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There is a heart-warming story about Nunaram Hansda in Subroto Bagchi’s book The Day the Chariot Moved: How India Grows at the Grassroots (Penguin Business). Born to tribal parents in the interior forests of Simlipal, one of India’s largest biospheres in Odisha, his parents sent him to Ashram School (run by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs) as they could not afford to raise him. Later, Nunaram joined the Industrial Training Institute (ITI) in Rourkela. He had no money to pay the fees and his teachers had to pool the required amount from their paltry salaries. Today, Nunaram heads the insulin manufacturing line at Biocon. In Bagchi’s book, we meet many people like Nunaram, who have achieved success despite the huge economic crisis and odds they face. Odisha’s journey When Bagchi was called by then Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik in 2016 to helm the Skill Development Authority to transform the State, he encountered the ground reality — how governments function and its schemes are implemented and why the leaders among ordinary people keep the world moving but do not write or speak about who they are and what they do. The book, Bagchi says, is a tribute to this grassroots India. With his crossover experience from corporate life in IT to a Cabinet-rank government position, he builds his book on individual stories that highlight the many facets of development, and also what ails and fails the system. He layers the saga of human development in narratives of achievements, frustrations, yearnings and hope because governments, he says, are characterised by stereotypes of unreasonableness, sloth and arrogance wrapped in corruption and personified by crafty politicians. But lives function because some government servants and people at the grassroots are different and willing to take on the challenges of poverty, unemployment, health, education and infrastructure. Divided into seven sections, the book details Bagchi’s life, his return to his home State after four decades, the stories of the poor and marginalised and how government initiatives are foiled due to inaccessibility, inertia and incompetence. Strategic perspectives that empower the people can change the scenario as Bagchi tries to demonstrate. He travelled 3,000 kms across 30 districts in 30 days to understand the requirements of people who either languished or made it out. His objective: to humanise the development agenda for policy makers and corporate leaders. Bagchi writes about the projections that blew his mind; a staggering 96% of the entire workforce in India is in the unorganised sector. Even as India is set to become one of the top economies of the world, there is an increasing wage disparity, forced migration, digital divide and receding women participation. Only 2% of the youth population under-30 had received formal skill training while 8% had received informal training though the country is in need of many more skilled workers. But even amidst widespread disdain, Bagchi came across people like Muni Tigga, born in a tribal village in Nuagan Tehsil, where girls were not sent to school. Despite taunts from the villagers, with her mother’s support, Muni worked as a daily wager at a plant 37 km from her home. Later, she enrolled at ITI Bargarh and landed a job as a loco pilot in the Indian Railways. The skilled training she received empowered her enough to earn a respectable identity. But there are many more families that manage life one day at a time. The need for skill development across the State was seen as a means to human development. It was kept above politics to make Odisha a sandbox of innovation, writes Bagchi. Every new idea such as the Fix (problems), Scale (skill development programmes), Accelerate (establishment of new institutes) strategy caught the imagination of many and produced what Bagchi calls “nano unicorns” — people who had the ability to learn new skills and seize the opportunity. Conversations on change Opening conversations on change with the future in mind is also discussed by Bela Bhatia in her book, India’s Forgotten Country: A View From the Margins (Penguin Viking), shortlisted for the NIF Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize 2025. When she worked with Dalits, Adivasis, women, bonded labourers, ethnic and religious minorities and other downtrodden groups living in hamlets, villages and slums, the oppressive forces that ruled and ruined them with brutality revealed itself assertively. Bhatia’s work encapsulates her research on the Naxalite movement, the conflict between the state and Maoists in Bastar, alongside her experiences as a rural activist in Gujarat. The book is a powerful critique of oppressive actions, and Bhatia offers empathetic narratives of life, death, and sufferings covering States such as Bihar, Telangana, Rajasthan, Kashmir and Nagaland. Standing by the marginalised to whom the governments and elites turn a blind eye, Bhatia gives several accounts of caste discrimination, communal massacres, untouchability, bonded labour, hunger, widowhood, armed uprisings and forced displacement. These sensitively expose the predicament of real India. While the searing book stirs the public conscience, it also serves as an inspiring account of resilience, courage and hope at the grassroots level. Diverse examples Anchoring Change: Seventy-Five Years of Grassroots Intervention That Made a Difference by Jayapadma R.V., Neelima Khetan, Vikram Singh Mehta, (Harper Collins India) looks at why we despair more about our inability to realise our full potential as a country and find fault with the leadership, state of our institutions and the economic model. The book tries to answer questions through examples of organisations working with the grassroots since Independence and underlines the need to reflect on the micro successes and the several cases of hugely impactful grassroots interventions that helped steer society in a positive direction. The authors’ idea is to revisit examples of civic action and explore their relevance for the future. It serves two purposes, they say: to shift the conversation from failure to success; and to distil from these successes relevant design principles that might have wide relevance to create an alternative, grassroots-based, sustainable development model. Sampat Kale’s book Grassroots Development Initiatives in India: Rights Based Approach to Development and Advocacy (Routledge and Aakar Books) examines the way voluntary organisations engage with development programmes for marginalised sections to empower them and make them independent and self-sufficient. Another interesting book, Grassroots Innovation Movements (Routledge), by Adrian Smith, Mariano Fressoli, Dinesh Abrol, Elisa Arond and Adrian Ely, examines six diverse grassroots innovation movements in India, South America and Europe in dynamic historical contexts and explains why each movement frames innovation and development differently, resulting in a variety of strategies. These books remind us of the contributions and the neglected questions which grassroots innovation movements identify. They reflect on both progress and the need for further improvement and empowerment.
