Princess Jahnavi Kumari Mewar, a member of India’s historic Mewar royal family, is trying to galvanize family offices around the world to address humanity’s most existential need for life.
“I have conceptualized creating a center of innovation and excellence for addressing food and water insecurity around the world,” she said. “I don’t want to be the one telling family offices how to solve a problem. I want it to be a platform for collective action where we together come up with methods and solutions to address pressing global challenges, and they don’t need to be set in stone. In fact, I would suggest they be as fluid as possible so that it’s adaptive.”
Jahnavi stands as the 77th generation of the Mewar family — whose dynasty ruled regions of India for more than 1,300 years, from 566 to 1949. “Ours is the only family that never bowed down to either of the imperial powers — Mughals and British,” she told Crain Currency.
As founder of the multi-family-office co-investment firm Auctus Fora, Jahnavi visited New York City in September to attend the United Nations General Assembly and speak on panels related to global policy agendas. U.N. statistics show that 750 million people around the world face severe food insecurity.
Auctus Fora has advised on over $5 billion in assets.
Early beginnings
Jahnavi’s finance career began at the family office of her father, Maharaj Shakti Singh Mewar, who employed Jahnavi as a teenager in the late 1990s. Today, Princess Jahnavi manages a family office with her husband, Prince Parikshit Singh of Jodpur, since their royal wedding in 2017. She also recently joined the advisory board of ForbesAPEX, a new group that addresses issues that affect Asian and Pacific Island residents and the Asian-Pacific diaspora.
“Most families that have built immense wealth, regardless of how many generations they go back, I think there comes a point where somebody gets really greedy or overambitious,” Jahnavi said. “I think greed comes from ego, and all that comes from the fact that people generally today lack gratitude.”
To help gain that sense of gratitude, Jahnavi left India, where the Mewar family has a history of palaces in the lake city of Udaipur. She graduated from Deakin University in Australia and spent time living in England, the Netherlands, Geneva and Dubai.
Living away from India for 14 years allowed Jahnavi to “put myself outside of my comfort zone to create more emotional and social maturity for myself and create an identity that was outside of India and my family background. You don’t appreciate the things that are in front of you that are everyday things, be it a home or place or people. And the moment you get that distance, it’s a renewed love.”
In college, Jahnavi said, she took jobs as a waiter for a catering company and a nightclub promoter. Her advice to other heirs is to “humble yourself and see how the rest of the world lives and survives,” as the experience helps you become “a better leader and better human being as someone who has now gone through challenges that were yours to take on and overcome.”
Since Jahnavi returned to India, over 300 family offices have emerged in the country. For the first time, India recently overtook China as the largest weight in the MSCI Emerging Markets IMI Index. Current projections expect India to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027, surpassing Germany and Japan.
“India always had the potential, but our infrastructure and on ground development needed to catch up. We are there now because of better policy-making,” Jahnavi said. “In the past 10 years, it has become a country and economy where people can do business with ease. They can make investments that are risk-mitigated.”
For continued growth, Jahnavi would like to see the Indian government introduce programs similar to the Australian government’s $120 billion commitment over 10 years to facilitate infrastructure projects backed by private investors.
“There could be pipelines created by the government for private funds or family offices to invest in those assets, but they’re already cleared and blue-chipped,” Jahnavi said. “But today as we stand, I would bring my friends and my capital to invest in my country, which I probably wouldn’t 10 years ago.”