AGARTALA: Every once in a while at a room full of experts and executives, it is the person nobody introduced from the stage who changes the entire conversation. At the BusinessLine Agri and Commodity Summit 2026 at the Leela Palace in Chanakyapuri on Friday, February 27, that person was Aruna Debbarma, a Lakhpati Didi from Tripura who has been quietly rewriting what it means to be a woman farmer in India one harvest at a time.
Aruna is a member of the Tripura Rural Livelihood Mission (TRLM), a state-backed programme that has walked alongside over one lakh women in Tripura and helped them build lives that belong entirely to themselves. She did not travel to New Delhi to present data or argue policy. She came as a farmer, as a woman who has done the work and lived the result, and when Brahmani Nara, Executive Director of Heritage Foods, met her on the sidelines of the summit, that quiet fact alone was enough to make the room feel different.
Brahmani took to X (formerly known as Twitter) on the following day to put the encounter into words, and what she wrote read not like a post but like a letter from someone still sitting with what they had seen.
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“Women farmers like Aruna are not waiting for change. They are building it, quietly and consistently, often without the recognition they deserve. She has built a livelihood on her own terms, and she carries that with a quiet confidence that is genuinely inspiring,” Brahmani wrote.
“She is exactly who we should be talking about when we talk about the future of Indian agriculture,” she added, and in doing so pointed a spotlight at a corner of India’s farming story that rarely gets one.
What made the moment land harder was the source it came from. Heritage Foods is one of India’s largest dairy and food companies, and Brahmani has spent years building its work with women farmers into something she describes as the organisation’s core purpose rather than its footnote.
“At Heritage Foods, this is personal for us. We work with women farmers every single day across our network, and we see firsthand what determination and resilience look like up close,” she expressed.
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She further mentioned, “Meeting Aruna was a reminder of why that work matters and why we cannot afford to slow down.” In words that made clear the summit had given her not just a conversation but a renewed sense of direction.
Aruna’s story sits within a much larger movement that is changing the texture of rural India from the inside out. The Lakhpati Didi initiative helps women enrolled in self-help groups build household incomes that cross the one lakh rupee mark each year through farming and allied activities, and in Tripura, the numbers behind that effort are striking.
According to reports, the TRLM has enrolled over 1,08,281 women, nearly 95 percent of the state’s set target, across 54,170 self-help groups that together cover 4.86 lakh women across the state. But behind every number in that count, there is a woman like Aruna who made a decision at some point to stop waiting and start building, and that is the part the data cannot fully hold.
The BusinessLine Agri and Commodity Summit, organised by The Hindu BusinessLine at the Leela Palace in Chanakyapuri, drew policymakers, industry leaders and agricultural thinkers to New Delhi on Friday for a day of wide-ranging discussion on the future of Indian farming. It was by any measure a serious forum with serious people, and yet the exchange that outlasted every session was the one that happened away from the microphones, between a woman who runs one of India’s major food companies and a woman from Tripura who simply runs her own life with extraordinary grace.
Brahmani brought her post to a close with a gentleness that suited everything that had come before it. “Grateful to be a part of a conversation that went beyond policy and got to the heart of what actually matters. And grateful to Aruna for taking a moment with me,” she wrote, and in those two lines said something the agriculture sector has needed to hear said plainly for a very long time.