Transform Rural India

06/10/2026

By 2050, nearly one in five Indians will be above sixty and seven in ten of them will live in rural India. As families shrink and young people migrate, the challenge for many is not only access to services. It is the quiet loss of everyday human connection.

This , TRI's team of development designers turned the Anganwadi Centre in Chokad, Jharkhand into a space of dialogue, discussion and community belonging. Elders came together, some walking there at the age of 90 just to meet one another and see the children. They sang Jhumar, shared stories of sweeter rice and greener villages and left saying, "We should meet again."

In the latest piece, our colleagues Shyamal Santra and Md. Rayhan Siddik explore how a familiar village institution like the Anganwadi could become a common space where Silver meets Gen Alpha and Gen Beta. It would be a space where memory meets imagination and where neighbourhoods of care can begin.

👇 Read the full article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/common-space-where-silver-meets-alpha-beta-transform-rural-india-gupqc

Special thanks to Shampa Roy for field insights.

02/10/2026

This Gandhi Jayanti, Transform Rural India is launching TriQuest.

Rural India learns every day what works and what doesn’t, in its panchayats, SHGs, farms and health centres.

Most of that knowledge is never written down, tested or heard by the people who design research and policy.

TriQuest starts from the questions communities and frontline workers are asking.

It studies them with partners including
Stanford University University, IIT Bombay, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), ICAR- Indian Council of Agricultural Research and IWMI. And it carries the answers back to where decisions are made.

Ten studies are already in motion.
Have a question from the field that research hasn’t answered? 👉Tell us at triquest.in

Sincere thanks to our partners and supporters.

02/10/2026

Today, on his 157th birth anniversary, India will garland Gandhi's portraits, share his quotes and post his face across every feed.

And yet, for many young Indians, he has become so familiar that he is invisible and so revered that he is remote. A sticker. A meme. A still in a thirty-second reel.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the man who argued, experimented, failed and tried again. The man whose first satyagraha in India stood with the indigo farmers of Champaran. The man who believed India's freedom and India's villages were part of the same equation.

So what happens when the most connected generation in India's history stops connecting with him?

This Gandhi Jayanti, in the latest , our colleague Anish Kumar asks: Why isn't Gandhi trending?

👇 Read the full article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-isnt-gandhi-trending-transform-rural-india-unsuc

Is Gandhi still relevant to young India or have we already let him become just a portrait on the wall? Tell us in the comments.

28/09/2026

Disease does not respect the boundaries we draw on maps.

Malaria follows the forests of the central Indian plateau, fluorosis follows hard-rock aquifers, and arsenic follows the Ganga-Brahmaputra floodplain. None of them stop at a state or district line.

Yet India counts, funds and plans its health almost entirely by district and state, an administrative map inherited from colonial revenue collection, not from the land people actually live on.

As the world marked , it was a reminder that the health of people cannot be separated from the health of the land, water and forests around them.

In the latest piece, our colleague Shyamal Santra traces how India's governance once followed rivers, forests and agrarian landscapes, how that ecological lens was lost and why a health system tied to static boundaries will struggle to keep pace with climate change and shifting disease patterns.

He also shares how TRI's Community-Led Land Assessment Tool helps communities read their locality as a whole, connecting care for people with care for land, water, forests and food.

👇 Read the full article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bioregions-natural-health-system-rethinking-wellbeing-f36jc

21/09/2026

19/09/2026

The India Rural Colloquy 2026 concluded its six-state journey at the National Convergence in Delhi, where the conversation turned to what could genuinely move the needle on rural prosperity.

Kachina Chawla, Co-Founder and Director, Light House Health Solutions LLP, argued that care needs to be treated as infrastructure, on par with roads and telecom, not an afterthought within Viksit Bharat’s caregiving strategy.

Santosh K Singh, Partner and Managing Director, Climate and Agri Solutions, Intellecap, pointed to a gap in adaptation finance: the need for a translation layer at the village level that can match the right activity to the right kind of financing.

Laveesh Bhandari, President, Centre for Social and Economic Progress, challenged the rural-urban divide itself. Cities exist because of rural migration, he noted, and the two remain deeply interdependent. When one struggles, so does the other.

Rajiv Kumar, Former Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog, offered a sharper test for prosperity: measure it only by the income growth of the population’s last decile. Nothing else.

We are grateful to all the participants across six states who made this journey so rich and insightful.

16/09/2026

“India is a country of diversity. There’s so much diversity that you cannot hold development to the same yardstick for every state. It cannot be the same parameter for all states for a nation like India. And especially when we look at Jharkhand, there’s so much diversity within the state itself that the meaning of development needs to be worked out with great care.”

That’s the ground Shilpi Neha Tirkey, Hon’ble Minister of Agriculture, Animal Husbandry & Co-operative, GoJ, set at the Jharkhand State Colloquy, as the conversation turned to what a flourishing rural Jharkhand could look like under the state’s Ulgulan 2050 Vision.

We are deeply grateful to all the participants who made this conversation so rich and insightful.

11/09/2026

Chhattisgarh’s green economy shift is no longer on paper, it’s on the ground.
Solar cities are taking shape, natural and organic farming is expanding, and water conservation efforts are gaining momentum across the state.

That set the tone for the opening session of the Chhattisgarh State Colloquy, which also saw the launch of the Green Economic Pathways: Chhattisgarh report.

We are grateful to all the participants who made this conversation so rich and insightful.

⭐️ Rahul Bhagat, Neeraja Kudrimoti

Transform Rural India

10/09/2026

“Villages have to develop. Without that, no amount of urban growth will make us a developed country. That’s why India lives in its villages.” – Dr. Heera Lal Patel IAS

That’s how the Uttar Pradesh State Colloquy opened its conversation on women as architects of rural well-being. Building on that thought, the discussion turned to what lies ahead: a future where women lead institutions, shape markets and build resilient communities, not as an aspiration but as a certainty of the next two decades.

We are grateful to all the speakers and dignitaries who made this conversation so rich and insightful.