Reimagining Rural Prosperity

Pramel Kumar was a proud winner of Nexus of Good Annual Award, 2025. His journey with Green Chakra began not as a new idea but as a continuation of a lifelong commitment he had. Having grown up in a farming family that experienced the vagaries of land erosion and livelihood loss, he spent over 25 years working with rural communities, civil society organisations, and national coalitions to make agriculture both sustainable and dignified.

Through Natural Capital, founded in March 2020, a beginning was made with the Maati Maange More (3M) campaign, a people’s movement for living soils. The campaign inspired farmers and youth to value soil as the foundation of all prosperity. As the work deepened, there was a recognition of a recurring gap: while several Bio-Input Resource Centres (BRCs) were being promoted across states, many lacked viable business models, supply-demand systems, and youth engagement. The potential was clear: BRCs could become the green engines of local economies if they were connected through a decentralised, enterprise-driven ecosystem.

This realisation gave birth to Green Chakra, a model where nature, youth, and enterprise meet.

The Problem

Modern agriculture has left our soils exhausted and our farmers disempowered. In most villages, farmers depend on costly chemical inputs supplied by external companies. The result is a cycle of debt, declining fertility, and health hazards. Women and youth, meanwhile, remain on the margins, the former confined to unpaid farm work, the latter migrating to cities for uncertain jobs.

Green Chakra was designed to reverse this cycle. It seeks to build local circular economies, where everything a farmer needs from bio-inputs to desi seeds to farm services is available within their own ecosystem. Instead of a top-down project, it is a community enterprise rooted in local ownership and ecological integrity.

The Green Chakra Solution

Green Chakra establishes decentralised rural hubs, called Green Chakra Platforms, each led by local youth or community institutions such as FPOs (Farmer-Producer Organisations) and SHGs (Self-Help Groups).

At the heart of every platform is a Bio-Input Resource Centre (BRC), a unit that produces organic inputs like Jeevamrit, Dashparni Ark, Sudarshan Chakra and Bhim Tonic using local materials. Complementing these are community seed banks that conserve indigenous varieties, and women-led nurseries that produce saplings and composts. Together, they form the nucleus of a Rural Circular Economy (RCE) where waste becomes input, knowledge becomes income, and community becomes the enterprise.

To make this system efficient and transparent, Green Chakra introduces a digital layer of simple mobile tools to record production, manage orders, and connect local demand with local supply. The aim is to create a “rural Amazon for natural farming”, a hub where every farmer can access sustainable inputs and every youth can find dignified green work.

Pilot in Sausar: Small Steps, Strong Roots

The first Green Chakra pilot began in the Sausar block of Madhya Pradesh, a landscape known for its diversity of crops and vibrant farming culture. Over six months, we worked closely with a local FPO, seven BRC entrepreneurs, and about a thousand farmers.

The results, though early, have been promising. Farmers reported a 25–40 per cent reduction in input costs, improved soil texture, and visible signs of biodiversity recovery, such as the return of earthworms and pollinators. Youth who once sought work outside now earn livelihoods as Green Chakra Champions/Fellows managing sales, quality, and farmer outreach.

Women’s SHGs, previously involved in seasonal wage work, are now running small nurseries and preparing plant tonics, turning ecological knowledge into income.

Innovation Rooted in Tradition

What makes Green Chakra distinctive is how it blends traditional ecological knowledge with enterprise innovation. Farmers bring centuries-old practices of preparing organic tonics and preserving seeds. Green Chakra, strengthening these with scientific validation from partners such as ICAR–IISS SoilTech Innovation Hub, is in process, ensuring quality assurance and standardisation.

Social Inclusion and Climate Resilience

At its core, Green Chakra is about inclusion. It prioritises women, youth, and indigenous farmers as enterprise leaders, not beneficiaries. The initiative transforms vulnerable groups into change-makers who lead local climate action.

The environmental impact is equally powerful. Each BRC replaces 2–3 tons of chemical fertiliser annually, reducing about 6–8 tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions per village cluster. By enhancing soil organic carbon and promoting indigenous seed varieties, the model contributes to both climate mitigation and adaptation.

Building a Scalable Movement

The success in Sausar is not the end but the beginning. Green Chakra envisions scaling to 2,000 platforms by 2035, reaching over 10 million smallholders. The model’s strength lies in its replicability; each platform is locally owned, financially viable, and ecosystem-linked.

Natural Capital acts as an enabler, providing knowledge, design, and quality support, but leaving ownership with the community. This ensures that the movement grows village by village, youth by youth, seed by seed.

Investing in Change

Building Green Chakra has been both a professional mission and a personal investment. The total cost of establishing the pilot was approximately Rs 32 lakh, including cash investments, co-founders’ time, and contributions from local FPOs, BRCs, and field teams. More than money, it represents thousands of hours of shared learning, mentoring, and collective belief in the power of rural enterprise.

All training and mentoring services to youth, NGOs, and farmer groups have been provided free of cost, ensuring that even the most resource-poor communities could participate. This is how Green Chakra stays true to its ethos that knowledge should not be gated by affordability.

Recognition and the Road Ahead

Being selected for the Nexus of Good Award in the Agriculture category is not just an honour but an affirmation that India’s future lies in empowering communities to innovate from the ground up. The recognition reinforces their belief that sustainable change happens when people become the solution.

Going forward, Natural Capital aims to partner with public and private institutions to mainstream Rural Circular Economies as a national development strategy integrating bio-input hubs, agri-entrepreneurship, and soil regeneration under one umbrella.

Green Chakra is not just a project; it is a movement to make climate action a community business. It redefines prosperity not as extraction, but as regeneration; not as aid, but as agency.

When a young woman in Sausar sells her first batch of bio-inputs, or a farmer proudly shows earthworms returning to his field, we are reminded that true transformation begins with trust in people, in nature, and in the soil beneath our feet.

Green Chakra stands as a living example of that trust where nature, youth, and enterprise meet to regenerate India’s rural future.

Views expressed are personal. The writer is an author and a former civil servant