🇮🇳India

The world's largest beach cleanup, started single-handedly by Mumbai lawyer Afroz Shah in 2015.

An Indian solar micro-grid developer builds decentralized, community-owned power plants that bring round-the-clock electricity to villages beyond the national grid.

Yuwa fields girls' football teams and runs a free school in rural Jharkhand, using the game to keep girls in the classroom and out of child marriage.

SELCO Foundation designs solar-powered solutions for low-income Indian households, clinics, and small businesses to improve livelihoods.

A Mumbai-based nonprofit trains marginal and tribal farmers to keep indigenous bees, lifting both crop pollination and household incomes.

A community-driven initiative restoring centuries-old stepwells across Rajasthan so monsoon rain can once again recharge village aquifers.

Five worried Delhi mothers turned lockdown blue skies into a pan-India movement demanding clean air for every child.

A 2010 heatwave killed more than a thousand people in Ahmedabad in a week. The plan the city wrote afterwards now saves roughly that many lives every year.

A Delhi cleantech startup built a device that clamps onto diesel generator exhausts and turns the captured soot into usable ink and paint.

Villagers across rural Bengal stage forum theatre plays that let audiences step onstage and rehearse standing up to domestic violence, child marriage and corruption.

Kheyti's 'Greenhouse-in-a-Box' gives Indian smallholders an affordable, low-water greenhouse that multiplies yields and incomes.

India's first REDD+ project pays indigenous Khasi communities to protect and restore Meghalaya's sacred cloud forests.

Magic Bus uses weekly sports sessions led by young community mentors to keep India's poorest adolescents in school and out of child labour and early marriage.

One man who single-handedly grew a forest on a barren Brahmaputra sandbar over four decades.

WOTR mobilizes villages across India's drought-prone drylands to build check-dams, contour trenches and ponds that recharge groundwater and bring barren common land back into production.

Rural grandmothers from dozens of countries train in Tilonia, Rajasthan to become 'Solar Mamas' who electrify their own villages.

A rural Odisha NGO refuses to install a single tap or toilet in a village until every household, rich or poor, agrees to join in and build them together.

The world's largest operator of community solar mini-grids delivers round-the-clock renewable power to rural villages and small businesses across India and Nigeria that the national grid has never reached.

A grassroots NGO built waste-collection systems from scratch in Himalayan towns and national parks that had none, one trail and one household at a time.

India's 'Waterman' Rajendra Singh turned a dying craft of earthen check dams into a movement that brought dried-up Rajasthan rivers back to life.

SayTrees packs dense Miyawaki mini-forests into Bengaluru's leftover urban land to cut heat and clean the air, one former parking lot or roadside strip at a time.

A former journalist's grassroots mission is replacing Punjab's smoke-choked stubble fires with mulching, composting, and organic farming.

A volunteer-driven Delhi non-profit that turned parental worry over toxic winters into a Supreme Court petition and a citywide clean-air education movement.

An Ahmedabad-founded women's NGO training female construction workers in Delhi to monitor air quality and demand clean-air action.

India's first accredited surf school pays coastal kids in free surf lessons for every 5kg of beach trash they collect, turning Chennai's Kovalam shoreline into a classroom for ocean literacy.

In flood-prone Gorakhpur, women farmers are turning the city's peri-urban wetlands and fields into working flood buffers that also feed their families.

The Centre for Pastoralism works with India's estimated 10-20 million mobile herders to reclaim traditional grazing grounds under the Forest Rights Act and prove that seasonal migration is a sound way to manage rangeland, not a relic to be fenced off.

A Rajasthan village plants 111 trees every time a girl is born, turning the celebration of daughters into two decades of large-scale reforestation.

A Delhi-based network of river researchers scrutinizes every major dam in South Asia to expose the flooding, displacement and biodiversity loss they cause.

In the cold desert of Ladakh, engineers and villagers freeze winter meltwater into towering "ice stupas" that release irrigation water just when spring-sown crops need it most.

Kolkata's sewage is cleaned for free by fishponds its own fisherfolk built — and the only reason those ponds still exist is a public interest case filed in 1992.