A key stakeholder of the climate domain once told Neeraja Kudrimoti something that has stayed with her since. “Climate toh intangible hai, uspe kaam nahi ho sakta, kuch tangible batao,” he said, meaning climate is intangible, you cannot really work on it, show me something tangible.
For someone who had spent years watching women carry water further and further as ponds dried up, watching forests shrink to fragmented patches, and watching soils harden under chemical inputs, the dismissal stung.
But it also set the direction of everything that followed. Neeraja Kudrimoti is the Associate Director for Climate Action at Transform Rural India (TRI), a development design organisation working toward transforming a lakh of languishing localities into flourishing communities.
Across seven states and over fifteen years of her professional career, she has engaged with over 30,000 women households to build climate resilience from the ground up.
Shaped by Her Roots
Neeraja was named after Neerja Bhanot, the Pan Am flight attendant who saved passengers during the 1986 Karachi hijacking and lost her life doing so, remembered for her extraordinary bravery and unwavering strength. The name was a signal of the household she was born into.
Her mother was a radiologist, a feminist ahead of her time, and a fierce advocate against female foeticide. She also took young Neeraja out into nature, to observe snakes, crabs, water bodies, and the indigenous communities (Katkaris) who lived in harmony with their surroundings.
When her mother passed away, Neeraja’s education took a more conventional turn. Her family found her questioning of social norms unsettling. Her inclination to explore alternate career paths earned her the label of the black sheep. But the perspective her mother had shaped in her did not disappear. It waited.
The Leap in the Dark
After more than two years at an MNC, Neeraja decided she wanted to formally enter the social impact space. In 2012, she took “a leap in the dark” and joined the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship. She moved from a comfortable urban role into rural areas marked by conflict, working closely with district administration in Chhattisgarh.
Her work with indigenous women in the state helped her co-create models to address poverty, with the government as facilitator rather than driver. It convinced her that real, lasting change comes from strengthening local institutions and enabling communities to shape their own development pathways.
Her association with Transform Rural India began in 2018. What drew her was TRI’s commitment to working at the intersection of community, state, and markets, and its belief that change must be systemic and rooted in local realities.
Millets, Memory, and a Climate Lens
Indigenous communities she worked with called them “besharam,” meaning shameless, because they are farmer-friendly, planet-friendly, and nutrition-friendly. Low water footprint, drought-resistant, deeply rooted in culture.
The Green Revolution had gradually pushed millets out. Paddy replaced them, backed by assured procurement and inclusion in the Public Distribution System. The burden of preserving millets, economic, social, and ecological, had fallen on indigenous communities. The damage was visible not just in livelihoods but in the health of landscapes.
This marked a shift in Neeraja’s work toward a broader climate engagement, with community resilience at its core. To deepen her understanding further, she joined a climate action fellowship, where she began studying the science of climate action, what is happening at a global level, and how different stakeholders are approaching it. At the same time, she saw that public systems and markets were struggling to address community aspirations and issues, and that the climate lens was largely missing from their frameworks.
Working across regions from Chhattisgarh to Maharashtra, she saw that climate variability shapes everyday decisions about what to grow, what to eat, and how families cope. Climate, she came to understand, is deeply interconnected with livelihoods, water, nutrition, migration, and gender.
The Millets Initiative she led at TRI grew from small pilots with women farmers into a large-scale mission later adopted by the state government, including the establishment of an exclusive Millet Café. Speaking with The Logical Indian, she reflected that resilient local economies are built by reconnecting climate-smart agriculture with local consumption and local markets.
The Millet Café demonstrated that value-addition models can turn traditional crops into viable enterprises, bringing in a circular economy focus and increasing farmer incomes. Millets, she says, are a source of nutrition, resilience, and cultural empowerment, not a passing trend.
What Women Know That Schemes Don’t
Across seven states, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, and Bihar, Neeraja has found that the most immediate need for women is water. The drudgery and stress of gathering water in summer is enormous, and it covers not only agriculture and caregiving but also livestock. Perennial water bodies are becoming seasonal. Natural landmarks that held both environmental and cultural value are disappearing.
Forest cover is shrinking from dense, contiguous patches to open, fragmented ones, increasing the distance women walk for fuelwood and worsening human-animal conflict. Chemical inputs have improved paddy yields but hardened the soil, reducing its natural fertility and pulling farmers into a cycle of debt and ecological exhaustion. Energy too is a deep challenge, one that affects communities across all the regions she works in.
Women in the communities she works with have articulated all of this with a clarity that policy rarely captures. Telling The Logical Indian about her field visits, Neeraja recalled what some of these women shared with her. “Insaano ke liye peene ka paani toh ghar tak aa raha hai, lekin prithvi ke paani ki jarooratein insaan poori nahi kar paa raha hai,” said one woman, meaning while drinking water is reaching people’s homes, we are failing to meet the water needs of the Earth.
Another reflected, “Agar jameen hi nahi bachegi, toh yojnaon ka hum kya karenge,” (if the land itself does not survive, what use are schemes and programmes to us). A third observed, “Bazaar logon ko apne baare mein sochne par majboor karta hai, paryavaran ke liye nahi,” (markets push people to think about themselves, not about the environment).
Making Climate Tangible: Three Pathways
When Neeraja reflects on how to make climate action understandable and actionable, she identifies three clear pathways. The first is building community-level understanding and enabling a shift from reliance to action, something that happens only when communities, especially women, begin to see themselves as active agents of change rather than passive recipients.
The second is influencing the agenda-setting of public systems, so that climate becomes embedded in everyday governance and decision-making rather than treated as a separate or abstract issue. The third is building a collaborative of multiple actors within a bio-region, bringing together communities, Panchayati Raj Institutions, frontline administration, and markets for collective change.
Underpinning all three is a “whole-of-society” approach. Ten years of TRI’s work across seven states has shown that convergence is what drives impact. To bridge the gap between grassroots practice and global policy spaces, including platforms like COP, TRI uses technology in two distinct ways: for communities, in the form of planning, data, and resource management tools; and for communication, through storytelling and digital platforms.
Field-based evidence is documented and translated into policy-relevant insights, ensuring that local challenges and solutions shape larger climate narratives.
Women at the Centre of Climate Action
At TRI, the anchor of climate action initiatives, whether on water security, sustainable livelihoods, or decentralised renewable energy, is women. This approach, grounded in TRI’s belief in “move along all, not one,” has led to better identification of gendered and intersectional climate issues.
Vulnerable groups, including pregnant women, children, the elderly, and marginalised hamlets, are now more visibly accounted for. Illnesses and ailments related to extreme heat or heavy rainfall are tracked and responded to more effectively. Women collectives have enabled more targeted and timely responses to climate stresses such as heatwaves, water scarcity, and disease outbreaks.
With a focus on institutional strengthening, these collectives have improved last-mile delivery and uptake of climate solutions, from water management to nutrition practices, because of improved social cohesion, agency building, and the collective ability to negotiate for commons.
Women are increasingly participating in Gram Panchayat planning processes, influencing priorities such as water security, soil conservation, and public health. In several locations, this has resulted in public investments being better aligned with women’s demands. Collectives are also moving beyond mobilisation to co-owning planning processes and engaging directly with local institutions.
Pidhapal: A Village That Wrote Its Own Plan
One of the most concrete examples of community-led climate action from Neeraja’s work comes from Pidhapal village in Chhattisgarh. Women’s collectives there played a central role in shaping a GIS-based, community-driven water and landscape restoration plan by actively engaging with Panchayat institutions.
Their leadership prioritised water conservation and equitable irrigation. Interventions like Staggered Contour Trenches generated 714 person-days of employment for 68 villagers and INR 1.86 lakhs in wages. The plan was expected to conserve over 609,000 cubic metres of water annually.
Women’s participation also strengthened convergence with MGNREGA and SRLM, ensuring sustained investments and accountability. The shifts that followed were visible across three areas: women’s voice and leadership in local governance, equitable resource planning and access, and improved agriculture stability with reduced stress on women.
TRI’s role, as Neeraja clarifies, was to bring together knowledge, tools, and convergence with government schemes. The ownership of the plan was entirely the community’s.
The Barriers That Remain
Despite the gains, Neeraja is clear-eyed about what holds women back from full participation in climate decision-making. Paternity and gender gaps in land ownership limit women’s access to green assets and opportunities. Women are often the first responders to climate stress but among the last to sit at decision-making tables. Technical committees remain largely male. Cultural norms, including the practice of sarpanch pati, dilute women’s formal representation even when they hold elected office.
Government climate training and early warning systems are typically funnelled through male-headed households or male-only community spaces, leaving women dependent on second-hand information. Mandates for creches and maternity benefits are still viewed by many employers as a cost rather than a social good. Gender-intentional financing and women-centred value chains remain underdeveloped.
Governance as the Anchor
Neeraja sees Panchayati Raj Institutions not as peripheral to climate action but as its anchor. Under the 73rd amendment, PRIs have the legal authority, institutional structure, and decision-making proximity to communities that large programmes often lack. At TRI, this sits within what she describes as the Samaj-Sarkar-Bazaar framework, connecting community action with public systems and market linkages.
When SHGs, FPOs, and youth collectives actively participate in Gram Panchayat planning, the result is more equitable and need-based resource allocation, especially for vulnerable households. Climate solutions become place-based and community-owned rather than delivered from the outside. Frontline workers and community institutions, when aligned with Panchayats, ensure effective convergence, accountability, and responsiveness of public systems.
For grassroots models to scale within government frameworks, she believes several things must come together: place-based design co-created with communities, credible real-time evidence that can feed into policy, and public resources aligned to sustain what works.
Drawing from her experience with large-scale programmes like the Aspirational Districts initiative, which focuses on rapidly improving socio-economic indicators in India’s most underdeveloped districts, she has seen that proven community-led models must be integrated into existing government schemes and backed by sustained financing to achieve true scale.
There is also a need to build green value chains that are economically viable and ecologically sustainable, supported by stronger regulation and enforcement for long-term green growth.
The Most Underestimated Thing
Neeraja is insistent that none of this work belongs to her alone. At TRI, every model and every innovation is owned by the community. “We see ourselves as co-travellers, not drivers of change,” she says in conversation with The Logical Indian, “and that distinction matters enormously in how outcomes actually unfold on the ground.”
Looking back, she says the most underestimated factor in driving meaningful change has been community agency, particularly women’s collective leadership within local governance. Real change, she has seen, does not come only from technology, funding, or schemes. It comes from communities having a deep, emotionally anchored sense of purpose shaped by their lived experiences, which are largely missing in solutions.
Women who once did not step out of their homes are now advocating for policy change. Public systems that once dismissed climate as intangible are now acting on it. “The voice, when given the right platforms and institutional pathways to influence decisions, can be a powerful one,” she says. An ecosystem that once demanded tangible proof began to see and understand climate linkages across development through dialogue, evidence, and community aspirations.
The Logical Indian Perspective
At The Logical Indian, we believe climate resilience is not built through top-down schemes alone, but through communities that understand, own, and drive change in their own landscapes. Neeraja Kudrimoti’s work shows that when women are placed at the centre of climate action, not as passive recipients but as active agents, the results reach further and last longer.
However, for such community-led models to truly scale, they must be met with stronger institutional commitment, gender-intentional financing, and policy frameworks that treat local knowledge as an asset rather than an afterthought.
Real change lies in the balance between grassroots action and systemic accountability. Climate change is not an abstract future problem for millions of rural women in India. It is today’s walk for water. Are we doing enough to change that?
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