Dr Sanjay Sinho, newly-appointed chief executive officer of the American India Foundation, traverses comfortably between the world of medicine and sociology.
Decades ago Dr Sinho, then a freshly-trained paediatrician from India, started working in the area of public health, but soon realised that most of the health practices of the people in India are decided on the basis of the social context: the joint family system, neighbours and peer pressures.
The result was that Dr Sinho quit medical practice and went back to college. "I thought there is so much social dimension to the life of a person that I went back to college and studied social science, so that I can start thinking and understanding about the whole social process, and certainly there are certain leverage points which one can best use [by studying social sciences]."
He emerged with a degree in sociology, but was still undecided about his life and calling. He got an offer to work for CARE India, a subsidiary of CARE USA, a 58-year-old non-profit organisation trying to fight global poverty. He took on the job, which entailed responsibilities in the area of public health, but worked for a little less than a year before quitting CARE and heading back to the practice of medicine.
Those few years were crucial in deciding his future calling. "They were literally a churning period where I realised that what I liked the best was not medicine, but developmental sector work," he said. He came back to CARE in 1996, and says he has never had cause to take a backward look.
His initiation into developmental work was just incidental, he agrees, but points out that by the time he rejoined CARE India, it had become his lifelong passion. "What I bring to the table is the passion for India's development, but also experience in terms of organisational development within the non-profit sector," he said.
CARE USA brought him to America in 1998 as director to work on projects that have since spread around 70 countries.
"We are delighted to have Sinho join us and we are confident that the experience he brings in developing and managing large-scale programmes will take AIF to new heights," Victor Menezes, co-chair of the AIF board, said last month during AIF's fifth annual spring gala in New York City.
Dr Sinho, who is from Madhya Pradesh, points out that CARE, by virtue of having been around for a long time, has better developed systems and procedures as compared to the relatively younger AIF, and hence it would be 'interesting' to bring to the table the type of developmental experience he had acquired during his stint with CARE.
Dr Sinho, who is yet to settle down in New York after spending nearly a decade in Atlanta, said his first task is to rethink things, since AIF has been doing a lot of things in different fields. He believes that since the government sector in India now has a lot of resources and the private sector is vibrant, it is very important for the AIF to rethink its activities in a setting where there is plenty of social development funds available to India.
"We really have to think how we can bring some innovative thinking, which can be taken later on by government. So the first order of business for me is really coming up with a strategic plan for the AIF. Rather than our current approach of focusing on individual projects, we have to start thinking about how we can bring large-scale changes by working with the government, and bringing changes in the government system as well," he said.
He does not see AIF getting into new sectors besides education, health and livelihood, which have been the organisation's primary focus. "Within the focus area, the issue is how we change our working approach in a way so we become major catalysts for large-scale changes in India, rather than just creating small projects which are really doing very well," Dr Sinho said.
Sociology and medicine, he has found, are complementary disciplines. "I think if people want to work in the developmental sector, then they really need to understand that some of the basics of the development sector comes from a study of social sciences, may be sociology, anthropology, or something that helps them root their developmental thinking in the real context of the community, rather than in theory or technical fields," Dr Sinho said.
Like his unusual educational background medicine and sociology his unusual surname also evokes curiosity from those who are Indians or of Indian origin. "Yes, it's pretty unusual. But you know what my understanding is that at some point of time, my father used to write Singh and somehow it got misspelt during his high school years, and it became Sinho. And we got stuck with Sinho ever since," he laughs.