Learning the Art of Giving

For Rohini Nilekani, making the money was the easy part. The Bangalore-based wife of Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani, Rohini owns 1.67% of the Indian outsourcing company, and her personal fortune soared to about $300 million along with the meteoric rise of its stock. She calls her windfall "a quite frightening amount of money." And as soon as it started rolling in, the social activist and journalist began to look for ways to give enormous sums away.

That's been the hard part. With little guidance available for the country's would-be Rockefellers, Nilekani became a self-taught philanthropist, building two foundations...