Nitish (PFM 2007-09) is an Associate Director within the Strategy and Build team at the Global Development Incubator. In his current role, he focuses on making migration safe for 140 million internal migrants in India.
Before joining GDI, he worked as a Senior Manager at MicroSave Consulting’s Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) domain and led the Asia Practice.
Nitish possesses 13 years of experience working on program implementation, financial inclusion, and MSME finance and development. His expertise lies in strategy development, financial capability development and implementation, and evaluation of government benefit transfer programmes.
Social Media:
Twitter: @nitish_narain
Q. How has been your journey from IIFM to this role?
A. Thanks to IIFM, I got an opportunity to work on diverse roles – microfinance operations, financial inclusion consulting, and program implementation, all of which have helped me grow professionally.
I clearly remember the placement day – January 2, 2009. It was a difficult year as the global financial crisis struck in 2008. It’s impact on our national economy and the job market was yet to be seen. However, we knew that there will more caution among recruiters. I sat for the first company BFIL, that had come for recruitment that year. After a long day, I got selected for BFIL. I always knew managing microfinance operations was not natural for me. However, I considered it a challenge and dived into it head-on. The experience at BFIL was enriching. I learnt a little bit about people management and realised the importance of the ‘Organisational Behaviour’ course at IIFM. I wish I spent more time internalising the learning when the sessions were on.
I was fortunate to attend a talk from one of our distinguished alumni, Vineet Rai at the IRMA campus during their annual fest ‘Udaan’ in 2008. One of the things that Vineet said during the talk struck me. He said, “one should stick with an organisation for at least two years – it takes one year for you to understand the organisation and another year for the organisation to understand you.”
As I was about to complete two years at BFIL, two key issues made me think to explore other opportunities – first the microfinance crisis in 2010 and second the question of whether I can contribute more to microfinance operations. The answer to both led me to take up an opportunity with MicroSave in 2011. I spent nearly 10 years at MicroSave, where I was fortunate to work on diverse projects that ensured that I never had a dull moment. MicroSave played an important role in shaping my career: exposed me to general consulting work, provided an opportunity to become an expert in some subjects, and a chance to work with the senior management of financial institutions, corporates, and even the government, and an opportunity to travel to many countries.
In January 2021, I joined Global Development Incubator (GDI). GDI is a venture builder for impact at scale. At GDI, we are long-term partners, who roll up our sleeves and deep dive into issue areas to develop a portfolio of strategic bets with the potential for impact at scale, which we help bring to life. Currently, we are working with a partner organisation to make internal migration safe.
Q. What were some of the key milestones/learning in this journey that you would like to share with us?
A. IIFM and the period after have been a period of self-discovery. There were times when I was out of my comfort zone and it was these times that accelerated learning. Every job has been an important milestone and I list below some of the key learnings that I acquired as I moved from one milestone to the other.
- The stint at BFIL taught me to manage large field operations and the skill to get things done in a team setting. This is still a work in progress and I can never be confident that I have figured this out completely.
- MicroSave helped to build an ability to articulate my thoughts and the ability to translate my thoughts into words both written and spoken. It also helped build a consulting mindset: the ability to look at things from 30,000 ft.
- My current role is about building ventures, so it requires a bit of both consulting and operations. I can say that what I have done in MicroSave and BFIL culminates in my current role. It requires the translation of ideas into action.
Q. What is the most satisfying part of your current role?
A. I derive the most satisfaction from the issue that I am working on – making internal migration safe for 140 million migrants in India. While a lot of work has happened on cross-border migration but not much has happened on internal migration. Had the Covid-19-induced national lockdown not happened, the issue would have remained under the cover. What makes this more exciting is that we are attempting to address the issue at scale by fostering active collaboration across the community, civil society, industry, and government.
Q. Has your learning at IIFM helped in shaping how you approach your professional roles?
A. It has very much. Quite often we realize the importance of courses much later. One such course is organization behaviour (OB), which was taught by Prof. Rekha Singhal and Prof. Parul Rishi. I always found the course very appealing as it has an element of psychology and group behaviour. The only challenge was that I could not find its application while I was in college. But as I joined my first job and moved in my career, I realised that the most important course was organisation behaviour as at the end of the day you are working with a group of people and it is critical to understand how people respond individually and in a group setting. The course also helps me reflect on my behaviour and the biases that may be influencing my behaviour and action.
Of course, the courses taught by Prof. C. S. Rathore continue to help me. The tips he gave on making presentations still help me. These days I watch his videos on YouTube. They continue to help me in my day-to-day work.
At the mindset level, IIFM helped in sensitization towards developmental issues through a mix of the curriculum, assignments, and field visits. Further, participation in different club activities provided an opportunity to work on live problems and solve them with the collective efforts of the team.
Q. Who (or what) are the biggest influences or drivers in your careers? What would be your advice to freshers and IIFM graduates who are looking to choose similar sectors/roles?
A. I got inspired by a lot of my batchmates. There was an incredible diversity of personalities, the skills and experiences they brought and the perspectives they had. I consciously tried to learn from them and imbibe the best of everyone.
My current and past colleagues have also actively pushed me to develop critical thinking. I think what is special is that no one ever prescribed me what I should do. They shared their experience and most of the time, they led me to experiment.
My advice to freshers and IIFM graduates is to actively talk to people (juniors, subordinates, seniors, peers, and others) and hear their stories and experiences. There are many questions for which we are chasing answers. I believe we will get a perspective on those by just talking to people.
Q. What are your favourite memories during your IIFM days?
A. The images of the hostel, mess, canteen, academic block, room 119 (now ‘Samagam’), sunset point, and the streetlamps near the T-junction as you enter the campus are permanently etched in my memory. Several stories come rushing when I recollect these images. These stories are of success, frustration, personal struggles, and many times just of the ordinary mundane time that I spent alone and with friends over the two years in IIFM.
As I mentioned earlier, IIFM was a period of self-discovery. I always wanted to carve out a space for myself in my batch. I never wanted to be limited to just a number in a batch of sixty people. For the first two months, it was about finding my own USP, and interest areas. I also got to know myself better. I participated in a stand-up act with my friend Dhruv Tiwari and then followed up by participating in a skit competition. I had no idea that I could do either of these. Thanks to my batchmates Anurag, Dhruv, and Munish who got me into this. We did a skit in Kalpataru and later Prof. C. S. Rathore called us in his cabin and appreciated the skit and suggested we perform at Bharat Bhawan. I was thinking that I didn’t know anything about skits before that.
My roommate, Rohit Modh, was very enterprising and kept trying new things and I always tried to support him. He led the Nature Club and decided to build a website called Antareep. I helped him with drafting the content for the website and was overjoyed when the website was launched.
Q. As an alumnus, what is your advice to freshers or IIFMites who wants to explore similar paths?
A. My advice is more general, and I think these will help across diverse professional journeys.
- Keep investing in yourself. It is quite likely that you do not know what you want and perhaps you may not get there in the first iteration. Understanding that this is a journey, and the journey may have several twists and turns will help. But the idea is to know what you want to do and why you want to do it and keep working towards it.
- There is no experience which will go waste. All the experiences of life/IIFM will help, be it clubs, committees, or anything else. So, it is important to expose oneself to experiences. More and more experience will evolve one’s thinking. The campus offers an opportunity to be exposed to diversity. To summarise, experience, diversity and self-reflections would come in handy both professionally and personally.
Q. What is your typical day at the office?
A. I have been working from home for almost eight years now and have been managing teams remotely. This means that I spend a lot of time in virtual meetings. My family thinks that I run a call centre :). However, working from home has been easy for me because of the tremendous support that my parents provide in running the house. I don’t have to worry about the daily chores as they take care of them completely.
Q. And how about weekends, Hobbies, Family and anything else you want to add?
A. Weekends are a mixed bag: walks, podcasts, music, and of course grocery and other household chores. I sometimes cook pasta for my daughter. Some of the weekends are spent on planning travel. I am not an avid traveller as my wife is. She pushes me to look for destinations and plan trips. I am thankful to her that we were able to make many trips together. Otherwise, most of my weekends would have been spent at home.
Q. Favourite Books, movies, authors.
A. Recently, I have developed a strong affinity for podcasts. Thanks to my friend and colleague at MicroSave who first introduced me to this. Some of my go-to podcasts are The Seen and The Unseen by Amit Verma, Mission ISRO by ATS Studio, The Happiness Lab with Dr Laurie Santos, A Brief History of Mathematics by Marcus Du Sautoy, and You’re Dead To Me by Greg Jenner.
Some of the recent books that I enjoyed reading were – The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali, Masala Lab by Krish Ashok.
Q. IIFM is driven by alumni’s passion and commitment towards its goal. How would you like to contribute to IIFM or IIFM alumni, and students?
A. Thanks to the faculty and the alumni affairs Committee I got an opportunity to conduct guest lectures and a session to prepare for placements for the current batch. I will be happy to continue supporting these activities. If there is anything else that the IIFM community thinks I can support, I will be happy to support it.
Q. Any suggestions on who you want to get profiled/interviewed here?
A. My batchmates Shweta Rajpurohit and Siddharth Iyer.