About
We exist so that geography stops deciding opportunity.
India Action Project (IAP) was founded to close the distance between rural communities and the modern economy — not by replacing village life, but by giving it the tools, trust and access it has long been denied.
Our mission
To build the people, places and platforms that power inclusive, dignified rural commerce in India.
How we work
We partner with rural communities, brands, banks and government programs to design solutions that work in real villages, not in boardrooms.
Why we built IAP
Rural India is not under-served because it is unreachable. It is under-served because reaching it is treated as someone else's problem.
Chapter 01
A decade of listening to rural India.
For nearly a decade, our founder ran Chaaipani, a grassroots media platform that travelled across rural India to report on people building change in their own communities. Chaaipani also worked closely with the brands and advertisers executing marketing initiatives — which gave us a rare seat at both tables: the village square and the marketing boardroom.
Chapter 02
The pattern we couldn't unsee.
We realised that most marketing strategies were being designed for metros — and even the strategies aimed at rural India were being written in air-conditioned offices in metros, with near-zero exposure to rural markets, the psychology of rural consumers, or what actually drives sales on the ground.
Brands, banks, governments and even well-funded programmes kept failing at the last 50 kilometres. Distribution stopped at the district town. Surveys were faked at the highway dhaba. Adoption data was a guess.
Chapter 03
Building the bridge.
The villages already had the talent — articulate young people, trusted shopkeepers, women who ran SHGs, farmers who other farmers actually listened to.
What was missing was a bridge: training, tooling, structured work and accountable reporting that would let outside organisations plug into village networks without having to build one from scratch.
That conviction met its match in our co-founder Manu Khera, who has spent 25+ years building IT, retail and connectivity businesses — exactly the operating and technology muscle a deeply distributed, low-bandwidth, multilingual rural network needs to scale.
IAP is that bridge.
What fieldwork taught us
Three insights that shape every project we run.
Trust is local, not national.
A farmer will trust the woman two streets away over a glossy ad or a stranger with a clipboard. Outsider-led execution rarely converts. Our Digi Saathis are residents — known by name, accountable inside their own community.
Proof beats promises.
Most rural reports are unverifiable. We treat every task as a data record — geo-tagged, photo-documented, time-stamped — so partners can audit what actually happened, where, and when.
Distribution is the real moat.
Most brands have great products. Few have a way to reliably reach the 600,000+ villages where most of India still lives. We are building the rails — Digi Saathi for execution, DigiBharat for the digital supply chain.
Core team
Why we chose to solve India's rural distribution problem.
Our founder spent years working with some of India's top brands and designing and executing 55+ election campaigns across the country. That work is what sparked the interest in — and the lens on — rural India: the same villages that decide elections were being routinely missed by the brands, banks and platforms trying to reach them. Paired with a technologist who has built and scaled IT, retail and connectivity businesses across industries, IAP exists to close that gap.
From the field
The work, where it actually happens.
An India Action Project product
DigiBharat is our B2B platform that digitises the distributor to retailer supply chain in rural India.
In the news
Recognised by India's leading media.
Featured in Times Now, ET Now, YourStory, Femina, Homegrown, Times of India and more for our work in rural development and grassroots distribution.
Partners and supporters
Companies and organisations we work with.
