Builders of a new India #2
Deendayal Shodh Sansthan is a rural transformation catalyst like no other. Located near Khajurao on the border of MP with UP, this is a NGO which was set up by Bharat Ratna Nanaji Desmukh in 1992.
The Arogyadham campus of the Sansthan was set up with funding from the Tata Trusts. When you enter the campus, you are greeted by statues of Nanaji and JRD Tata
The Institute is led by some amazing leaders. I got to personally spend time with a number of them. Abhay Mahajan, Amitabh Vashishta and Vasant Pandit are part of the management team that overseas operations which impact 2 lac people in a 50 km radius from the Institute.
This is not a religious order but a mission organisation supported by the RSS with Suresh Soni as the overseeing leader. It also serves as a magnet to attract leaders from the domain. These include my iitb junior Prof Dr. Ravi Kant Pathak and Padma Sri Umashankar Pandey.
India often debates development in terms of cities, capital, and scale. Mumbaikars like me are often obsessed with capital market driven models of growth. For the last decade or so, it has shifted to the startup /venture capital model of hyper growth. Since Covid, the survivors have started thinking philanthropy. And so the social impact fund model investing in social ventures has gained eminence. But social or not so social – the model involves latent control by the investor.
But what happens if there is no exit. In that case you need a really long runway fund. And all of India has only one 99 year tenure AIF.
The Deendayal Research Institute is focused on something far harder: making villages self-reliant.
Its core idea was simple but radical — development cannot be imported, it has to be grown from within. Slowly. At DRI, this translated into a living model:
Villages as laboratories.
Farmers as innovators.
Communities as stakeholders
The philosophy behind it — Integral Humanism — pushed a deeper question:
What is the point of economic growth if it fractures society or ignores human dignity?
DRI answered that by working at the intersection of:
Agriculture
Entrepreneurship
Education
Health
Social cohesion
And then added a uniquely Indian innovation — Samaj Shilpi Dampati:
Committed couples living within villages, catalyzing change from the inside.
No policy paper can replicate that level of trust.
In a country still searching for scalable rural models, this experiment stands out.
DRI has built a role model for frugal rural transformation. Their treasurer tells me they need very little – it is an absurd demand that struggles for justification.
If the model has been found – why now spray capital and mass replicate. Someone tells me that you can’t throw more men and money to get a baby out in nine weeks instead of nine months.
They are right. But you can get a million mothers, and get a million babies out in nine months. What am I missing ?
hashtag#Leadership hashtag#RuralDevelopment hashtag#India hashtag#SelfReliance hashtag#SocialImpact
