Reimagining Rural Prosperity

From Madhya Pradesh to the national stage, Green Chakra demonstrates how climate action becomes powerful when communities lead

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Green Chakra offers a scalable blueprint for rural climate action

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.

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.