He had exactly 67 pieces of cloth when Anshu Gupta left his journalism career in 1999, and started Goonj with his wife Meenakshi in a single room in Delhi. Urban India discards enormous amounts of usable material that rural India desperately needs. Rerouting those materials seemed like charity; hence, Gupta believed it would strip recipients…
More than 89,000 sewer and septic tank workers have been formally validated under India’s principal sanitation-worker welfare scheme since 2023, and official profiling data indicate that over 90 per cent of those identified belong to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, or Other Backwards Class communities — underscoring sanitation work’s long-documented association with caste in India. Against…
The Union government now has a combined outlay of Rs 11,639 crore committed to the Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP), its flagship scheme for developing villages along India’s international land border, according to a Press Information Bureau feature released this month. The Ministry of Home Affairs, which frames border residents as the eyes and ears of…
India’s tiger population has increased significantly, from 2,967 in 2018 to 3,682 in 2022. But beyond the success of tiger recovery lies a harder question: can India protect wildlife while ensuring dignified livelihoods for communities living around tiger landscapes?
Puducherry has received three fisheries infrastructure projects worth ₹36.49 crore under PMMSY, including upgrades to Nallavadu Fish Landing Centre and Thengaithittu Fishing Harbour, along with a seaweed innovation centre in Karaikal.
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…
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…
