A new approach to sustainable rural livelihoods and a self contained, circular rural economy, designed by the community itself.
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.
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.
Reach at last count. Live figures and the partner map are maintained on glide.org.in.
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:
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.
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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See where GLIDE has reached on the map →
Any organisation can host GLIDE workshops for its rural communities and field workers. To reach communities served by organisations of every size, the workshop is offered close to a gift economy.
In place of a fixed fee, host organisations give whatever is best possible for them and respectable for the facilitators. Better funded organisations give liberally, which helps cover organisations in a weaker funding position.
Day one, identifying the elements of business. Listing everything a sustainable business needs, then finding the skills, the raw material and the money.
Day two, understanding the rural economy. Finding the market, working through the dimensions of the rural economy, and identifying livelihood opportunities.
Day three, designing sustainable livelihoods. Deciding livelihoods, creating business plans, and working through packaging, branding, advertising, marketing and licensing.
Field workers help participants start their group livelihoods and encourage others in the region to follow, making sure each group picks a different product, understands its economics, upgrades its skills and builds awareness among local consumers. A complete implementation guide is shared with the field workers, along with a WhatsApp group connecting them to the management and the facilitators so questions get resolved immediately. A monitoring sheet is available for organisations that need one, and a form for sharing achievements and challenges with the GLIDE partner network. Organisations that report monthly get a dedicated page on the GLIDE site showing their progress.
The GLIDERS training of trainers workshop is offered only to organisations and networks that have run one GLIDE workshop for field staff and three for their communities, whose prospective trainers attended all four, and whose trainers have taken part in implementation on the ground. It runs three full days at the host’s location for 30 to 35 participants, and is entirely participative and hands on.
Climate change. Dramatic seasonal variation is altering cropping patterns and cutting yields, making farming economically unviable and undesirable as a profession. Irrigated rice yields are projected to fall by 7 to 10 percent, wheat by 6 to 25 percent, and maize by 18 to 23 percent in the coming years.
Migration. Education in rural areas builds aspirations only towards government jobs and industry, driving heavy migration to the cities. Farming is treated as the profession of the illiterate. Almost all rural youth believe money exists only in urban areas and that village life has no future, but they arrive without skills that are useful there, and mostly end up as exploited labour.
Competition. Rural youth are groomed from childhood to compete and to outdo their peers. That rooted competitiveness turns into individualism, discrimination and inequality. Communities fragment as individuals turn selfish. People stop thinking as a group at all, families and friendships break, and the result is loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide.
The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) has trained rural youth in industrial skills, which drove more migration. Over the years industrial automation replaced those same workers and left them jobless. NGOs and CSR programmes train rural youth to make goods for urban markets at better prices, but they mostly end up working as labour on buy-back contracts while local flora and fauna are exploited. Rural livelihoods have become entirely dependent on urban markets and urban demand.
Sixty percent of India still lives in rural areas, and needs daily essentials. Crops cover only part of a family’s annual food requirement; most of the rest comes from factory-made products. With yields falling, farmers cut consumption of what they grow in order to sell it, and increasingly live on government rations. The best rural produce goes to urban markets, while rural demand is met by rations and by packaged, preservative-laden goods made in urban factories. Every village shop displays ready-to-eat products in bright plastic packaging hung like torans across the doorway.
Rural markets have been captured completely by urban industry, manufacturers and resellers. An Economic Times report of 2 September 2025 found that 51 percent of affordable premium FMCG sales now happen in rural India.
Rural India sells its best produce and art to urban India, and buys adulteration, malnourishment and pollution in return.
One solution, fourteen Sustainable Development Goals. Because GLIDE works simultaneously on livelihoods, nutrition, health, education, gender, water, energy, consumption, climate, land, inequality and local institutions, a single intervention moves fourteen of the seventeen SDGs at once.
The approach was first proved in two Maoist-affected forest villages in West Bengal, where it arrested migration completely. Read that story →
Workshop bookings, partner updates, the live map and the latest from the field.
Complete social security for the masses with no taxes, premiums or savings, drawn from a slice of each family's everyday spending. The first expenditure based model in the world.
Teaches rural development to rural children, 70 percent practical and 30 percent theory, building a local backbone of professionals to run welfare programmes and earn locally.
A shared platform that brings community, university, corporate and government together to brainstorm and test solutions for long pending problems, at both grassroots and university level.
Whether you bring funds, a fresh idea, or an unsolved problem from the community you serve, there is a way in.
