Gram Vikas

| Through a shared process, Gram Vikas network villages bridge community needs and government channels

Across Gajapati, Kalahandi, and Ghumsur, communities identify what they need, prioritise it together, and present those demands to the relevant authorities. From drinking water and roads to pensions and mobile connectivity, communities work collectively to pursue these priorities.

Following up when responses are delayed, tracking progress, and keeping the community informed along the way requires its own set of skills and institutional habits.

Earlier in March, 76 members of Gram Panchayat Coordination Committees from five Gram Panchayats gathered over four days to strengthen how communities pursue their priorities.

Through group exercises and discussions, participants practised how to monitor community demands and engage with line departments. They also explored how to use platforms such as convergence melas and the Village Prosperity and Resilience Plan for collective action.

The discussions also surfaced priorities that communities had long identified but not yet acted on.

Within weeks, members in two Gram Panchayats had organised adult literacy classes in their villages, with local volunteers stepping forward as teachers.

Learn more about Gram Vikas's community governance work at www.gramvikas.org

| Where water was scarce, 150 acres of sunflowers now thrive

Season after season, a potential source of income remained out of reach for farming households in Gajapati, Odisha.Large stretches of cultivable land remained fallow after the monsoon, across three Gram Panchayats.

Water availability during the growing season was uncertain. For many farmers, cultivating a second crop was a financial risk they could not afford to take.

The Water Secure Gram Panchayat (WSGP) programme worked to improve water security across three Gram Panchayats through groundwater recharge and investments in local water infrastructure. As water availability became more reliable, farmers became confident to cultivate the land.

150 women farmers planted sunflower across 150 acres. Within four months, they harvested and sold their produce through market linkages in Berhampur. ICRISAT provided sunflower seeds to participating farmers.

🌻The farmers’ investment per acre was ₹5,550.
🌻The return per acre was ₹38,244.
🌻Women earned a net profit of nearly ₹33,000 per acre.

Plans are now in place to expand the cultivation to 600 acres in the coming season.

If you are working on water security and livelihoods in rural Odisha, write to us at [email protected].

| In rural India, safe drinking water is frequently addressed through large infrastructure, state programmes, centralised procurement, and significant capital outlay. The Gram Panchayat, the unit of government closest to the problem, rarely owns the solution.

In Rayagada, Odisha, Gram Vikas co-designed and implemented a trial that challenged that assumption.

The CTI-8 is an in-line chlorination device installed directly into the piped water supply, assembled from parts available at any local hardware shop. It requires no electricity, no proprietary components, and no external supply chain. It costs approximately ₹4,000 to build.

In a randomised controlled trial across 20 villages, the CTI-8 was tested alongside a commercial device costing ₹25,500. At one sixth of the cost, the CTI-8 produced the same outcome as the commercial device, reducing E. coli at the tap by 70%.

The CTI-8 is open source. Any Gram Panchayat can build it, maintain it, and replicate it using local materials and local knowledge. The barrier to adoption is lower than most water safety conversations assume.

With institutional will, water treatment at the Gram Panchayat level is well within reach.

If rural Odisha's water, livelihoods, migration, and climate challenges are on your mind, write to us at [email protected].

UC Berkeley, Development Innovation Lab (University of Chicago) | ICMR-RMRC Bhubaneswar | GiveWell | Weiss Fund | National Science Foundation | Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (via Biohub)


The University of Chicago

| In 1979, Gram Vikas came to Odisha. Since then, the work has spread across the Eastern Ghats of Odisha and the forested plateaus of Gumla in Jharkhand.
Over that time, working alongside communities made one thing consistently clear: water security touches almost everything else.

Whether a family can cultivate a second crop, whether livestock survive the dry months, whether a woman's morning begins with hours of walking — all of this connects back to water. So does what happens when water runs short: livelihoods contract, migration increases, land degrades, and communities become more exposed to climate shocks.

Gram Vikas works across water, livelihoods, ecological restoration, governance, and migration together because in villages, these are not separate problems. The approach has been built and revised over 47 years with the communities it serves, and today reaches more than 1,700 villages across Odisha and Jharkhand.

If rural Odisha's water, livelihoods, migration, and climate challenges are on your mind, write to us at [email protected].

Deloitte India| HDFC Parivartan Azim Premji Foundation | Axis Bank Foundation | Wipro Cares | InterGlobe Foundation | InterGlobe Aviation | SBI Foundation | PwC India | charity: water | B1G1 | Rainmatter Foundation | Bajaj Finance Ltd. | International Action | Standard Chartered


.foundation @aviationinterglobe @rainmatterorg

To make a phone call in Malaspadar village in Gajapati district, residents travelled to a distant spot with enough signal to get through. Locally, this spot had a name. People called it the "hello point."

For students trying to study, migrants trying to call home, and healthcare workers trying to communicate in an emergency, the absence of connectivity was a daily problem with real costs. In emergencies, it cost more than time and money.

At a convergence mela, the community brought this forward as a collective demand. They raised the demand directly in front of officials who could connect it to the departments with the authority to act.

Within three months, a mobile tower was installed.

Sunita Mallick, a resident of Malaspadar, reflected what the village felt. They had assumed this would either never happen or happen much later. The speed of it felt, in her words, unbelievable.

What changed was not the government's willingness. What changed was that the community raised the demand together, in a space where the right people were present, and did not let it go.

A convergence mela brings government officials, community members and civil society organisations into the same space. Instead of communities travelling to offices, the offices come to the community. This simple idea changes what becomes possible for residents of rural Odisha.

Learn more about Gram Vikas's community governance work: www.gramvikas.org

| "Communities affected by climate uncertainty are not simply enduring crises—they are actively using mobility to diversify risk, protect dignity and build better futures."

Liby Johnson, Executive Director of Gram Vikas, brought this perspective to a London conference last week, speaking from years of fieldwork in Odisha and sustained research on climate-augmented labour migration.

At the conference, over 100 researchers and practitioners had gathered to examine one question the climate adaptation field has been circling for years. Whether migration is a failure of adaptation, or part of it.

The gathering was rich with evidence, field-rooted insight and nuance from across Africa and Asia. The answer it arrived at was clear: Migration is part of adaptation.

In Thuamul Rampur, Kalahandi, Odisha, a joint study by Gram Vikas and the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID) documented how long-term circular migration functions as a poverty interrupter and a mechanism through which households reinvest in agriculture, education and local livelihoods. Migrants return seasonally, send remittances home and maintain deep ties to their villages. Moving away and staying rooted are not contradictions in these communities.

What the conference examined through global evidence and frameworks, communities in the Eastern Ghats of India have been practicing for decades.

The work ahead is to make mobility safer, fairer and more dignified for those who adapt.

For ground-level evidence, read Gram Vikas's research:
https://bit.ly/4dKK5QX

Liby Johnson | Neil Adger | Chandni Singh | Aromar Revi | Benoy Peter | Nitya Rao | Kerilyn Schewel | Roman Hoffmann | Reetika Subramanian | Manuela Di Mauro | Ricardo Safra de Campos | Jon Barnett | Raya Muttarak | Kasia Paprocki | Aysha Jennath


.trust B1G1

| "Communities affected by climate uncertainty are not simply enduring crises—they are actively using mobility to diversify risk, protect dignity and build better futures."

Liby Johnson, Executive Director of Gram Vikas, brought this perspective to a London conference last week, speaking from years of fieldwork in Odisha and sustained research on climate-augmented labour migration.

At the conference, over 100 researchers and practitioners had gathered to examine one question the climate adaptation field has been circling for years. Whether migration is a failure of adaptation, or part of it.

The gathering was rich with evidence, field-rooted insight and nuance from across Africa and Asia. The answer it arrived at was clear: Migration is part of adaptation.

In Thuamul Rampur, Kalahandi, Odisha, a joint study by Gram Vikas and the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID) documented how long-term circular migration functions as a poverty interrupter and a mechanism through which households reinvest in agriculture, education and local livelihoods. Migrants return seasonally, send remittances home and maintain deep ties to their villages. Moving away and staying rooted are not contradictions in these communities.

What the conference examined through global evidence and frameworks, communities in the Eastern Ghats of India have been practicing for decades.

The work ahead is to make mobility safer, fairer and more dignified for those who adapt.

For ground-level evidence, read Gram Vikas's research: https://journals.plos.org/water/article?id=10.1371/journal.pwat.0000440

Liby Johnson | Neil Adger | Chandni Singh | Aromar Revi | Benoy Peter | Nitya Rao | Kerilyn Schewel | Roman Hoffmann | Reetika Subramanian | Manuela Di Mauro | Ricardo Safra de Campos | Jon Barnett | Raya Muttarak | Kasia Paprocki | Aysha Jennath

Winter farm incomes across Water Secure Gram Panchayat villages have risen by 33%.

That number reflects the difference a second growing season makes to a household with no alternative income.

In most villages across Odisha and Jharkhand, farmers depend on the kharif crop. When that season fails, there is nothing to fall back on. Even when it holds, it gives only a limited opportunity for income generation.

The rabi crop, grown in winter, changes that. A second growing window means more food for household consumption and a second source of income. It reduces the risk that comes with dependence on a single season.

The rabi crop depends entirely on groundwater available after the monsoon ends. In these villages, that water comes from wells, borewells, and springs fed by the hillsides above.

When degraded land fails to hold the monsoon's water, the groundwater cannot be recharged. Due to the run off the groundwater that would have fed the winter crop is simply not there.

WSGP's land treatment work addresses this directly. Communities treat degraded slopes, build stone bunds, and reforest hillsides to slow runoff and recharge groundwater after the monsoon. Water held in the ground through the wet season is what makes the rabi crop possible in the dry one.

When groundwater is available and predictable after the monsoon, farmers plant. When they plant, they earn. Across 73 gram panchayats, that earning has grown by 33%.

Learn more about the Water Secure Gram Panchayat programme: www.gramvikas.org