From Wells to Systems: How Gram Vikas Turned Participation into Policy
Liby Johnson on how Gram Vikas built lasting institutions, and what India can learn about scaling participation, not just infrastructure.
View as PDF
SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation | SDG 11: Sustainable Communities
Institutions: Ministry of Jal Shakti | Ministry of Rural Development
When Liby Johnson first entered the world of rural development, his journey began with a question rather than a plan, driven as much by instinct as by his grasp of local conditions.
“You can’t manage a village the way you manage a project,” he says. “You have to understand its pulse before you touch its systems.”
Across villages in Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha, he learned that progress depends less on management and more on listening. Working at the intersection of governance, livelihoods, and community confidence, he sees social change as accompaniment - helping people recognise themselves as the authors of their own continuity. That belief found its fullest form at Gram Vikas, a name long synonymous with community-driven development in eastern India, where Liby now serves as Executive Director.
Over four decades, Gram Vikas has reached nearly 600,000 people in 1,700 villages across Odisha and Jharkhand – supporting 105,000 families to build toilets and bathing rooms, bringing renewable energy to 54,000 households, and regenerating 10,000 hectares of land.
What began as instinct has become architecture - a way of building systems that last because people own them.
From Relief to Design – A Philosophy Takes Form
Gram Vikas began in 1979 out of a student-led relief effort in cyclone-hit Odisha. What had started as emergency relief became a search for lasting rural equity. The founders, led by Joe Madiath, realised that deprivation was not only economic but infrastructural and institutional – without water or sanitation, dignity itself was impossible.
Out of that insight came MANTRA - the Movement and Action Network for Transformation of Rural Areas. Its principle was radical for its time: every household, regardless of caste or income, would receive sanitation and piped water, but only if all in the village agreed to participate. Equality became the precondition for progress, forcing communities to decide together or not at all. Over time, this sequencing evolved from a project rule into a development as consensus philosophy.
“Our work evolved with the needs of people,” Liby reflects. “You can’t separate water from health, or sanitation from dignity.”
Today, Gram Vikas works across six domains – Water, Livelihoods, Sanitation & Health, Habitat & Technology, Village Institutions, and Education & Youth – but its purpose remains the same: to turn infrastructure into institution. In doing so, it mirrors a wider shift in Indian development – from delivery to design, and from construction to collective ownership.
Water as the Organising Principle
From its earliest projects, Gram Vikas treated water as more than a service. Over the years, it has expanded from water supply to water security - a subtle but crucial shift. Its Water Secure Gram Panchayat Programme, launched in 2021, weaves together four pillars: sustainability, prosperity, safety, and equity & resilience.
It views the Gram Panchayat as both an ecological and institutional unit where communities map sources, monitor quality, protect catchments, and align water use with livelihoods..
“Water security isn’t just about taps,” Liby observes. “It’s about the confidence that water will still be there next year, and that people can fix their own systems.”
The approach complements the state’s Jal Jeevan Mission, but Gram Vikas sees itself as a companion of local institutions rather than a service provider. It even links water governance to migration – encouraging families to channel remittances into productive assets, so that migration becomes a choice not a compulsion.
“When water works, livelihoods stabilise,” Liby notes. “And when livelihoods stabilise, people migrate on their own terms.”
Water became both entry point and organising principle: the thread through which Gram Vikas reimagined development as institution-building.
Today, Gram Vikas links energy, housing, and climate resilience to water security. Across Odisha’s hilly and coastal districts, it has supported communities to build micro-hydro systems, solar grids, and disaster-resistant homes that reduce drudgery and expand opportunities.
Liby recalls a villager once telling him, “Now our village is the kind of place where parents want their daughters to marry.” He smiles. “That’s when you know dignity has arrived.”
From such moments, he says, you learn that infrastructure delivers services, but institutions deliver confidence.
Learning as a Model of Delivery
Looking back on decades-long work, Liby often credits his training in rural management and exposure to diverse social, political and geographical conditions.
“Programmes often fail or succeed not because of funds but because of fit. Adaptation isn’t a strategy, it’s the only model that works,” he explains.
When he first worked in Odisha’s tribal belt, he spent months learning the language, observing local governance patterns, and mapping community logic. A later seven-year interlude away from the sector became another form of learning.
“It helped me unlearn habits and recover perspective,” he says.
This reflection anchors Gram Vikas’s distinctive culture: diagnose causes rather than symptoms, and stay long enough for institutions to internalise accountability. For Liby, a broken toilet isn’t a hardware failure, it’s a social one.
“If people don’t maintain it,” he says, “it means they never really owned it.”
Learning, for him, is therefore less about plans than about patience – the readiness to listen until a system reveals its own logic.
Patience as Design, Partnership as Method
Patience is a deeply embedded lever in Gram Vikas’s operating culture. In one village, a sanitation project halted when upper-caste families resisted inclusion of Dalit households. Rather than enforcing deadlines, the team waited. Consensus came months later, and inclusion with it.
“You can’t script trust in quarterly reports. Social change moves at the pace of people, not dashboards and spreadsheets,” Liby observes.
Patience, he argues, is not inefficiency but design. Durable outcomes require policy timelines that factor trust in the time that it takes for social change.
Long before government schools reached remote rural areas, Gram Vikas established four residential schools for first-generation learners from SC and ST communities – in Kankia and Rudhapadar (Ganjam district), Koinpur (Gajapati district), and Kumudabahal (Kalahandi district). These classrooms value curiosity and self-governance. Students run committees, manage sanitation, and lead science clubs. Many alumni now work in public service, teaching, health care, and local entrepreneurship – proof that aspiration travels fastest through trust.
“We are an R&D lab for rural systems,” Liby says. “We build prototypes, prove they work, and step back when governments adopt them.”
Patience, in this sense, becomes partnership – the quiet collaboration through which grassroots learning matures into public policy.
When the State Learns - and Listens
Connecting social progress to the state is equally vital. Over four decades, Gram Vikas’s methods have quietly shaped India’s policy grammar. The Swachh Bharat Mission and Jal Jeevan Mission both carry its signature ideas – universal access, dignity, and community governance. What began as a grassroots idea - every household as the unit of dignity - is now embedded in national programmes.
Policy has succeeded in scaling infrastructure at scale, but still struggles in sustaining participation.
“Governments have reach; we have trust,” Liby notes. “When the two align, transformation lasts. When speed outruns participation, systems collapse.”
As the Jal Jeevan Mission enters its consolidation phase, the contrast between pipes and people has sharpened. Millions of new tap connections exist, but without maintenance budgets or trained staff, many falter.
“Infrastructure delivers water, institutions sustain it.” Liby adds. “You can’t mass-produce self-reliance and confidence, you have to grow it locally.”
Gram Vikas’s story points to a larger policy truth: India has mastered delivery, but must now master durability. To be lasting and effective, techno-managerial solutions need the scaffolding of community ownership and social acceptance. Civil society acts as the country’s social R&D - developing prototypes the state can later scale. When participation takes root, it turns into governance capital – self-correcting and self-sustaining.
As India races to expand infrastructure, Gram Vikas offers a simple lesson: resilience grows from participation and collective trust. For a nation of six hundred thousand villages, that trust may be the most enduring infrastructure of all.
View as PDF
Liby Johnson is the Executive Director of Gram Vikas. All the details are based on his account and have been approved for publication. This piece was prepared with assistance from Ms. Sapna Singh, a member of the editorial team at The Policy Edge.