Gram Vikas

#SenseOfTheHouse | Mahendragiri rises from the Eastern Ghats in Gajapati, one of Odisha’s highest peaks, with forests and ancient temples along its slopes. It has long been a place of pilgrimage and is now also drawing growing interest as a tourism destination. For the villages at the foot of the mountain, this brings a practical question: as more visitors arrive, how does the area remain clean? Clean Koinpur is one response. The effort is working towards a Gram Panchayat where residents, businesses and local institutions take an ongoing role in keeping public areas clean, rather than coming together only for periodic clean-up drives. Ahead of the recent eco-tourism festival, residents and shopkeepers cleared waste along the tourism road and around the village chowk. Shopkeepers committed to using bins and reducing litter around their establishments. The Sarpanch and the Clean Koinpur committee took responsibility for different parts of the work. This is how the Sense of the House approach is being applied in Koinpur. It starts with the place and the people who live there, and asks how responsibility for its care can be organised locally. Gram Vikas supports Clean Koinpur in this process, alongside the district administration’s efforts to promote tourism in the area. The work is still at an early stage. A waste-free Gram Panchayat will require systems for collection and disposal, appropriate infrastructure, and sustained participation from residents, businesses and visitors. Koinpur has begun by organising around what it can address locally as more people come to visit the area. #SenseOfTheHouse #CleanKoinpur #Mahendragiri #EcoTourism #Gajapati #GramVikas

#InConversation | Weather can vary sharply even across neighbouring villages. A forecast that is useful to one farmer may tell another very little. Liby Thomas Johnson, Executive Director of Gram Vikas, spoke about this at the Earth Again Conference 2026, organised by the Sambad Group in Bhubaneswar on 2 October. He was part of a session on air quality and water conservation. He drew on Gram Vikas’s experience in Jagannathprasad block of Ganjam district, Odisha, where community weather stations provide farming households with localised weather information. Advance warning of fog, for instance, can give farmers time to protect their crops. Families also use the information for crop planning and day-to-day farming decisions. On water, Liby spoke about conservation as a shared responsibility, and the role of education and awareness in encouraging rainwater harvesting. The session also included Dr Debadatta Swain of the School of Earth, Ocean and Climate Sciences, IIT Bhubaneswar, who spoke about identifying the sources of air pollution, and Dr Namrata Misra of the KIIT School of Biotechnology, who discussed solutions that can remain effective over time. Natyamanch, a youth theatre collective from Ganjam, Kandhamal and Gajapati districts trained by Gram Vikas, also performed at the event, with a play on water on the first day and one on plantation on the second. We thank the Sambad Group for the invitation and the opportunity to contribute to the discussion. #GramVikas #EarthAgain #WaterConservation #ClimateChange #Odisha

#GVAtIIWW | A village can plan for water more meaningfully when it has a clear picture of the sources it depends on and how those sources change over time. Last month, Prasanta Set, Siddharth Patil and Varun N were at India International Water Week 2026 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi. At Stall 210, conversations centred on the Water Passbook: what it is, how it is prepared, the information it brings together, and how villages use it to plan for their water needs. The Water Passbook has been shaped through Gram Vikas’s work with rural communities. IIWW offered an opportunity to place this village-level tool within a wider conversation on water security, and to hear from others working on similar questions across different contexts. Thank you to everyone who stopped by, asked questions and shared experiences from their own work on water. #GramVikas #IIWW2026 #WaterPassbook #WaterSecurity #IndiaWaterWeek

#IntheMedia | What does useful weather information look like for a farmer making decisions under uncertainty? In The Guardian, Neelima Vallangi reports from Odisha on delayed rains, El Niño and the choices farmers are making as they prepare for an uncertain season. The story visits Laxmipur in Ganjam, where a Gram Vikas weather station records local conditions and a village weather board makes a seven-day forecast available in Odia. Gram Vikas Executive Director Liby Thomas Johnson speaks about the importance of giving farmers the time and confidence to assess this information for themselves: “We have to instil confidence in the community that the information is accurate and valuable, and let the farmer choose what works best for them. ”Read the full story in The Guardian: https://lnkd.in/da-7rcD6 #ElNino #RainfedFarming #ClimateResilience #GramVikas Rainmatter Foundation | Axis Bank Foundation | IndiGo (InterGlobe Aviation Ltd) | InterGlobe Enterprises | Bajaj Finserv | WeatherCast Solutions Private Limited

#PeoplesPlan | 𝐀 𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐭. The Convergence Mela creates that opportunity at the Gram Panchayat level. Residents meet the officials responsible for public services: the Block Development Officer, block and district officials, line department staff, and the Panchayat’s elected representatives. The Gram Panchayat Coordination Committee (GPCC) and Village Development Committees (VDC) organise the Mela. The committees invite the officials and mobilise people across the villages. A GPCC member presides over the proceedings. VDC and GPCC members present the priorities identified through village planning and submit consolidated grievances and requests directly to the officials concerned. The Mela also brings a range of services together in one place. Stalls support Aadhaar enrolment and correction, labour card registration, and access to veterinary and other departmental schemes. Health camps run alongside. Self-help groups manage food stalls, while traditional performances are part of the day. Across Odisha’s villages, Gram Vikas supports these community processes to strengthen local institutions and connect village priorities with the public systems responsible for responding to them. #PeoplesPlan #ConvergenceMela #GramPanchayat #Odisha #LocalGovernance

#Swaraj | A village that has managed its own water system for 20 years tells us something about self-governance. For Gram Vikas, this is one way Swaraj becomes visible in everyday life. On 2 October, as Gram Sabhas across the country meet to plan the year ahead, it is worth asking what that looks like in practice. In villages across Odisha, Gram Vikas has worked with communities that do not simply receive a piped water supply. They build and run it themselves, through a Village Development Committee that every household joins. They sustain it for years, in some cases for two decades and more. An independent study, Enabling Autonomy, followed 11 such villages to understand what allows a community to sustain a system long after the organisation that helped build it has stepped away. The study found communities making their own rules for water use and changing them when circumstances changed. They raised money for repairs, added storage and backup power, kept technical skills within the village, and drew on corpus funds built through household contributions. In Dengapadar, the committee added water tanks, kept spare motors and bought a generator for days without power. In Angarpada, the village introduced a fine to discourage private water connections. In Anusahi, Enosh Mandal, trained during construction, continues to repair the village pipelines without charging for his work. For these villages, self-governance can be seen in something very tangible: how a community looks after a resource it depends on, decides what needs to change, and takes responsibility for what happens next. Read Enabling Autonomy: https://lnkd.in/gCrCbvvP #GandhiJayanti #Swaraj #SelfManagedSystems #PanchayatiRaj #GramVikas

#OrganicFarming | Organic farmers need a regular supply of inputs through the cropping season. In Badakua, four farmers learnt how to prepare some of these inputs locally. The four are members of the Jirjira Krushak Udpadaka Gusti in Churangpur Gram Panchayat, Mohana block, Gajapati. Through training in organic farm inputs, they learnt to prepare, store and label organic liquid formulations. They then set up a small Bio-Input Resource Centre in the village, with space to produce and store the formulations. The group now supplies these inputs to farmer groups in Antarba and Churangpur at a subsidised rate of ₹50 a litre. Gram Vikas provided the training and starting equipment. The four farmers now manage production and supply themselves, making the inputs available locally to other farmer groups as well. #ClimateResilience #FarmerProducerGroups #SustainableFarming #BioResourceCentre #RuralOdisha #GramVikas

#FinancialInclusion | In many villages, access to affordable credit is only part of the challenge. Knowing how to manage that credit matters too. Rang De connects social investors with rural borrowers, many of them women, to provide access to affordable credit. A loan, however, also requires borrowers to understand repayments, keep records and make informed decisions about what they can afford to take on. On 15 August, five self-help groups in Daringbadi opened a Financial Inclusion Centre in their meeting hall at Line Pada, in Greenbadi Gram Panchayat. The centre is a place where women can learn to maintain accounts, track repayments, use simple digital tools and understand the financial decisions involved in borrowing and running an enterprise. It was set up with support from Rang De and Gram Vikas, with the five self-help groups providing the space from which the centre will operate. At the opening, Latika Pradhan, president of the Arati Mahila Mandal SHG, spoke about the importance of understanding the numbers before making financial decisions. The centre brings this learning into a space that the women already use and manage themselves. Credit becomes more useful when borrowers have the information and skills to decide how, when and whether to use it. #FinancialLiteracy #RangDe #WomenLedEnterprise #RuralOdisha #FinancialInclusion #GramVikas Arun Ramachandran | Soumyajit Dey | Manjary S | Shakti Sekhar Panigrahi

#WaterSecureGramPanchayats | A bank passbook tells you what you have, so you can decide what to spend. A village can keep one for its water. Young people from the village, trained as Jal Bandhus, go source by source through their own village: the springs, the wells, the tube wells, the ponds. For each one they record what it is used for, and how many months of the year it holds water. Together, those records make the village's Water Passbook, a plain account of how much water the village actually has, and for how long. With it, a village can plan rather than guess. How much water can go to households, how much to farming, and what needs doing before the dry months arrive. In the film, Basanta Naik, speaks about understanding and sustaining water sources. Alongside him, Shanti Goud, our Jalabandhu from Adri, talks about how learning to use the technology has helped her better understand the water sources in her village and share that knowledge with others in her community. #WaterPassbook #JalBandhu #WaterSecurity #RuralOdisha #GramVikas

#GrassrootsGovernance | A village may have many priorities. The harder task is deciding what needs attention first, and knowing which public system can respond. A Convergence Mela begins before the gathering itself. Through the Village Prosperity and Resilience Plan process, households and groups identify their needs, discuss priorities and agree on a common list. Women participate actively in these discussions and in deciding what is taken forward. At the mela, community representatives meet government officials to understand which scheme, department or office can respond to each priority, and what needs to happen next. In Luhagudi Gram Panchayat, Sukanti Sabar had spent months trying to get her pension resumed. At the mela, she raised the matter directly with the Block Development Officer, who verified her case and helped move the process forward. In Malaspadar, the community used the same forum to raise the need for mobile connectivity. The issue was taken up with the administration, and within three months a mobile tower was installed, replacing the village’s mountaintop “hello point”. The mela itself is one meeting. The larger value lies in the process around it: communities deciding priorities together, identifying the relevant public systems and following those priorities through. #Convergence #GrassrootsDemocracy #PublicEntitlements #Gajapati #PanchayatiRaj #GramVikas Thomas Sunil | Jannatun Begum | Sebin Mathew | Ahamed Amjath | Shakti Sekhar Panigrahi