GLIDE

As climate change makes farming unviable and automation erodes factory work, rural youth are left stranded between a livelihood that is failing and cities that exploit them. GLIDE helps communities redesign sustainable livelihoods at home, together.

The numbers behind the problem are stark. India ranks among the countries most affected by climate change, crop yields are projected to fall sharply, and millions face climate driven migration. At the same time the country has one of the youngest populations on earth, yet only a small fraction of its youth are formally skilled, and automation and AI threaten a large share of low skill jobs. Skilling programmes have often trained rural youth for urban work that no longer exists.

The hidden drain

GLIDE begins by helping a community see something it has never measured. While villagers chase outside markets for their crops, they themselves have become a vast market for factory made goods. Workshop after workshop, communities discover that a single cluster of a few hundred households spends crores of rupees each year on packaged products, much of it on credit and generational debt, and pays crores more in GST than it receives back in schemes and subsidies. The money earned locally drains straight back to the urban economy.

The solution, on two pillars

GLIDE turns that drain into opportunity. Mapping a community's existing skills, the wild and cultivated resources around it, and the factory goods it buys, the model forms small livelihood groups that produce those goods locally instead. It rests on two simple rules:

• People work in small groups, with no group made up of members from the same family.
• Each group makes a different product, unrelated to the others, and they sell locally and to each other, so the whole community becomes its own market.

The outcome is a self contained, circular rural economy: needs met locally, wealth retained in the village, minimal carbon footprint, no plastic and preservative laden packaging, better nutrition, less debt, and migration arrested. The communities call it a march toward Aarthik Swaraj, a self governed rural economy.

How it begins

It all starts with a three day design thinking workshop that helps participants understand their local economy, form livelihood groups, choose products, and build practical business plans to take home. It is run by OASiS GLIDE facilitators, with a field implementation guide and monitoring tools for partner organisations. The workshop is offered in a near gift economy spirit so that organisations of every size can host it.

Since 2017, GLIDE has spread fast. Recent host partners include the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, Gram Vikas, WASSAN, Grameen Foundation India, Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre, and government programmes such as Jharkhand's Deendayal Gram Swavalamban Yojana.

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