Ask someone from a village what makes their place different and you will rarely hear about monuments. You will hear about a pond, a school, a game, a tree, a habit the whole village keeps. The ten villages below are known across India for exactly that kind of distinction — something the people there built, defended or simply went on doing until the rest of the country noticed. None of them is here for scenery alone.

Mawlynnong, Meghalaya

In this Khasi village in the East Khasi Hills, cleaning is not a municipal service but a shared duty. Households sweep the lanes in turn, waste goes into woven bamboo bins, and children grow up doing their share. The village is widely described as the cleanest in Asia, although that description began as a magazine's appreciation in the early 2000s rather than as an official ranking. The discipline behind it, however, is real and daily. Mawlynnong is a matrilineal Khasi settlement, where women hold property and are the traditional keepers of the home and the paths around it, which is part of how the practice took hold.

Mattur, Karnataka

On the banks of the Tunga in Shivamogga district, Sanskrit is not only a language of ritual but a language of the street. Shopkeepers, schoolchildren and elders use it for ordinary conversation alongside Kannada. The practice in its present form grew out of a Sanskrit teaching camp held in the village in the early 1980s, after which families chose to carry the language into everyday speech and the local school made it part of study. Mattur is often called the Sanskrit village of India; the fairer description is that it is the best known of a small handful of places where the language is genuinely spoken at home.

Sansarpur, Punjab

A modest village near Jalandhar has sent a dozen or more players to the Olympic Games, all of them in hockey, and not all of them for India — men with roots in Sansarpur have also turned out for Kenya and for Canada. For a generation, the village playground was effectively a national selection ground, and its families counted international caps the way others count harvests. The flow has thinned since the 1970s, as hockey itself changed and astroturf moved the game away from village grounds, but the record stands: no other village in the country has put so many of its sons on an Olympic hockey field.

Marottichal, Kerala

A hill village in Thrissur district is known today for chess boards laid out in tea shops and courtyards. The habit is traced to one resident, C. Unnikrishnan, who learnt the game outside the village, came back and began teaching it at his tea shop as something for people to do instead of drinking and gambling, which were then a serious problem locally. The idea spread house to house. A very large share of families now play, the village runs its own chess association with thousands of members, and children learn the game long before they learn to read a chessboard notation.

Kodinhi, Kerala

This settlement in Malappuram district has an unusually high number of twins — several hundred pairs among a few thousand families, many times what would be expected. The pattern was noticed from the mid twentieth century and grew more visible from the late 1990s. Researchers have collected samples and studied families here, and no accepted explanation has emerged; it does not appear to be simple inheritance, since couples with no family history of twins have twins here too. The village has made its peace with the attention and even has a local association of twins.

Khonoma, Nagaland

An Angami village near Kohima, Khonoma is known for terraced fields, alder-based farming that keeps the soil fertile without long fallows, and a decision its village council took in 1998. After a hunting drive killed a large number of Blyth's tragopan, Nagaland's state bird, the council set aside a stretch of community forest as a conservation area, and later extended a ban on hunting and logging across the village's forests. The commons are village-owned, so the decision was binding in a way that no forest department order could have been. Khonoma is commonly called India's first green village.

Hiware Bazar, Maharashtra

In Ahmednagar district, a village that had been emptying out through drought reversed course from 1989 onwards under sarpanch Popatrao Pawar. The work was unglamorous: contour trenches, earthen and stone bunds, percolation tanks and check dams, a ban on cutting trees and on free grazing, restrictions on water-hungry crops, closure of liquor outlets, and an annual water budget the gram sabha actually enforces. Wells recharged, cropping became reliable, and families that had migrated returned. Hiware Bazar is now studied as a model for community-led watershed work, and its methods have been carried to other villages in the state.

Piplantri, Rajasthan

In Rajsamand district, the birth of a daughter is marked by planting 111 trees. The custom was begun by a former sarpanch, Shyam Sunder Paliwal, in memory of his own daughter, and it comes with a financial arrangement: the village and the parents together put money into a deposit held for the girl until she is grown, and the family gives an undertaking about her schooling and her age at marriage. The trees are cared for by the family whose child they honour, which is the quiet strength of the idea — a plantation nobody has to be paid to water.

Punsari, Gujarat

Punsari, in Sabarkantha district, became known for delivering services that villages are usually told to expect from cities. Under a young sarpanch elected in 2006, the panchayat put in place purified drinking water, street lighting, closed-circuit cameras, a public address system reaching every lane, better village transport and improved school buildings, largely by stitching together existing government schemes and running them properly. Its real lesson is administrative rather than technological: a panchayat that plans, applies and follows up can get far more out of the same schemes than one that waits.

Dharnai, Bihar

Dharnai, in Jehanabad district, had lived without a working electricity supply for decades when a solar micro-grid was switched on in 2014, lighting homes, a school, a health centre, street lamps and irrigation pumps. It drew national attention as a model of village-scale renewable power. It is also an honest lesson, and worth telling as one: after a few years the plant fell into disuse for want of maintenance and a clear owner. Hardware alone does not electrify a village; someone has to be responsible for it in year five as much as in month one.

What these places share is not luck. In each of them a decision was taken and then kept — by a council, a family, a teacher, a sarpanch — and repeated long enough to become ordinary. That is usually how a village becomes known for something.