any cheque its founder could have written year to year.
The reason is by now well established. Rich societies emerge less from capital alone than from the institutions that make capital productive, the universities and courts and property rights that let knowledge and trust compound beyond a single lifespan. When the 2024 Nobel in economics went to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, it honoured exactly this finding, that prosperity follows the institutions a society chooses to build.
Here India holds a distinction few countries can claim. By the EdelGive Hurun reckoning, the single largest philanthropist of the past century was an Indian, Jamsetji Tata, whose endowments, begun in 1892, are valued today at more than a hundred billion dollars.
He wanted far more than wealth as his legacy. Industrialisation demanded capabilities the country lacked and his ambition ran from steel and power to science and higher learning. His bequest for research seeded the Indian Institute of Science, and later generations of the trusts helped raise TISS, TIFR and the Tata Memorial Hospital. Fortune became, again and again, institutions that produce knowledge and public capacity, a conception of capitalism a world away from mere accumulation.
Jamsetji himself drew the line that today's wealth holders most need to hear. He set apart what he called “patchwork philanthropy,” the giving that clothes the ragged and feeds the poor, from the deeper work of nation-building, arguing that what truly advances a country is “to lift up the best and the most gifted, so as to make them of the greatest service.” Charity relieves the suffering in front of us and India will always need it. An endowment does something rarer. It builds capacity that keeps giving long after the giver is gone. India has a fair bit of the first and far too little of the second.
The measure of a great house lies in the questions that reveal institutional character rather than balance-sheet strength.
Who can be trusted to think past the next quarter, year or decade? Who holds standards when nobody is watching? Who accumulates knowledge across generations? Who wields power while treating power as a means rather than the point?
Tata made even its character an economic asset, so its companies pay a royalty to use the Tata name and trust sits, quite literally, on the invoice eventually all in the service of good.
The recent turbulence around Tata Sons is a reminder that such principles survive only when each generation chooses to codify them and carry their cost, rather than trusting to the temperament of whoever holds the chair.
Set that inheritance beside the present moment. Media reported figures put India at 308 billionaires with combined wealth near ₹112.6 trillion, the third-largest concentration on earth, swollen by 57 new fortunes in a single year.
Against that, the entire EdelGive Hurun philanthropy list, 191 of the country's most generous givers, donated around ₹10,380 crore in a year, well under a tenth of one percent of billionaire wealth and more than half of it came from just ten families.
The wealth has arrived at civilisational scale. Alas, the endowment instinct has yet to follow it.
The honourable exceptions show what following it looks like. Shiv Nadar has poured thousands of crores into a university and schools built to outlast him and Azim Premji has directed the bulk of his fortune into a foundation and a university dedicated to Indian education. Both read the Tata method correctly, turning wealth into an institution with a horizon measured in generations, then handing it the freedom to grow beyond its founder.
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What India needs is for that to become the rule among its wealthy rather than the striking exception.
Edmund Burke described society as a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born. That partnership is the real inheritance the developed world enjoys, where the working life of an institution outruns the lifespans of the people who made it. India is now old enough and rich enough to build that inheritance for itself and its billionaires, more than anyone, hold the means.
A society grows great when its elders plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. India has never had so many who could plant on that scale.
Whether they choose to is the question that will shape the country its grandchildren inherit.
About the Author: Shubhranshu Singh is a marketing leader, columnist and advisor. He was CMO at Tata Motors from 2021 to 2025.
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