Development work in India often moves in cycles of enthusiasm: a project launches with fanfare, runs for three to five years, and quietly winds down when the grant ends. Sambandh, a non-profit based in Bhubaneswar, has taken the opposite approach since it began in 1992, treating community development in Odisha as a multi-decade commitment rather…
The newly notified MPD-2047 leans on transit-led density and in-situ slum rehabilitation to house a capital projected to cross 3.2 crore people by 2047 — reviving equity questions that outlasted two earlier master plans. NEW DELHI: The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs notified the Master Plan for Delhi 2047 (MPD-2047) on August 20…
In large parts of rural India, the nearest bank branch can be an hour’s journey away, and women-owned small businesses, which make up a fifth of the country’s MSMEs, receive only a twentieth of the financing that public-sector banks provide. She Leads Bharat: Udyam set out to close that gap not by building more bank…
In 1998, Teliya, a remote village in Jharkhand’s Gumla district, had almost nothing going for it: severe food insecurity, high rates of malnutrition, and barely any cash circulating in the local economy. Twenty-five years later, the same village has year-round crop planning, renovated roads, working irrigation, and a sanitation system with toilets for its 77…
Development organisations usually pick a lane: some do agriculture, others do women’s health, and the two rarely share a budget line. SumArth, a not-for-profit based in Gaya, Bihar, decided that separation didn’t make sense on the ground, where the same woman who needs a reliable harvest also needs a dignified way to manage her period…
India’s Northeast rarely features in national development conversations the way the Hindi heartland does. Seven Sisters Development Assistance, known as SeSTA, was built specifically to close that gap. Since 2011, the organisation has grown from a single-district pilot in Assam into a network working with 160,000 families across 2,540 villages in 24 districts spanning Assam,…
At the 29th UN Climate Conference in Baku, only 8 of the 78 world leaders present were women, i.e half as many as the year before. The gap is not unique to global summits. In India’s own climate and clean energy sector, women remain strikingly underrepresented in leadership roles, even though women and girls make…
Sandy Khanda was 12 years old, growing up in a farming family in Khanda village, Haryana, when a classmate got her first period in the middle of class. The boys around her didn’t understand what was happening and mocked her, assuming, wrongly, that sex had caused the bleeding. That evening, young Sandy went home with…
On August 21, the world observes International Senior Citizens Day. It is not the kind of occasion that usually dominates headlines. There are no grand celebrations attached to it, no constant reminders on television or social media. It often passes quietly. And perhaps that is precisely why it matters. India is home to over 150…
Roughly 100 million families in India farm small plots and lose money doing it, on average, year after year. Kaushik Kappagantulu did not come to this problem through agriculture. He spent his first five years out of college helping school dropouts find jobs through vocational training, and noticed something troubling: nearly every trainee came from…
