Building the Relational Infrastructure for Rural Economic Self-Reliance Across India

The Social Innovation

Magnitude of the Problem, and its Root Causes

India's 600,000 villages are quietly losing their economic vitality. Over 10 million people migrate from rural to urban areas every year. Rural per capita income is one-third of the national average. Agriculture grows at 2.8% while inflation runs at 6%. Communities that make up 65% of India's population contribute just 18% to GDP.

During their participation in the Globalizer co-created by Ashoka and eBay Foundation in 2014, the Drishtee team highlighted the following key factors contributing to the magnitude of the problem:

• Rural producers — especially women — have no reliable channel to market. Middlemen control access and extract value, leaving producers unable to convert skill and time into sustainable income.
• Development organisations, including Drishtee itself until 2016, placed themselves at the centre of rural development, creating dependency rather than ownership. Communities were partners, not authors.
• Government training programmes designed to build skills often funded migration to cities, because they were not embedded in local livelihood ecosystems. Free training attracted people looking for city jobs, not village futures.
• There is no capital available to initiate small enterprise development in villages, and no trusted exchange infrastructure for women whose economic activity falls outside the formal monetary system.

Based on their systems change analysis, Drishtee made it a mission to shift rural development from service delivery to communities, to economic ecosystems owned by communities — making rural entrepreneurship self-sustaining at a scale where the departure of any single organisation cannot cause collapse.

"With the confidence you gain from Globalizer — seeing programmes in pilot, seeing how other Fellows are doing what they are doing, knowing we are all in the same boat — it is extremely comforting as an entrepreneur with a dream. The plan I took in 2010 felt out of reach; I went to seek resources. By the 2014 one I realised the plan was within our reach, and I wanted guidance, not permission. Globalizer is a small family within the Ashoka family. What it did was make us imagine. Lifting that imagination itself has led us to what we are." 

Strategy to Catalyze a Network of Changemakers towards the Targeted Mission

The strategy involves activating a village-level ecosystem of entrepreneurs, local governing bodies, banks, government agencies, and women's collectives — with each actor playing a defined role that outlasts Drishtee's direct presence.

"Systems change is to leave all your prior certainties behind and just be with the community. I learnt empathy from the women we work with. I see the same level of energy in them as I see in Ashoka Fellows — the platform is different, but the energy is identical."

Some of the tactics deployed as part of this strategy include:

1) Collaborating with Banks as Door-Openers for Involving Entrepreneurs in the Villages

The Jan Dhan Yojana financial inclusion push created a structural opportunity. Drishtee partnered with State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Indian Bank, and other nationalised banks to establish Customer Service Points (CSPs) — entrepreneur-run banking access points — in underserved villages. The banks fund the village entry cost; within 3–6 months the CSP entrepreneur is profitable, earning a 20% revenue share. The model has been profitable in 13 of last 14 years of operation, funding its own innovation without a significant dependence on grants.

"The moment we have an entrepreneur in that location, they start doing camps in different villages, and those camps help introduce the livelihood model. The CSPs became door-openers — we were able to expand much faster."  

Once embedded in a village, Drishtee establishes the Swāvalamban Samiti — the local governing council — and introduces the full livelihood model. Today, 4,000+ CSPs provide an outreach to 16,000+ villages, across 23 states growing at ~700 new CSPs per year. The goal: 20,000 CSPs reaching 80,000 villages by 2030.

2) Demonstrating the model to Inform and Influence Government Programs

Rather than lobbying, Drishtee demonstrates. In 2000, Satyan piloted government service delivery through locally-owned, revenue-sharing kiosks — entrepreneur-run computer terminals giving villagers access to government records, agricultural commodity prices, health insurance, distance learning, and certificate applications. Eliminating information intermediaries increased farmers' incomes by 3–5% in early impact assessments. The government's Common Service Centre (CSC) programme — today operating across 150,000 villages — directly echoes Drishtee's original design.

3) Reviving Barter with a Digital Livelihood Points Currency for the Ecosystem to Collaborate with each other

During COVID-19, when cash dried up, Drishtee rediscovered what communities already knew: barter. Women producing across 42 product categories — agarbatti, soap, textiles, pickles, handicrafts, heritage crafts — needed a way to exchange value without cash and without a distant market. Drishtee built a digital barter platform using Livelihood Points (LP): a unit based on time invested and skill level, not market price. Women list what they have and what they need; the platform matches them and credits LPs to a digital wallet.

Grain used to be the common currency in these villages — divisible, portable, a unit of trust. LP digitises and democratises that same logic. "It's what they were already doing — we just digitised it and democratised it."  

4) Created EQ 1.0 — A Voice-Based AI Device for Village-Level Scale to be able to Influence and Involve more Villages

EQ 1.0: is a voice-based AI device — a village-adapted smart assistant built on edge computing with battery backup for off-grid environments — that can identify a user, personalise her livelihood journey, and guide her through training, product listing, and market navigation without a smartphone or external facilitator.  

Developed in-house, the 1.0 application uses voice samples to build personalised personality and skills profiles. Voice samples of all 340 Drishtee staff are already in the system, now being used to build internal teams. The vision: EQ replaces the need to send a field worker to every village, taking Drishtee's reach from 8,000 to 80,000 villages.

5) Co-Created a Social Capital Fund for Involving & Supporting Women Entrepreneurs

Priya Dasgupta, a social finance enthusiast partnered with Drishtee to create Quiver — a dedicated social rural venture fund (started with about $500K investment from Drishtee) for rural women-led startups that have outgrown Drishtee's community infrastructure but are not yet ready for conventional venture capital. Quiver provides a combination of financial capital and social capital: introductions, board support, and advisory connections.  

So far, Quiver has screened 200 startups, onboarded 59 startups, and invested in 3 startups.

6) Creating the Vidhushi Fellowship to Involve a new Generation of Leaders for the Field

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Drishtee launched the Vidhushi Fellowship (vidhushi: the learned one). Rather than struggle with lateral hires who require extensive unlearning, Drishtee recruits graduates from diverse disciplines — architecture, design, business — and sends them to live in villages for six months. Fellows orchestrate the Swāvalamban Samiti, launch barter circles, and experience the community from the inside out. Of 200 Vidhushi Fellows across cohorts since 2020, approximately 75–80 have stayed with the organisation and are on track to become its future leadership. 

In 2025, Drishtee launched an international Vidhushi cohort, with 10 Fellows from across Africa — including two who spent six weeks in Indian villages (one an Ashoka Fellow from Kenya). "They come in capable, open to learn, with extreme empathy. In five years, they will be the top management of this organisation."