Picture the scene: a woman with a PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of Madras, sitting in a modest room in Kanchipuram back in 2002, her mind turning over the problem of child labour. At first glance, the leap is almost surreal. You’ve got atomic particles on one side, rural kids out of school…
The Telecom Grave Nobody Expected to Open For most of the previous decade, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) was subject to a very specific kind of policy conversation. The public sector telecom company was losing money at a big scale, shedding subscribers in crores. BSNL was routinely described as irrelevant in a market dominated by…
The Village That Was Declared a Model Kanchanpur is a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Hamirpur district where approximately 65% of residents are from Scheduled Caste communities. In 2022, it was selected as an Adarsh Gram under PM-AJAY. Unfortunately, this was a designation that should have brought converged government services, infrastructure upgrades, and livelihood investment. By…
The Spice She Grew. The Market She Never Reached. Meenakshi Pillai grows turmeric on two acres in Erode, Tamil Nadu. The same district produces nearly 60% of India’s turmeric. She sells through a local aggregator at Rs. 80-90 per kilogram. The same turmeric, value-added into curcumin capsules and marketed under a wellness brand in Germany,…
There is a particular kind of ambition that builds for the field, the village lane, the farmer who has never once seen his soil analysed or his crop priced fairly. Shashank Kumar has carried that ambition since 2012. It is the same year he walked away from a career in management consulting. He gave up…
Every democracy has its steady hands and its showmen. Some folks make sure the government just Works; others are happy to grab the spotlight, dressing up the daily business with big words. But, once in a while, you meet a third kind someone who quietly bridges the gap between what’s written in law and what’s…
The First Name on the Document Laxmi Bai is the first person in her family to have a bank account in her own name. She is 41. Before the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana account was opened for her in 2016 at a banking correspondent’s stall in her village in Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh, money had…
The Farmer Who Stopped Growing Rice Govind Nair farmed rice on three acres in coastal Kerala for most of his working life. In 2022, following a government horticulture scheme, he converted one of those acres to coconut cultivation and intercropped it with cocoa. By 2025, the intercropped acre was generating nearly twice the income of…
The Mill That Lost Its Orders Rajiv Gupta runs a secondary steel processing unit in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. He has been in the business for nineteen years. In 2024-25, he lost two major contracts to a supplier offering steel at prices he simply could not match. The steel his competitor was offering came from China, and…
The Biscuit That Changed a Village Economy Urmila Devi runs a small food processing unit outside Varanasi. She makes millet-based snacks using a government-supported machine, sells them under a cooperative label, and earns three times what she made from raw grain. Before her unit was set up under the PM Formalisation of Micro Food Processing…
