Mission Chetna: finding the people who quietly hold India together

In a widely shared post on LinkedIn, the founder introduced Mission Chetna to a professional audience that mostly knew him as a CEO and industry chairman. Chetna means consciousness, awareness — the quality of being awake to what is around you. The mission takes its name from the observation that India is full of people who are awake in exactly that sense, and that almost nobody knows who they are.

Who a Chetna Hero is

The post describes them in their own settings. A retired teacher running a school for construction workers' children on a pavement. A family that has cooked for strangers every day for twenty years. A farmer who has spent a decade reviving a dead pond. A young woman who taught herself accounting to keep a village self-help group honest. None of them waited for recognition, funding or permission. They started, and they kept going, and the goodness they produce is invisible to every index the country keeps.

The method

Mission Chetna is the practical form of an intention the founder first stated publicly at the TISS convocation: find the people already working selflessly for society, and help them grow into organisations so that the goodness survives them. The post sets out how the Institute does this in three movements.

• Document. A Chetna Hero's work is recorded, verified and told well — so that it can be seen, trusted and funded by people who were never going to walk past that pavement school.
• Connect. Heroes are introduced to one another, to academic partners who can study and strengthen their methods, and to corporate volunteers from the IIT Alumni Council who bring skills the heroes lack — legal, financial, digital.
• Recognise. Publicly, repeatedly and with dignity. This is the seed of the National Goodness Awards the Institute will launch in 2029.

Where it stands

By the time of the post, Mission Chetna had grown into a network of more than seventy partner NGOs across eleven Indian states, with over ten million lives touched through their combined work. Those are the numbers on the Institute's impact page, and they are the reason the Institute describes itself as a movement rather than a think-tank: the research and the curriculum are built on the lived practice of people who were already good before anyone thought to measure it.

Read the original

The post, with profiles of individual Chetna Heroes, is on the founder's LinkedIn. To nominate a changemaker for Mission Chetna, use the contact page.