Looking back at some 30 years of working in the social sector, I believe that the most important milestone in my journey was the point when I started recognising the importance of research in development.
As a freshly minted doctor in the late 1970s, I was so socially oriented that I did not take research seriously. When Rani [Dr Rani Bang] and I started working in the villages of Wardha district, in 1977, we had a lot of beautiful, innocent ideas: we thought we would help people in the villages, that people would change, and villages would change, too.
