The last leg of my 12-hour car journey from Delhi co-incided with dusk as we climbed from the valley floor high into the forests of Binsar National Park.

We were in Uttarakhand, the newest Indian state created only in 2000 and then renamed last year, which is cradled in the elbow of Tibet and Nepal and dominated by the Himalaya rising 25,000ft along its border.

It's an exhilarating location, made more special because of Village Ways, a project that - it is fair to say - has transformed the lives of villagers in Binsar.

Let us rewind a little. The Park was annexed by India's Forestry Commission in 1990, at a stroke depriving the five villages affected of the right to timber or to tap resin from the trees. Soon, many villagers were leaving for the city to find work.

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• Gallery: Village Ways, India

At Khali, the 'big house' on the estate lives Himanshu Pande, whose father, a gardener, inherited the estate from a colonial who died without an heir. A chance meeting was to change his life, and that of the villagers.

Keith Virgo has spent his entire life in rural development work. He is also a keen walker, and bumped into Himanshu while trekking in Binsar in 2002. They got talking about how to save the villages through tourism, more specifically, how to create a holiday walking between the villages and staying in the community.

Six years on, and a second Village Ways project has just opened in the Saryu Valley, closer to the Himalaya. There is a five-year plan for 12 projects in India, including Goa and Kerala - and elsewhere, in Ethiopa. It is an extraordinary story.

"It struck me while walking how beautiful the villages were," says Keith, as we relaxed on the terrace at Khali, now a mountain hotel and the base of Village Ways' operations. "But they were being bypassed and the villagers were being forced to migrate for work.

"The five villages didn't even know each other - but once everybody came on board and started building guesthouses, it was the villagers who suggested how better it could work. Now there is a committee of two people from each village who meet once a month.

"It has become a business for everyone - the guides, Village Ways and the villages. It is not an NGO, it is a commercial thing that works - the whole thing is a family, it is extraordinary and so emotional. I've got tears in my eyes now." And he has.

Keith contacted an old NGO friend, Graham Edgeley, who had set up a rural tourism company in Spain, who in turn contacted a travel industry friend, Richard Hearns, who ran a walking company, Inntravel.

Twelve villagers were trained as guides by Inntravel and the Forestry Commission, grading paths for difficulty, learning English and the flora and fauna of the Park. Two of the guides - and three in Saryu - are women. Bags are taken carried by porters.

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