How Salman Khan's Being Human Pays for Its Charity Work
Salman Khan's charity trust gets a share of Being Human clothing sales. The programmes, the royalty model and which figures are dated.
Being Human is two things that share a name: a charitable trust that Salman Khan registered in 2007 and a clothing and accessories brand whose sales help fund it. A Business Today profile from 2018 and the brand's own story page explain how the arrangement is meant to work. Most of the figures are several years old, and we date them below.
The foundation
Business Today says the Being Human Foundation was registered in 2007 as a non-profit charitable trust to provide healthcare and primary education to economically weaker sections. For its first decade, it reports, the foundation organised cataract surgeries, free eye camps and women's healthcare camps across India.
In 2013 the foundation partnered with Fortis Foundation to offer free treatment to children with congenital heart defects, under the Little Hearts Programme. The paper says 849 surgeries had been funded through that programme until July 2015.
Education and skills
On education, Business Today lists partnerships with the non-profit Akshara High School, the NGO Aseem and the Maharashtra Prabodhan Seva Mandal, providing free education to 500 children directly and 4,000 indirectly. The foundation also funded career development centres with NIIT and Coca-Cola, and educational resource centres in Zilla Parishads in Maharashtra.
Under a programme called Project Veer, the paper says, the foundation provided a platform to skill 2,700 differently-abled people and prepare them for jobs. It adds that Being Human stores have a policy of employing at least one differently-abled person. These are 2018 figures from the profile, not current numbers.
How the clothing pays
The brand's own story page gives the origin. Salman Khan once painted a T-shirt and wore it to an event, only to find replicas being sold by street vendors in Mumbai. That, it says, sparked the idea of making fashion a force for good. The brand says it continues to release annual capsule collections featuring his original artwork and paintings.
Business Today says the foundation floated its clothing at HDIL Couture Week in 2009, with a tie-up with the cotton and linen clothing company Cottonworld. T-shirts were sold at offline stores and on BookMyShow, and watches on a separate site. It quotes the actor saying that whatever sells, "we will sell it", with all the money going into the foundation. It also quotes him on why the model exists: "We couldn't keep asking people for donations".
The royalty
The paper explains that the foundation set up a revenue-sharing model with a private company. It receives a 5.75 percent share of sales of T-shirts, women's wear, kids' wear, jewellery, flip-flops and electric bikes sold under the Being Human name. That is the mechanism by which sales translate into charity money, so the percentage matters more than the charitable language.
The paper adds that Mandhana Retail Ventures, the company it names in connection with the brand, posted sales of Rs 216 crore and a net profit of Rs 20.02 crore in 2016-17, according to its balance sheet. The brand was sold from 256 points and had an exclusive deal with the Landmark Group for West Asia, it says.
Why it is an unusual model
Business Today's headline calls the arrangement an atonement, though that is the magazine's framing and not the foundation's. The brand's current story page now speaks of "sustainable philanthropy" and values such as love, care, share, hope, help and joy.
What we could not confirm
We could not find audited figures from the foundation for any year after 2018, nor the current royalty rate. The 5.75 percent share, the sales number and the beneficiary counts come from a 2018 article. We did not verify the brand's present store count or its current retail partners. The brand's own page is promotional and we read it that way.
Sources
*Cover photo: Laura Lee Dooley from Arlington, VA, USA, Wikimedia Commons, *[*https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-IIFA2017_-_NYC_%2835751567862%29.jpg*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-IIFA2017_-_NYC_%2835751567862%29.jpg)* (CC BY 2.0).*