Inside Rainmatter Foundation's "climate bias" and the inner workings of the $100 million initiative by Zerodha, on how it aims to create better adoption, ecosystem-building, and collaboration to help climate efforts become mainstream
Kailash Nadh (left), chief technology officer and Nithin Kamath, founder and CEO, Zerodha
Nithin Kamath loves trees. ‘Is there a way to grow a tree fast?’, ‘Can we turn every terrace into a garden?’, ‘What if we take a neglected piece of land and turn it into a self-sustaining farm?’ are some of the comments that pop up during a free-wheeling conversation.
Basically, Kamath wants a little more forest, everywhere. It is with that in mind that in early January 2021 the founder and CEO of Zerodha, India’s largest stock broker, had made an announcement about launching the Rainmatter Foundation. A $100 million [around Rs 750 crore] commitment to focus on climate change at the intersection of livelihoods, afforestation, environmental conservation and rejuvenation. “What’s the point of fintech without a planet to live on?” Kamath, 42, had tweeted at the time. Sixteen months later, a lot of ground has been covered, and they have their thesis figured out.
Even as we speak at the Bengaluru office of Zerodha in early May, this journalist finds that the city that had been her home for five years until 2018 has become warmer, with temperatures hovering around 33 to 34 degree Celsius, according to AccuWeather. Just a week later, however, India’s technology capital would go on to experience heavy rainfall and thunderstorms, with the maximum temperature dipping to as low as 24 degree Celsius. Around the same time, as cyclonic storm Asani would form in the Bay of Bengal and cause rainfall in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) would warn of a fresh heatwave spell in Delhi, with temperatures expected to soar over 44 degree Celsius.
The damaging effects of climate change are already around us everywhere, and people are scrambling to adapt their lives. So much of this damage is “irreversible”, says Kailash Nadh, chief technology officer of Zerodha, stressing on their intent behind working toward solutions to combat the effects of climate change. A major area of focus is to look at climate at the intersection of livelihoods, because Kamath and Nadh believe that just reducing carbon footprint or re-greening or making other such efforts in silos is not going to be enough. “The human cost of climate change is going to be huge. You need to integrate people into these processes,” Nadh says.