“Will the government take this over?”

“Which government department will take this over?” If you are a leader of a nonprofit, how many times have you heard this question from a funder? At a point in time in the 1990s, this question made sense.

The Indian state was expanding service delivery across the country, while many nonprofits, working with a mix of public and private funds, were filling gaps in public provision. These organisations were not only delivering services differently; they were also widening the state's sense of what was possible. In underserved parts of the country, many of them laid the ground for rights-based…