All too often, the focus of conversation in India is on our failure as a socio-economic polity. We despair about our inability to realize our full potential as a country: we find fault with our political system, the leadership, the state of our institutions, the economic model and much else. What we do not do is reflect on the micro successes and the many examples of hugely impactful interventions that have shifted the needle of society in positive directions. We do not ask the questions: what were the ingredients of these successes? Are they scalable? Are there learnings from these that could be applicable elsewhere in India, and might these learnings provide the guts for a new developmental model?

Anchoring Change attempts to answer these and several other such questions, through accounts of organizations from across India, spanning the seventy-five years since independence. The idea is to

revisit these examples of civic action and explore their relevance for the future of India.

The book has two objectives: to shift the conversation from failures to successes; and to distill from these successes relevant design principles that might have wide relevance to create an alternative, grassroots-based, sustainable development model.