Vikas Gambhir’s journey into the development sector followed an unconventional route. He spent nearly a decade in banking and corporate consulting, chasing growth much like any traditional finance professional. However, a single conversation at a global conference served as a “shake-up call,” prompting him to question his trajectory and purpose. This realization led him to step away from a flourishing career in advisory to establish one of the early structured development sector advisory practices within an Indian consulting firm.
Nearly two decades later, his experience spans collaborative work with NGOs, CSR donors, government bodies, and international funders. He is an engaged development sector advisor and active partner at SVP India, a philanthropic network, bringing over a decade of dedication to the group alongside serving as board member at some progressive development sector organizations. Today, his primary focus centres on a critical area the sector has long struggled to prioritise: structuring the projects, building the institutional capacity of organisations to ensure their grassroots work creates a lasting impact.
The Early Years: Banking, Consulting, and Coming Home
Vikas started his career in 1997-98 in banking, a natural first step for a finance postgraduate. For nearly seven years, he worked at a time when marquee organisations were building out their capital units. The role offered international travel, exposure to well-known brands, and steady professional growth.
But banking, after a certain point, started to feel repetitive. “There are very strict laid out procedures—an assembly-line approach to conducting yourself in the processes,” he says. He made his first pivot, moving into consulting. His work took him to manufacturing setups of global iron and steel organisations, and he moved abroad again, this time with his family. That chapter lasted roughly a couple of years before he decided to come back to India.
Back home, he joined a consulting firm, where he would go on to work for many years. He grew, managed a large client portfolio and by his own account was doing well. Development sector clients began appearing in his client list during this period. He is straightforward about his mindset at the time. “I’ll be very honest. I was looking at them more from a dollar value rather than actually committed to the space. It was more like a tick in the box kind of aspect for any client you are serving.”
The Conversation That Changed Things
The turning point came at a global conference hosted in India, where leadership from across the world had gathered. In one of those interactions, a senior global leader mentioned that the development sector practice group in their country was at that time the largest practice group among peers and in another country their development sector practice was larger than the entire India operation.
For someone working in India, a country that is one of the largest recipients of development funding in the world, this landed hard. “That was a little shake-up call,” Vikas says. He began thinking about why, in a country of this scale and need, the advisory ecosystem around the development sector was so thin.
He approached his leadership and asked for permission to explore the space. The first reaction, he recalls, was one of disbelief. They questioned why he would leave a growing setup to explore an unknown trajectory. He requested five or six colleagues to come with him, people who were willing to at least explore what this space had to offer. They agreed. Together, they set up a dedicated development sector advisory practice within the organisation, one of the early structured efforts of its kind within an Indian consulting firm.
Watching the Sector Change
When Vikas entered the space, the structural gaps were considerable. Institutional capacity across NGOs was limited. Governance was weak. Trust between stakeholders, whether government, civil society, or corporates, was thin. Many organisations were running parallel systems because working along systems was either too much ask or minimal flexibility.
He has watched the sector change steadily over the fifteen years since. The CSR Act brought compliance rigour that simply had not existed before. Donor organisations, which had at times placed PR, HR, or even marketing professionals in charge of their CSR functions, began building more serious internal capacity. Professionals from the corporate world started moving into the sector. Philanthropy began, in some cases, to offer more unrestricted funding that allowed organisations to invest in themselves.
The shift he considers most significant is attitudinal. “People started believing in shared outcomes,” Vikas says. The government, which had historically been resistant to outside involvement, began to change its stance. “They started accepting outside government stakeholders to come and work with them and enable them, help them, not only to identify the areas of challenges or changes to be made, but also co-create with them.”
He does not suggest the challenges are behind the sector. Duplication on the ground, with multiple NGOs working in the same geography on the same issue without speaking to each other, remains common. CSR funding continues to concentrate in states that already have industrial presence. But the overall direction, he believes, has shifted. “Things have moved on,” he says.
When an Assignment Became a Turning Point
One assignment did more to shape his focus than almost anything else. A foreign donor organisation asked him to review roughly 20 Indian NGOs it had been funding for a decade. It was supposed to be a standard consulting job. Six months in, the report was still not complete.
Every file he opened revealed a problem. Processes that had not been followed, policies that existed on paper but not in practice, records that raised more questions than they answered. The donor was unsettled. The recipients were taken aback. Vikas was frustrated, and he says so plainly.
After almost a year had passed and the donor asked him to do yet another review of the same organisations, he told them directly: “You have two choices. Either you do away with your recipients in India, go with the new recipients. Or if you have trusted them for past 10 years, then invest in their capacity this time.”
He did not think much would come of it. “I never knew this would happen,” he says. But the donor, for the first time in its history, directed the next full year’s grant entirely toward building the institutional capacity of those organisations.
“My point of departure was not that,” Gambhir told The Logical Indian. “But my point of arrival changed everything.”
That experience clarified something for him. The problem was not intent. Across the sector, there was no shortage of commitment or effort. The problem was that organisations lacked the basic institutional infrastructure to sustain, govern, or scale what they were doing. From this point, capacity building moved to the centre of his work.
SVP India engagement: Philanthropy That Goes Beyond the Cheque
For around a decade, Vikas has been associated with Social Venture Partners India, a network built on a very different model of giving.
The structure is distinctive. Individuals, including senior professionals, entrepreneurs, business families, and younger working professionals, come together in city-based chapters. Each partner contributes an annual amount to a shared corpus. The chapter collectively identifies small NGOs, some with an annual outlay of as little as fifty lakhs, and on-board them after a diligence process. Two or three partners then become lead partners for each NGO, spending dedicated time with the founders with cadence, co-creating a work plan for the year, and bringing their own professional skills to the table, whether in strategy, finance, HR, marketing, or IT.
“It’s not a matter of just writing cheques,” Vikas says. “That’s the easiest part to do.” What partners bring alongside the money is time, professional expertise, personal networks, and introductions to potential funders and collaborators for enabled funding.
SVP India now has seven chapters and over 800 partners across the country. Vikas joined the Delhi chapter in its initial years, and has served on national committees, the grants review committee, and as a lead partner to several NGOs over this time. Some of the organisations SVP began working with in their early years, when they were running on less than a crore annually, have since grown to organisations with outlays of multiples.
The model addresses a gap Vikas had been watching for years. Organisations could be twenty years old and still have less focussed governance infrastructure & institutional systems, and no capacity beyond their programmes. “Even after being in existence for 20 years, they struggle on that front, despite the great work they are doing.” Conventional donors rarely fund this kind of capacity building. SVP tries to fill that gap with something money alone cannot provide.
COVID and the Capacity Support That Reached Scale
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the development sector faced a crisis it was entirely unprepared for. Organisations whose entire work depended on being physically present with communities suddenly could not operate. “When the lockdowns began, Vikas says, even his own team was at a loss. “For the first month, we were all figuring out what to do. Sitting at home, working, delivering for this space, everybody was evolving.”
Then his team got to work. They created a capacity building handbook focussing on building resilience in time of uncertainty covering the full NGO lifecycle, drawing on everything the team had accumulated over years of working in the sector. It addressed how organisations could focus and run their governance controls in various internal processes remotely including HR, Finance, Logistics, Procurement, Administration and IT while holding meetings virtually, maintain governance structures, and continue managing programmes without being on the ground. Vikas was also part of the disaster committee of a network representing over a lakh NGOs at the time, which gave him direct insight into what organisations were actually struggling with. The handbook was shaped by those conversations.
When it was released and shared freely, the response was far beyond what the team had anticipated. Over 1.5 lakh NGOs accessed it. More than 10 NGO leaders wrote forewords recommending it to the wider sector.
“That was a really good contribution we felt we gave to the space back at that time,” he says.
Small Moments, Long Motivation
The Logical Indian asked Vikas what keeps him motivated in a sector where change is slow, uneven, and rarely straightforward. His answer was honest about where motivation starts and where it needs to eventually arrive. Probably that’s the reason, he in spite of his professional degrees of finance, still dwelled into doing in MS in this sector just to stay relevant in past decade with simple ethos – learning never stops and the way this sector embraces you, one always feel motivated to give back with lots of unlearning and relearning.
“At times, it’s more selfish in the beginning… because it is more gratifying for your own self. You feel good about it.”
But that shifts, he says, with time spent in the field. Field visits were never something he imagined as part of his work when he was a finance professional. Over time, they became important to how he understood the space. “The moment that cusp of change happens, that it’s not about you, it’s about somebody else on the other side, I think the song of motivation comes automatically.”
There are also smaller, quieter moments that stay with him. He had once posted a video from a visit to a school in Assam, where children had built a handwashing station out of a long pipe with holes drilled into it. They had even created a 30-second song to mark the washing time.
They had no soap. After the video was posted on social media, a viewer committed to supplying soap to that school and geography for a full year. Vikas did not find out immediately. But when he did, it confirmed something he had come to believe about this era. “You never know what encourages whom,” he says.
He agreed to this conversation, he says, for a simple reason. “If it just makes a small thought-process impact on somebody reading it, it will be good, and I’ll feel content with that contribution.”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
At The Logical Indian, we believe that change in the development sector rarely comes from grand gestures. It comes from people like Vikas Gambhir, who stayed in the room long enough to understand what was actually broken, and then quietly got to work fixing it. In a space that often celebrates the visible and the large, his focus on the unglamorous work of building institutional capacity is a reminder that lasting change is built from the inside out.
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