Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the eighth edition of the businessline Changemaker Awards on 22 September 2026 in New Delhi. Wildlife biologist Purnima Devi Barman, popularly called the Stork Sister, was named Changemaker of the Year for saving the greater adjutant stork and empowering rural women in Assam. The Border Roads Organisation and palliative care pioneer M. R. Rajagopal were honoured as Iconic Changemakers.
The Eighth Edition in New Delhi
The businessline Changemaker Awards are presented by The Hindu Businessline, a leading financial daily published by THG Publishing Pvt Ltd. The awards were started in 2018, when the publication completed 25 years, to honour people and organisations whose work creates large scale change in health, education, poverty relief, gender equality and rural enterprise.
The eighth edition was held on 22 September 2026 in New Delhi. The event was presented by SASTRA Deemed University and powered by City Union Bank. The public call for nominations opened on 12 May 2026 and closed on 7 July 2026. More than 1,600 nominations were received across five categories. Knowledge partners Ashoka Foundation and Deloitte helped shortlist entries, Niiti Consulting validated them, and an independent jury chaired by retired judge Prabha Sridevan selected the winners on 10 August 2026 in Chennai.
Awards were given in six categories. These were Digital Transformation, Social Transformation, Financial Transformation, Young Changemaker, Iconic Changemaker and Changemaker of the Year. The Iconic Changemaker nominees are chosen directly by the editorial team and knowledge partners, while the Changemaker of the Year honours the entry with the widest impact.
Who Is Purnima Devi Barman
Purnima Devi Barman is a wildlife biologist from Assam who founded the Hargila Army, an all women movement to protect the greater adjutant stork. She studied zoology at Gauhati University, works with the conservation group Aaranyak in Guwahati, and links bird protection with income and dignity for rural mothers.
Barman grew up in Kamrup district, where her grandmother taught her to respect trees, birds and rivers. While studying for her doctorate on the greater adjutant stork, she saw a nesting tree cut down in Dadara village in 2007. Nests lay broken on the ground with dead and injured chicks, and villagers asked her to clear the mess. That moment changed her path from research alone to community action.
She realised the bird could not be saved unless people stopped seeing it as dirty and unlucky. Barman began attending village meetings, prayer halls and festivals. She compared mother birds feeding chicks to human mothers caring for children. She organised cooking contests, weaving training and baby shower ceremonies for newborn chicks. Slowly, hostility turned into pride.
The result was the Hargila Army, a network of rural homemakers who guard nesting trees, rescue fallen chicks, plant saplings and weave the stork motif into handloom cloth. The network started with a few dozen women in Dadara, Pacharia and Singimari villages. It has since grown to more than 10,000 active members, with reports placing the wider support base close to 20,000 women (as of September 2026). Nests in these three villages rose from 28 in 2007 to more than 250, making the area the largest breeding colony of the species in the world.
Barman earlier received the Whitley Award in 2017, often called the Green Oscar, the UN Environment Programme Champions of the Earth award in 2022 and the Whitley Gold Award in 2024. Receiving the 2026 honour, she said that when women rise, the hargila takes flight.
Greater Adjutant Stork Found in Which Region
The greater adjutant stork is found in only two countries today, India and Cambodia. In India it breeds mainly in Assam, with a second breeding cluster in Bihar, while Cambodia holds a small non breeding and breeding population in its northern plains.
The bird is known by its scientific name Leptoptilos dubius. It belongs to the stork family Ciconiidae. In Assamese it is called hargila, which means bone swallower, because it can swallow large pieces of carrion. In Bhagalpur in Bihar it is called Garuda and is treated with religious respect as the mount of Vishnu. It is one of the tallest storks in the world, growing up to 1.5 metres, with a bare head, a throat pouch and long legs. It eats fish, frogs, snakes, rats and waste from landfills. By clearing carcasses, it reduces disease and helps wetlands stay healthy.
The bird was once common across South and Southeast Asia. Loss of wetlands, felling of tall nesting trees, poisoning from garbage and pesticides, and direct attacks on nests caused a sharp fall. By the 1990s only about 115 birds remained for breeding in Assam. Nesting trees are often privately owned kadam and other tall canopy trees in crowded villages, so protection depends fully on the consent of families.
| Region | Status and Numbers |
|---|---|
| Kamrup district, Assam (Dadara, Pacharia, Singimari) | Largest breeding colony in the world, more than 250 nests and over 1,000 birds |
| Rest of Assam (including Nagaon, Morigaon) | Scattered colonies, taking state total to about 1,800 birds in recent counts |
| Bhagalpur, Bihar (Kadwa Diara floodplains of Kosi river) | Third largest breeding zone, more than 600 birds and 125 nests in 2023 to 2024, up from 78 birds in 2006 |
| Northern plains, Cambodia | Small remaining population, about 100 to 200 birds |
What Is the IUCN Status of the Greater Adjutant Stork
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the greater adjutant stork as Near Threatened under criterion D1. The assessment was last updated on 8 August 2023 and published in the 2023 Red List, with 1,360 to 1,510 mature individuals and an increasing population trend.
This was an improvement from the earlier Endangered tag. The change followed steady community protection in Assam and Bihar and conservation work in Cambodia from the early 2000s. The species remains fragile because its range is very small, its breeding sites number less than 100, and a single disease outbreak or loss of nesting trees can reverse gains. In India it is also protected under Schedule IV of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.
Iconic Changemaker: Border Roads Organisation
The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) builds and maintains roads, bridges, tunnels and airfields in border and remote areas for both the armed forces and civilians. It works under the Ministry of Defence and is headquartered at Seema Sadak Bhawan in Delhi Cantonment, New Delhi. The Director General is Lt Gen Harpal Singh (as of September 2026).
BRO was set up in 1960. Since then it has built more than 64,100 km of roads, 1,179 bridges, 7 tunnels and 22 airfields across the Himalayas, deserts and river valleys, and in friendly neighbouring countries such as Bhutan, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. These links give soldiers year round access to forward posts and give border villages schools, markets and health care. In the two years from 2024 to 2025, BRO dedicated about 250 to 356 infrastructure projects to the nation.
The scale of funding shows its priority. BRO recorded its highest ever expenditure of ₹16,690 crore in 2024 to 2025, with a target of ₹17,900 crore for 2025 to 2026. The Union Budget allocation rose from ₹6,500 crore in 2024 to 2025 to ₹7,146.50 crore in 2025 to 2026. The award recognised this steady modernisation of border infrastructure, from all weather tunnels like Atal Tunnel and Sela Tunnel to high altitude passes in Ladakh, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Uttarakhand, which strengthens both defence readiness and local incomes.
Iconic Changemaker: Community Palliative Care in India
Palliative care is medical and emotional support that relieves pain and suffering for people with serious, long term or incurable illness. It does not aim to cure the disease. It aims to improve daily life for patients and families through pain relief, home visits, counselling and social help.
The second Iconic Changemaker award went to Dr M. R. Rajagopal, often called the father of palliative care in India. Born on 23 September 1947, he is an anaesthesiologist by training. In 1993 he helped start the Pain and Palliative Care Society at the Medical College in Calicut, Kerala, which grew into the largest palliative care centre in the country with its Institute of Palliative Medicine. In 2003 he founded the charitable trust Pallium India, based in Thiruvananthapuram, to take this model to states where such care did not exist.
Rajagopal worked with the World Health Organization collaborating centre at Madison in the United States and with the central government to make oral morphine available for severe pain. His efforts helped simplify narcotic rules in 13 states and led to the amendment of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 in 2014. He also helped shape the National Programme for Palliative Care in 2012 of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The Trivandrum Institute of Palliative Sciences, set up in 2006, was declared a WHO Collaborating Centre in 2012. He received the Padma Shri in 2018. Only about 4 percent of the nearly 10 million Indians who need palliative care receive it, so the award spotlighted the need for community volunteers, home based care and low cost pain relief.
Digital, Financial and Social Transformation Winners
The 2026 businessline Changemaker Awards also honoured practical models that use technology and local supply chains to improve lives. The winners show how mobile phones, farm partnerships and direct outreach can solve large problems at low cost.
The Digital Transformation award went to ARMMAN, which stands for Advancing Reduction in Mortality and Morbidity of Mothers, Children and Neonates. The Mumbai based nonprofit was founded in 2008 by Dr Aparna Hegde to prevent avoidable deaths during pregnancy and childbirth. It follows a tech plus touch model. It sends timed voice calls and messages to pregnant women and trains frontline health workers, while working with the Union Health Ministry and state governments. Its Kilkari programme is the largest mobile based maternal messaging programme in the world. Its mMitra voice call service is used as a testing ground for artificial intelligence tools built with IIT Madras and Google Research to spot women at risk of dropping out. ARMMAN now works in 27 States and Union Territories and the award was received by its chief executive Gaurav Shah.
The Financial Transformation award went to Gourmet Popcornica Pvt Ltd, a Chennai based company founded in 2014 in partnership with Preferred Popcorn of Nebraska in the United States. The company, led by Managing Director SBP Pattabhi Rama Rao, built a full farm to consumer chain for popcorn maize, from hybrid seed and contract farming to processing, cold storage and supply to cinema halls and retail brands. More than 17,500 farmers in nine states grow popcorn maize on over 36,000 acres. The company gives inputs on credit, buys the full crop through bank transfers and processes 29 tonnes per hour with 45,000 tonnes of cold storage. Domestic production rose from 15,000 tonnes to 85,000 tonnes, while import share fell from 70 percent a decade ago to 15 percent. The market size grew from 50,000 tonnes to 1.3 lakh tonnes, and the company reports revenue of about ₹400 crore in 2025.
The Social Transformation category had two winners. Project Sambandh, founded by retired Colonel Vembu Shankar, a Shaurya Chakra recipient, supports families of armed forces personnel who die while in service due to illness or accidents rather than combat. These cases are termed physical casualties. The project traces widows, parents and children across the country, links them to records and welfare funds, and helps clear dues blocked by paperwork or lack of contact. What began as a 1,000 day effort at his own cost has been extended indefinitely. The second winner, Sankara Eye Foundation founded by Dr R. V. Ramani, was honoured for scaling up free eye care for the poor. The Young Changemaker award went to Ariana Agarwal, a 16 year old from Jaipur, for work that gives visibility to gig workers who often remain unseen in official data.
Key Takeaways
- Purnima Devi Barman won the Changemaker of the Year 2026 for greater adjutant stork conservation and women empowerment through the Hargila Army.
- The greater adjutant stork (Leptoptilos dubius) is listed as Near Threatened by IUCN in 2023 with 1,360 to 1,510 mature individuals.
- The Border Roads Organisation, set up in 1960 under the Ministry of Defence, won the Iconic Changemaker award for border infrastructure.
- Dr M. R. Rajagopal, founder of Pallium India (2003) and Padma Shri recipient in 2018, won the Iconic Changemaker award for community palliative care.
- ARMMAN (2008), Gourmet Popcornica (2014) and Project Sambandh won the Digital, Financial and Social Transformation awards respectively.
