A founder of a grassroots NGO in Tamil Nadu once told Guruprakash that he could not spend 900 rupees on a domain name for his organisation. If he had that money, he said, he would spend it on food or education for a child who needed it right now.
Guru, founder and CEO of People4Good, paused. “He wasn’t wrong,” Guru recalls. “That’s not ignorance. That’s a man whose entire moral compass points toward immediate human need.” It took him two hours to help that founder understand how one website could bring ten more children into his programme. But long after the conversation ended, the exchange stayed with him. It told him something essential about the work ahead: the gap wasn’t simply a technology gap. It was the absence of anyone willing to sit with these founders long enough to explain why any of it mattered.
People4Good, the organisation Guru built out of that understanding alongside two other co-founders Nandini Ravikrishnan & Santhosh Lourdraj, works at the intersection of social impact and systems support for NGOs across India. Its purpose, as Guru puts it in the simplest terms, is to become the tech team that NGOs never had.
A Sector That Quietly Broke
When COVID-19 arrived in 2020, the pressures on India’s nonprofit sector became visible in ways they hadn’t been before. About one in three NGOs were staring at a six-month survival window. Funding collapsed. The 2020 FCRA amendments, introduced for legitimate reasons of accountability and transparency, required foreign funds to route through a single designated branch, reduced administrative expense caps significantly, and restricted sub-granting to smaller organisations. The registered NGO count dropped from roughly 22,500 to under 16,000 in just four years.
In conversation with The Logical Indian, Guru was careful to note that the policy intent behind those amendments was valid. “Every policy transition takes time to settle, and some friction in that process is inevitable,” he said. What concerned him was something else entirely. During the exact period when compliance was being tightened, when processes were being restructured, the organisations that bore the heaviest burden were the smallest and most under-resourced ones. Grassroots NGOs with no legal teams, no tech systems and no buffer to absorb change.
But even before the pandemic, Guru had been watching the same structural problems play out across the sector for years. Programme officers managing beneficiary data in handwritten notebooks. Founders drowning in compliance paperwork. Critical ground-level data locked inside paper registers, never digitised, never analysed, never used to build better programmes or better policy. He had spent years inside grassroots organisations across India, not advising and not training, but observing. Listening. Staying long enough to understand what was actually happening.
The Two Stories Behind People4Good
Guru traces People4Good’s origin to two defining encounters, one about hesitation, one about exploitation.
The first was the domain-name conversation in Tamil Nadu. The second was darker. Guru has met founders who paid two to three lakh rupees to digital marketing agencies promising massive funding returns and received nothing. He knows one organisation that paid 2.5 lakh rupees to someone promising access to a Benevity account and foreign funding. The money disappeared. “This happened not because they were naive,” Guru says, “but because nobody had ever given them honest education about how the ecosystem actually works.”
These two experiences, the founder being too committed to spending on infrastructure and the founder being too trusting of the wrong people, became the foundation of what People4Good set out to do. “Not just to build technology solutions,” Guru explains, “but to first build understanding. Awareness. Trust. And then build systems that last.”
Going to the Ground
What separates People4Good from other tech-for-good organisations, Guru argues, is sequence. Most arrive with a product. P4G arrives with a question.
When an NGO reaches out, the team does not simply take the request at face value. They get on a call, understand what is being asked for, and then make a field visit. They go there. They sit inside the organisation.
In conversation with The Logical Indian, Guru described a visit to an organisation in Dindigul, Tamil Nadu, that had reached out with a simple request: a website. “We could have built it online and delivered it without ever stepping inside their office,” he said. But they went. The organisation had been working for over 26 years in women’s education and skill development, with 1,500 students benefiting and an 80 per cent placement rate. None of that was reflected in their digital presence. P4G built their website, set up their Google Workspace, secured Google for Nonprofits credits so they stopped paying for tools they could access for free, and trained the entire team. Today, Guru says, they are a long-term tech partner rather than a one-time client.
A similar story unfolded with an organisation from Mumbai working in environmental health and women’s health. They had reached out for an MIS system. The scale of their work was significant: over one lakh women educated on menstrual health and more than 25 lakh citizens reached through a green pharmacy initiative. But when P4G visited, they found something unexpected. The organisation already had Google Workspace, but because nobody had guided them, they were paying a third-party vendor for it. Their domain was with a separate vendor. Everything was scattered and expensive. “We didn’t just solve the problem they came with,” Guru says. “We solved the problems they didn’t even know they had.”
The Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About
Guru has a clear view of what is most persistently missing from how India discusses the social sector, and it is not funding.
“Everyone talks about funding gaps,” he says. “Very few people talk about the system gap.”
He offers an analogy: we expect NGOs to work like mobile phones, always on, always delivering. But we never stop to charge the battery. NGOs are expected to demonstrate impact, maintain compliance, manage beneficiaries, communicate with donors, and run programmes simultaneously, with teams that have never been trained on digital tools at that level. That is not a funding problem. That is a capability problem. And it is invisible because funders fund outputs, not capacity. Not systems. Not the people who build and maintain those systems.
The comparison he draws to the startup world is pointed. A startup doing work of equal scale will invest in its CRM, its data systems, its operational infrastructure, without question. Walk into an NGO doing the exact same volume of work, serving real communities, managing real beneficiaries, and filing real compliance documents, and suddenly technology becomes the last item on the budget. “There’s an unspoken rule in the sector,” Guru says, “that says operational investment in an NGO is somehow less justified than operational investment in a business. That is discrimination. And it’s costing us enormously.”
Building From Values
People4Good’s programmes are not designed in isolation from each other. Guru describes the design logic using a metaphor he learned from a friend, Siddesh, a farmer who also runs an NGO called Agro Rangers. When planting crops, Siddhesh told him, you don’t plant one seed alone. You place two different seeds together because certain plants support each other’s growth. He called it companion planting.
P4G’s Tech Incubation Programme and its SheDecode initiative work in exactly this way. The Tech Incubation Programme strengthens NGOs from the inside, building their digital systems and capacity. SheDecode trains women from rural areas on technology skills and places them in the nonprofit sector. One programme feeds the other. NGOs get the support they need. Women get employment opportunities in the social sector. Both grow together.
Guru is equally clear about what the organisation has chosen not to do. There have been opportunities to scale quickly, to take on more than P4G could deliver well, and to compromise on the depth of their engagement. They didn’t. “In the short term, that hurts,” he acknowledges. “Slower growth. Fewer logos on the website. But what we built instead was a reputation for actually doing what we say.”
He has also walked away from projects that did not align with the organisation’s values, even when the money was good. “That’s the clearest signal I can give about where our values actually sit,” he says. “Not in a document. Not in a tagline. In what we choose to say no to.”
What the Numbers Don’t Tell
In their second year, the organisations P4G worked with reached over 2,000 people directly and lakhs more indirectly through the programmes they run daily. P4G helped more than 500 organisations through capacity building and AI workshops, implemented over 90 technology solutions exclusively for nonprofits, helped nonprofits access over one crore rupees in free technology credits, and enabled 90 lakh rupees in funding for one partner by strengthening their data, systems, and narrative.
But Guru is quick to say what those numbers leave out. They don’t capture the field team that used to collect data on paper in areas with no connectivity and now syncs everything automatically once they’re back online. They don’t capture the founder who used to spend days preparing donor reports and now generates them in minutes. They don’t capture the organisation that didn’t know what their website traffic looked like and now makes decisions based on real data.
“These are the shifts that actually matter,” he says. “Not the numbers. The quiet change in how a team works. The confidence that comes when a system finally reflects the reality of the work being done on the ground.”
Still the Person in Between
Guru spent over a decade working across grassroots organisations before building People4Good, and trained more than 10,000 NGO staff on digital tools along the way. He describes his role as a translator between two worlds, the social sector and the tech ecosystem, offering something to each that the other could not provide alone.
What drove him eventually to build something of his own was not ambition. It was the accumulation of watching the same structural problems go unsolved year after year. Seeing decisions made far from ground reality. Seeing organisations building for reports rather than for people. Seeing a funding ecosystem that asked NGOs to demonstrate impact but did not fund the people who prepared those reports, or the systems needed to produce them reliably.
“NGOs aren’t failing,” he says. “Our funding models are.”
And at some point, he stopped waiting for someone else to build what he knew needed to exist.
He describes his journey with characteristic directness: “I was always the tech person in the room full of social workers and the social worker in the room full of tech people. P4G is where I finally stopped apologising for being both.”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
At The Logical Indian, we believe that purpose-driven work often happens in the least visible corners. Guruprakash Sekar and Nandini Ravikrishnan are not building People4Good for headlines. They are building it for the programme officer in a remote district who finally has a system that works, for the grassroots founder who no longer has to choose between compliance and community, and for the thousands of NGOs across India that have been doing extraordinary work without the infrastructure to sustain it.
In a sector where glamour often overshadows ground reality, People4Good is a reminder that the most meaningful change is frequently the quietest kind. That is precisely why it deserves to be heard.
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