In Rural India, Small Changes Hold Each Other Up

A special report from Swathi Adiseshu of Sehgal Foundation in the US

describing her first visit to see the work being done in rural India by S M

Sehgal Foundation.

I thought I understood this work before I went. I had the terminology down: integrated rural development, women's empowerment, the transformed lives of schoolchildren. I used these phrases in meetings and in conversations with donors. I believed in them. I just didn't know what they looked like on site in India.

Then I walked into a room in Kolar, Karnataka, and five women looked up at me briefly, smiled, and went back to work. 

On a weekday morning, the women of the Kamadhenu group were already at it. Coriander powder, ragi flour, sambar mixes, and spice blends were being ground and packaged on the premises. The finished packets were stacked neatly, ready for the village santhe, the local market where farmers and small producers sell their goods. Some of their products now reach customers far beyond the village. A few have begun finding international buyers.

The women know which products sell the fastest. They know which margins hold. They know what it took for them to get here. 

A year ago, none of them had run a business.

Kamadhenu branded spice products, Kolar, Karnataka. Kamadhenu women at work Kolar, Karnataka.

Five of the women are sisters in law, living in combined households on the same property in Kolar district. They began their enterprise with a shared goal: financial independence on their own terms. Through the Farmer Interest Group program supported by SMSF, they received capital, equipment, and practical business training. The decisions that followed were entirely theirs: what to produce, how to maximize yield, how to set prices.

Their operation runs on solar power. Spices are dried in a tunnel greenhouse on the property before grinding. Waste is minimal. The business was designed to be sustainable from the beginning, dependent on no one.

Speaking in Kannada, one of the women told me plainly, “We want our own identity. We want to be self-sustaining.”

She is a mother, a wife, a daughter-in-law with a full household. None of that is in conflict with what she is building here. This is simply the full picture of her life, and she is managing all of it.

What first drew me to this work was women's empowerment. The idea that a woman in a rural village could build something with her own hands and stand taller in her community because of it. Seeing it in that room in Kolar, without ceremony, made the idea feel very different from how it sounds in a “pitch.”

That room in Kolar, on an ordinary Tuesday, with no audience and no agenda, was a real thing. What I saw was not a program. This was five women running a business in a place where doing so was not expected or easy.

The Kamadhenu group is one part of a larger model our team calls “integrated” rural development. The idea is that water, agriculture, education, and livelihoods must improve together, or meaningful change will not hold and will not be sustainable—something the teams know from more than twenty-five years of working in small villages in rural India. 

Not far from where the Kamadhenu women work in Kolar, ponds that had slowly silted over and stopped holding water have been rejuvenated. The silt removed from the ponds is returned to nearby fields, where farmers use it as a nutrient-rich soil amendment. The restored ponds now capture rainwater, raise water tables, and bring life back to land that had been slowly drying out. A water purification kiosk nearby, which residents refer to as a water ATM, provides clean drinking water at minimal cost through digital payments, and eliminates the long trips that once consumed hours of a family's day.

In Nuh District, Haryana, new ponds have been built to recharge groundwater and raise water tables, and they now double as fisheries. The panchayat members harvest and sell the fish, and what they earn goes into a joint community account controlled entirely by the village. Hygienic toilets get built. Maintenance gets funded. Development moves forward by community without waiting for outside support.

One village doing this will inspired the next to ask how they can do the same. That is how the model spreads, quietly. People see the difference with their own eyes.

Pond rejuvenation project, Nuh District, Haryana. Water ATM providing clean drinking water, Kolar, Karnataka.

A principal in Badarpur understood this better than most. After working with the Transform Lives one school at a time team to empower rural schoolchildren, he was transferred to a different government school. His first request at his new school was simple: he asked our team to come work in that school too. He had experienced what a transformed school felt like from the inside. He wanted the same for his new students. That is not a program metric. That is trust, carried by one person from one place to another.

Nuh District is one of India's priority regions for rural development. At the Uleta Girls School and Badarpur Senior Secondary School, girls had previously stayed home because these government schools lacked functioning toilets and clean water. The same girls now come to school every day because their school now has separate toilets for girls, clean drinking water, and the classroom walls that have been converted into visual learning tools. Digital libraries give students access to a world that was previously out of reach.

Inside these schools, something is quietly shifting. Students such as Sefa, a Class 12 student in Badarpur who wants to study law, now navigate digital systems independently, helping her family update Aadhaar cards, access government schemes, find information without waiting for someone else to do it. The ambition is familiar. The access is not.

Students at Government Senior Secondary School, Classroom mural at S Madamangala Government School,

Badarpur, Nuh District, Haryana. Kolar, Karnataka.

None of this happens quickly. One of our field staff members has spent 23 years working in these communities. Every evening, after his official day ends, he goes back. He sits with farmers after they return from the fields, listens to what is working and what is not, and learns what the community needs before proposing anything. Over time, his presence has become something else entirely. He is no longer seen as someone who comes and goes. He is part of the fabric of the place. That is when the work stops being a project and becomes something the community claims as their own.

Before any project begins, we work through Village Development Councils, community groups that guide and oversee the work from the start. The goal is always the same. Build ownership so complete that the work continues long after we step back.

I came back to my home in the San Francisco Bay Area changed in a specific way: not more inspired, I was already inspired. I felt more accountable. Because once I stood in that room in Kolar, once I saw what this work actually looks like when it is running, the distance between here and there stopped feeling abstract.

Seen from a distance, this work can feel like a collection of programs, reports, and frameworks. Seen up close, it looks like women who know their margins sitting in a workspace they built. It looks like a girl walking into school every day because there is finally a reason to come. It looks like a community gathered around a pond that used to be dry, and is now clean and thriving, because they decided it was worth caring for.

And sometimes the only way to truly understand that is to see it for yourself.