Sharda Gaydhane-Shende had been speaking for about four minutes when I realised the 300-seat room had gone quiet in a particular way. The kind of quiet that settles when something real is being said, the whole room arriving at the same moment together.
She was speaking about trolley bags.
Free trolley bags had become the unexpected doorway through which Bela Gram Panchayat entered its journey toward rooftop solar. Sharda tai, the Sarpanch, had used them as a conversation starter, going door to door. She knew her neighbours. She knew what would get them talking. That turned out to be enough. Today, Bela is Maharashtra’s first net-zero village, and the Panchayat has been recognised at the state and national levels, receiving Majhi Vasundhara Abhiyan awards worth ₹3 crore and the First Prize in the Carbon Neutral Vishesh Panchayat Puraskar category of the National Panchayat Awards 2024, a testament to what becomes possible when government missions meet local leadership that is ready and willing.
This was the session we were building towards: From the Frontlines: Panchayats Leading India’s Climate Charge, hosted as a main session at the Mumbai Climate Week 2026 at the Jio World Convention Centre, BKC. Six Panchayat leaders and representatives from Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha had come to share what they had built in their own villages and what it had taken for them to build it.
The stories were different in their details and in the languages they were narrated in, but recognisable in their shape.
Suryanarayana’s account had a particular texture. In Huledanahalli, the pandemic years had forged something that outlasted the crisis, a solidarity network of young people who came together and chose to stay together for the long work of village development. They are still there, exploring new ideas with the same enthusiasm. What began as collective care had become collective agency.
We had six pioneers in that room that day. India has so many more; Panchayat leaders quietly doing this work at the village level whose names and work rarely appear in climate policy discussions, let alone on international stages. And yet, these are precisely the communities that did not cause the crisis they are now asked to navigate. They still contribute the least to the emissions reshaping their seasons, their harvests, and their water. What they have built in Bela, in Perinjanam, in Siyari, and in Koraput is an act of collective self-determination in the face of a problem they did not have much to do with but have simply inherited.
Each story pointed to the same thing: climate mitigation or adaptation, when they work, is built through the accumulation of deliberate, community-led decisions made by people who understand their land, their neighbours, and what is actually at stake. No single scheme or top-down intervention can conjure that.
At one point during the session, one of the representatives said something that has stayed with me. They said they were happy about the opportunity to speak on a stage like Mumbai Climate Week, and sad that there was a timer in front of them. They just had so much to share.
The audience laughed, gently. I laughed too. But in that laughter, I also heard the beginning of something. The appetite in the room, the leaning-in, and all the people who reached out to us before and after the session made it clear that more platforms and longer sessions are both needed and inevitable. These Panchayat leaders have been building and adapting long before any conference took notice and will continue to do so long after. But the right rooms, at the right moments, can shorten the distance between what they already know and the policies, partnerships, and resources that have yet to catch up.
This session was, in many ways, an expression of what Asar and Policy & Development Advisory Group (PDAG) set out to do when we co-initiated the Conference of Panchayats, our own COP. The premise was simple: Panchayat leaders hold real agency in shaping decisions affecting their communities. The kind of agency that goes well beyond implementation, well beyond being “beneficiaries”. The insights generated when Sharda tai, Jayanti di, Sachith, and Suryanarayana are in the same room; learning from each other, seeing their struggles reflected, building on one another’s work. These may be among the least measured and most consequential parts of our response to climate change.
At Asar, we think about our theory of change as mycelium – the vast, largely invisible network beneath a forest floor that connects trees, carries nutrients, and makes the whole ecosystem more resilient than any single organism could be alone. What I witnessed in that room in Mumbai felt exactly like that. For 10 years now, a network has been growing below the surface, without fanfare, Panchayat to Panchayat, state to state, one story feeding the next.
India’s climate ambitions are often measured in gigawatts and megatons. They should also be measured in the number of platforms where a Sarpanch from Maharashtra can sit beside a Panchayat representative from Jharkhand and say: here is what we did, here is what was hard, here is what we learned. This is where the world stops to listen – not for four minutes, but for as long as it takes.
The mycelium is real, and somewhere right now, in a village whose name no one has heard yet, a Sarpanch is knocking on a door. That is where India’s climate story begins.
To explore more stories of how Panchayats across India are shaping climate action from the ground up, visit our Roots of Resilience series on the Asar website. These blogs bring together voices, experiences, and lessons from local leaders working at the frontlines of change.
By Vishwajeet Poojary, with inputs from Suhas Joshi.
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