Soon after moving to Gurugram, Kyra Aziz heard a seventh-grader offer INR 500 for a particular seat on the school bus, even though other seats were free. He wanted a single seat, which spared him sharing a bench with four or five others. The casualness of the offer stopped her. In Chhattisgarh, where Aziz had already spent months working with women on a savings initiative, INR 500 could represent a long stretch of careful saving. She already knew urban and rural India could feel far apart. What changed on the bus was her sense of how differently people could value the same thing and how much of that difference came down to where someone was coming from.
Her feel for that gap had older roots. Her family’s protein business brought her into regular contact with farms, factories, and the office in Chhattisgarh from childhood. As she got older, she began sitting in meetings and spending more time with factory workers. During a long break between school, she started carrying some of their concerns to the staff who made decisions. The same decision, she began to see, could look one way to a worker on the floor and another to the person signing off on it.
Pragati ki Udan or “Flight of Progress,” grew out of that awareness. Aziz started it around Grade 10, and its first phase focused on six women in Chhattisgarh and on making saving feel possible in small increments. She gave each participant a traditional clay savings pot and encouraged deposits as small as INR 1 or INR 5. The women knew their numbers but had never been taught to record them, so Aziz showed them a simple notation for logging deposits and keeping a running total. Over roughly eight to nine months, all six kept setting money aside on minimum-wage incomes while being able to absorb expenses on Diwali, school, debt repayment, and in some households, a wedding or an illness. One of them walked more than an hour to work each day, and the bicycle she was saving toward actually ended that walk.
Working with the women also forced Aziz to question one of her own assumptions. She adapted a step-forward, step-back activity around financial decision-making, where an affirmative answer meant a step forward and a negative one a step back. Expecting the women to move backward on questions such as whether they went to banks or handled loans themselves, she was surprised when all six stepped forward. Her first thought was that she had made a mistake, so she rechecked the wording and had someone else check the translation, and the answers came back the same. The activity became the starting point for a separate research project she is still developing on women’s financial independence in India. Her question is whether women have the knowledge and the ability to manage financial decisions themselves, which is a different matter from how much they earn.
The research is nearing completion, and Aziz remains cautious about drawing broad conclusions from a country as varied as India. Beyond the research, the activity unsettled her sense of what financial independence actually means. The school bus incident later widened that questioning beyond finance. Aziz noticed the same problem when a friend proposed a pet-daycare business that seemed perfectly workable in Delhi but far less relevant when she imagined it in the communities she knew in Chhattisgarh. She began paying closer attention to the context hidden inside seemingly good ideas.
Phase two of the project took shape around that idea, pairing small groups of urban students with rural students in Chhattisgarh. At the time of the interview, five groups had been formed, each with three urban students and one rural counterpart. The cohort was still at an early stage, with introductions completed and the main exchanges only beginning. Aziz starts by asking rural participants what issue or opportunity matters to them. The urban group is then expected to understand that context before identifying resources or government schemes that could help the rural student.
Aziz does not want rural participants treated as passive recipients of advice from students in cities. A rural participant might discover an opportunity that was previously difficult to access, but she also wants the urban students to come away understanding circumstances they may never have encountered themselves. That matters to Aziz because some of those students may later build businesses or social projects of their own.
The same ambition explains why Aziz wants the rural side of the project to remain rooted in Chhattisgarh even as she tries to recruit urban volunteers from more schools and regions. She feels the state is often overlooked, sometimes even by other Indians. Expanding the volunteer base means approaching more schools and securing formal partnerships.
The project has also given Aziz opportunities to test those ideas outside her immediate environment. Pragati ki Udan was nominated through the Learning Planet Institute, which took her to the ECOSOC Youth Forum virtually in April and to the High-Level Political Forum in person in July. Conversations at the July forum prompted her to consider how similar perspective gaps can emerge across countries.
Aziz plans to study economics and psychology before eventually joining the family business. For her, the two fields meet at a question that has increasingly shaped her work. What makes people see the same situation differently? The same curiosity runs through the project and her research. “I’ve realized that before you try to solve a problem for someone, you need to understand the world they are seeing it from,” she says. “Otherwise, even a good idea can fall apart when it meets the real world.” For Aziz, bridging a divide begins not with assuming you have the answer but with understanding why the divide exists in the first place.
Spencer Hulse is the Editorial Director at Grit Daily. He is responsible for overseeing other editors and writers, day-to-day operations, and covering breaking news.
