4a637538f895c0a1e92ee887d5d113ef.jpg

Founder
Rural Relations

Pradeep Lokhande

Mr. Lokhande is a dynamic & visionary social entrepreneur who believes that the real India lives in its villages. For the past 20 years his organisation, Rural Relations, is working tirelessly to gather vital data about the people who reside in our villages. This data is used to bring about social change and is also leveraged to large corporations for them to better understand their rural market.

Rural relations’ activities span across 49,000 villages in 10 states including Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. One of the foremost social initiatives launched by rural relations is the project, which establishes libraries in Indian villages, aiming at encouraging and motivating children in the villages to develop reading habits.

Apart from building a databank of key information of each village, rural relations have launched several other social initiatives. These include the ‘ – an effort to encourage Indians to give back to their roots and ‘’ – a novel concept that makes data about Indian villages easily accessible.

An indicator of the popularity of Pradeep ji and his initiative is that he receives thousands of postcards from the interiors of India every day. Interestingly, these postcards are addressed to him just by name and his pin code and they unerringly find their way to him.