From International Policy to Grassroots Action

People sometimes ask me how a career that began in the corridors of the European Parliament ended up, years later, distributing ration kits and oxygen concentrators in Indian communities during a pandemic. On paper, the two worlds could not look more different. In practice, I have never experienced them as separate at all — one simply taught me how to do the other well.

Policy work teaches you to think in systems. You learn to ask not just “does this help someone today” but “does this change the conditions that created the problem in the first place.” Representing the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe at international conferences meant constantly translating between different countries’ priorities, different definitions of urgency, different ideas of what a workable solution should even look like. It is, in its own way, an education in humility — a reminder that no single perspective, however well-informed, has the complete picture.

Grassroots work teaches you something policy rooms cannot: specificity. A national health policy can be sound in principle and still fail a particular family because it did not account for the particular obstacles in their particular village. When I served as ACRE’s Director General for India, I was, in a sense, standing at the exact point where those two truths meet — where international frameworks had to be translated into something that actually worked for the people meant to benefit from them.

Founding The Rising World Foundation was, in many ways, a decision to spend more time on the grassroots side of that line without abandoning the systems-thinking the policy years had given me. Every initiative we run — whether it is distributing school bags and bicycles or coordinating emergency medical relief — is still, underneath the immediate action, an attempt to ask the same policy question: what would it take for this not to be necessary next year?

I do not think grassroots action and international policy are opposing approaches to social change. I think they are two different distances from the same problem, and the most effective work tends to happen when someone is willing to move between them — close enough to understand the specific need, far enough back to see the pattern it belongs to.

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