There was a time when Chanda Bhabhar stood at the back of a panchayat meeting, not seated, not invited, simply standing, while decisions that shaped her village were made without her. “The Sarpanch would not even ask us to sit,” she recalls. “We had to stand at the back, and no one would listen to us.”
That was then. Today, when the same panchayat meets, the men sit behind Chanda. The Sarpanch asks for her opinion before any activity is planned. Somewhere between that first meeting and this one, something fundamental shifted: not just in a village in Madhya Pradesh, but in the lives of three extraordinary women whose stories are quietly rewriting what rural leadership looks like in India.
They are not influencers in any sense the internet would recognise. They have no follower counts, no feeds, no carefully lit reels. What they have is something far harder to build: the trust of their communities, earned over years of unglamorous, incremental, door-to-door work. Transform Rural India, the development design organisation working to transform India’s bottom one lakh villages into flourishing localities, calls them Change Vectors. Their villages simply call them Didi.
This Women’s Day, meet the Influencer Didis: Chanda Bhabhar of Gunawad, Reshma Ninama of Asaliya, and Sarita Bhuriya of Bhagsur. Three women, three villages, and one quietly radical idea: that when women are given information, training, and the scaffolding of community structures, they do not just participate in governance. They transform it.
‘Governance Was Something Men Did’
Before Transform Rural India arrived in her life, Chanda Bhabhar had never thought of governance as something that concerned her. “Not only me, but other women were also not involved,” she tells The Logical Indian. “We remained occupied with household work, and governance was seen as something to be handled by the men of the village.”
The visioning exercise in 2020 cracked open that assumption. One of the first things it clarified was something the village had long accepted as normal: their Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANM) was irregular, rarely showing up, rarely informing anyone about available health services. Nobody had thought of this as a governance failure. Chanda did, for the first time. “Earlier no one saw this as a governance issue,” she explains. “But it was related to governance because the panchayat must ensure that the ANM is coming on a regular basis.”
The consequences of that irregularity were serious and had gone unaddressed for years. Women were missing critical vaccinations. Expectant mothers had no reliable care within the village. There had been miscarriages. Lactating women and young girls were not receiving the medical support they needed. Adolescent girls had no one to speak to about menstruation, iron intake, or nutrition. And government funds meant for health schemes sat unused because nobody knew how to access them.
With capacity building from TRI on panchayat systems, schemes, and citizen engagement, Chanda became a Panchayat Badlav Didi, a governance change vector, and began the work of addressing these gaps. She mobilised her Self-Help Group (SHG) network and submitted formal applications to the Village Organisation, Panchayat, and Janpad offices. The response was immediate ridicule. “Men and others would laugh at us and say, ‘Mahilayein kya kar lengi? Jo kaam purush nahi kar paa rahe wo mahilayein kaise karengi? Itne saal se kuch nahi ho paaya to ab kya hoga?'” she recalls. (What will women be able to do? If men haven’t managed it, how will women? If nothing has changed for so many years, what will happen now?)
The resistance was not just words. When the group needed a space to meet, the Sarpanch refused. Chanda and her group identified an unused government building, an old school lying vacant, and demanded it be allocated to them. Refused again, they escalated to the Block Officer. It was approved. Today, it is where they hold all their meetings, and they have not missed a panchayat session since. The Sarpanch who once would not offer them a seat now consults them before planning anything.
The ANM was eventually replaced with a regular, efficient one. Vaccinations resumed on a fixed monthly schedule, with reminders sent so no one was missed. Expecting mothers and young girls could now receive basic vaccinations within the village itself. “I believe that improved physical health is becoming an important factor in enabling them to plan their futures with greater confidence,” Chanda says.
And then COVID-19 arrived. Fear swept through Gunawad. Nobody was willing to get vaccinated. Chanda read about the vaccines, enquired at the block office, and took guidance from the TRI team. Then she and another didi did the one thing that no amount of messaging could achieve: they got vaccinated first, publicly, so the village could see. “I felt that if I got vaccinated myself, it would be the best way to show that the vaccines were not harmful.” Then they went door to door, reassuring, explaining, motivating. Gunawad achieved 100% vaccination.
When the village needed to understand government schemes and rural entitlements, Chanda organised a Ratri Chaupal in collaboration with government officers, something no one in Gunawad had managed before, not even the Sarpanch. It created an open platform for villagers to learn directly from officials. “Once people start seeing real results and understanding the systems,” she says, “they begin to trust the process and also want to ensure that their village and community continue to develop.”
Her father-in-law, once doubtful, now actively encourages her work. Her husband manages the household, the children, the meals, and the chores on the days she is out. “For me,” she says, “the biggest change has been the respect and trust I now receive from my family and community.”
Her dream is unambiguous: equal access to education, food security, good healthcare, and dignified livelihoods for every person in Gunawad. And for Chanda, a dignified livelihood means something specific. “It is not just about earning,” she tells The Logical Indian. “It is about women being able to stand on their own feet and contribute to their families and the village. When women earn through their own work, they gain respect within the household and in the community. This respect and recognition are what truly make a livelihood dignified.”
From Dreaming of the Police Force to Becoming Sarpanch
As a child, Reshma Ninama wanted to join the police force. She did not qualify, but the desire behind that dream, to do samaj sewa, to serve her community, never left her. It simply found a different path.
Reshma is 28 years old and hails from Asaliya, a tribal village in Madhya Pradesh. She arrived there after marriage and immediately did something that marked her as different: she kept studying. She travelled hours each day to attend college and earn her degree, even as she slowly built a reputation in the village as a woman who showed up, for pregnant women, for malnourished children, for anyone who needed her.
TRI’s visioning exercise in 2018 gave shape to what Reshma had been instinctively doing. “I gained the clarity that for a village to truly develop, health, gender, and governance must work together in alignment and move in the same direction,” she tells The Logical Indian. “In my village, and I believe in many villages across India, women were not actively part of governance and decision-making processes. I realised that I want to change this.”
As a trained Health Change Vector, she counselled mothers on nutrition, balanced diets, sanitation, and hygiene. She guided pregnant women on the importance of timely vaccinations and connected malnourished children to Nutrition Rehabilitation Centres. Working with SHGs, the Village Organisation, and TRI’s gender programmes, she took on domestic violence, dowry, child marriage, and discrimination, not as abstract causes but as issues affecting the women she was meeting every week.
Her education played a quiet but decisive role. “Over time, people, especially women, started to see that I was genuinely working for them,” she explains. “They also trusted that, because I was educated, I could take informed decisions and would not be misled.” As more women brought her their concerns, her confidence grew. By 2022, she decided to contest the Panchayat elections. She won.
As Sarpanch of Asaliya, Reshma has driven through a series of changes that most villages in India have not seen. The panchayat selected “Gender Sensitive Panchayat” as its SANKALP theme on the e-gram swaraj portal, choosing it deliberately from among nine available themes, as a signal that gender would not be an afterthought but the organising principle of the village’s development. Asaliya now has a Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP) and a Village Poverty Reduction Plan (VPRP).
In practice, being a Gender-Sensitive Panchayat means asking, before every governance decision, whether it makes life safer and more dignified for women and girls. Street lighting has been added across the village. Bicycles have been distributed to eligible girls to ease their commute to school. The sale of alcohol has been banned to reduce domestic violence. Child marriages have been stopped. Dowry has been actively abolished through community action. The use of loud DJ music at weddings has been discouraged, both for the health risks it poses to pregnant women and the financial burden it places on families.
A Sub-Health Centre is currently under construction, one of Reshma’s highest priorities. “Earlier villagers, especially women and girls, had to travel long distances to access basic health services,” she explains. “This often delayed care and made it difficult for many families to seek timely support.” Once operational, it will mean that women in Asaliya no longer have to choose between seeking care and staying home.
Reshma is also thinking beyond her own tenure. She is embedding her priorities into the GPDP and VPRP so that they continue as part of the panchayat’s long-term development pathway, and building ownership through SHGs, the Village Organisation, and youth engagement, so that governance in Asaliya does not depend on any single person.
Her vision for the village is concrete: reliable livelihoods so that families do not have to migrate, quality healthcare, accessible education, and safety for every woman and girl. “People generally migrate for lack of livelihood opportunity and low labour rates,” she says. “When families have steady income sources locally and see that their children can study well, their health needs are met, and their dignity is protected within the village, migration reduces.”
She wants Asaliya to earn the tag of a Model Gram Panchayat. Given what she has already done at 28, that dream does not seem far away.
The Woman Who Built a Bank, a Business, and a Home
In Bhagsur village, Sarita Bhuriya’s world was once defined entirely by the farm and the household. She worked hard on the land alongside her husband, but the returns were limited, the work was physically demanding, and the money was never hers. “I did not have any money of my own and relied on my husband even for the smallest expenses,” she says. Because of financial constraints, the family could not invest in better technology or adopt improved farming practices the way larger farmers could.
TRI’s visioning exercise changed the direction of her life. Through TRI’s support and RSETI training linked to GPCC processes, she grew into a Banking Sakhi, learning to offer banking services to her village from her home and through door-to-door visits. The family resistance was immediate and vocal. Her husband motivated her every day in the early months. Her in-laws took longer. Neighbours would taunt them: “Aapki bahu dekho ghoom rahi hai, ye kya kar legi, isne ghoonghat nahi kiya hai.” (Look at your daughter-in-law roaming around; what will she achieve? She does not even keep a veil.) It took months for her in-laws to see that this step would not just help Sarita grow, but would secure a better future for the entire family.
The early months of the work were their own challenge. She had very few customers and low visibility, operating from home in a village that had already been burned by a fraudulent banking kiosk. Trust had to be rebuilt from zero, and Sarita made transparency her only tool. Every transaction was explained clearly. Every process was open. It was slow work, but it held. Gradually, more people came.
After two years of persistence, she opened her own kiosk, a Common Service Centre that today serves 30 to 40 customers daily, offering cash withdrawals, deposits, and access to welfare schemes. Her annual income now stands at approximately Rs 1.5 lakh. “Today, this independence has given me an identity of my own,” she tells The Logical Indian.
The impact has spread through every part of her life. She is helping her family build a new home. They are now using improved technology on their farm. Her children attend school regularly. And she owns a scooty, which she rides alone every day to her centre, picks up and drops her children from school, and travels to the district headquarters when her work demands it. “Earlier, I could not even step out of the house without a family member,” she says. “Today, I confidently interact with customers from nearby areas and manage my work independently.”
Her kiosk has also changed how the village relates to welfare and entitlements. Earlier, villagers had to travel long distances to withdraw money or check payments, losing wages and paying travel costs for something as basic as confirming whether a benefit had arrived. Many were simply unaware of what they were entitled to. Now, with transparent, accessible banking within the village, “there is much greater satisfaction and confidence among villagers,” Sarita says.
When COVID-19 arrived, her role expanded well beyond banking. Trained by TRI on vaccination protocols and government regulations, she went door to door countering misinformation, got vaccinated first to demonstrate it was safe, and conducted household surveys to track who had been vaccinated and what each family needed. Bhagsur achieved 100% vaccination.
Looking ahead, Sarita wants to expand her services and open a stationery store. But more than her own plans, what moves her is what she now sees in the women around her. “Earlier, most of us rarely stepped out of our homes and lived within the limits of our ghoonghat,” she observes. “Now, more women are gathering the confidence to step outside and see a world beyond those boundaries.” Women-led businesses are coming up across the area, in beauty and in fashion, and Sarita sees in each one a ripple of something she helped set in motion.
She puts it simply: “I enjoy my work so much that even on holidays I do not feel like staying at home.” From a woman who could not spend a rupee without asking, to one who is building a home, running a business, and inspiring others to dream, that line says everything.
What These Three Influencer Didis Teach Us
Founded in 2016, Transform Rural India has spent nearly a decade building community-led, gender-intentional development. As it enters its second decade in 2026, it is deepening this approach while scaling it across rural India. Chanda, Reshma, and Sarita are not exceptions; they are the evidence that the approach works.
None of them arrived at their positions through accident or luck. Each sat in a circle, participated in an exercise that asked them to imagine what their village could become, and found that the imagining itself was transformative. Each then spent years doing unglamorous, incremental work, attending SHG meetings, showing up at panchayats, going door to door, building trust one conversation at a time, until the village moved with them rather than against them.
The changes they have catalysed are neither small nor complete. Regular vaccinations, a functioning banking kiosk, a Sub-Health Centre under construction, an alcohol ban, child marriages stopped, a Gender-Sensitive Panchayat, government schemes reaching people who did not know they existed, and 100% vaccination rates achieved in the middle of a pandemic. These are not headline moments. They are the result of years of consistent, determined, community-rooted work.
Gaps remain. Chanda is clear about what institutional support is still missing: “There is a need for more regular information-sharing, continued capacity-building, and timely support from local officials. Stronger institutional recognition and backing would help women leaders carry out their roles more effectively and with greater confidence.” Sarita notes that the elderly and many women are still not comfortable with digital platforms on their own. Reshma is working to ensure her reforms outlast her tenure.
But in each of these villages, something irreversible has already happened. Women are part of every decision. The Sarpanch asks for their opinion. The men sit at the back.
This Women’s Day, the most powerful influencers in rural India are not online. They are in Gunawad, in Asaliya, in Bhagsur, doing the work, one village at a time.
