Beyond delivery: How empowered citizens can build the change they seek 

India’s next leap in development will depend not only on what we deliver to people, but on whether people have the agency to adopt, adapt and shape that change 

India has never been short of ambitious ideas for social change. From disease control and sanitation to nutrition and immunisation, we have built infrastructure, introduced services and taken information to millions of people. 

But anyone who has worked in social impact knows that getting something to people is not the same as getting people to use it, trust it or make it part of their lives. That space between delivery and adoption is where some of our most difficult development challenges exist. 

Building a toilet does not automatically change sanitation practices. Making vaccines available does not automatically create trust in vaccination. Providing nutritional advice does not necessarily change what a family eats. 

Because people are not empty vessels waiting for the correct information to be poured into them. We come with beliefs, fears, identities, aspirations, social norms and deeply embedded ideas about how the world works. This is where narrative design becomes interesting. 

Narratives are not simply the stories we tell. They are the stories through which we understand ourselves and the world around us. Who is responsible for feeding a child? What does a strong man look like? Should menstruation be spoken about openly? Who makes decisions inside a household? These ideas are repeated so often that eventually they stop feeling like stories and start feeling like facts. Narrative design gives us an opportunity to question them. 

We saw this while working on Bahubali ki Jeet, a social and behaviour change communication campaign developed as part of RajPusht in Rajasthan. Maternal nutrition was seen as a women’s issue. Men were peripheral to conversations about what pregnant and lactating women ate, despite having considerable influence over household decisions. 

We could have simply told men to become more involved. Instead, we asked a different question. 

What if we changed the story of what it means to be a strong man? 

Using Bahubali, a larger than life figure associated with physical strength and courage, we connected strength with care. What if nurturing your wife during pregnancy was not outside masculinity, but an expression of it? 

The campaign used humour, popular culture and familiar situations to make this alternative identity visible. It reached millions of people, and the larger programme saw significant shifts in attitudes and behaviours around maternal nutrition. The Economic Survey 2025–26 subsequently highlighted the initiative as an example of effective Social and Behaviour Change Communication. 

For me, the important lesson was not that we had found a clever way to communicate with men. It was that sometimes people don’t need to be told what to think. They need an opportunity to see themselves differently. 

That also changes how we think about the people our programmes are designed for. We routinely call them beneficiaries, target audiences, recipients or the last mile. The language itself places people at the end of a process designed somewhere else. 

But people are not recipients of change. They interpret ideas, question them, negotiate them within their families and communities, adapt them to their realities and influence others. They participate. When we recognise this, communication stops being something we do to people and becomes something we create with people. 

Of course, narrative design cannot solve everything. A powerful story cannot compensate for a health centre without medicines. Communication cannot fix structural inequality. Infrastructure, policy, access and economics matter enormously. But narrative influences whether people see themselves within the change we are trying to create, whether they trust it and whether they believe another way of living is possible. 

As India imagines Viksit Bharat, we will understandably talk about infrastructure, technology, services and economic opportunity. But perhaps we should also ask another question: 

What kind of agency are we creating for people within that progress? 

India’s development story cannot only be about what we deliver to people. It must also be about enabling people to question, choose, participate and shape what happens next. Because the most powerful social change does not happen when people receive the change we designed for them. It happens when they begin designing it themselves. 

Nirmala Nair is Founder and Director of Kaboom Social Impact