Anshu Gupta - अंशु गुप्ता - वैश्य गौरव

Anshu Gupta is an Indian social entrepreneur who founded Goonj, a Delhi-based non-governmental organisation  (NGO) that positions the under-utilised urban material as a development resource for the rural parts of India.

Born in Meerut, (Uttar Pradesh), Gupta spent his initial years in Chakrauta, Banbasa and Bariely, smaller towns of Uttar Pradesh as his father got postings in his job with Indian Army’s Military Engineering Services (MES). After finishing his college from Dehradun, Gupta came to Delhi to do a double PG diploma in Journalism and Advertising and Public Relations from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication. He has also done an MA in Economics.

After working in the corporate sector for some time, he started Goonj in 1999, with his wife Meenakshi Gupta and a few friends, to work on the basic need of clothing, an issue that does not have a place in the development agenda. Using cloth as a metaphor for other crucial but ignored needs like sanitary pads for menses or school material for education, for the last 16 years, under Gupta’s leadership Goonj has taken the growing urban waste and used it as a tool to trigger development work on diverse issues; roads, water, environment, education, health etc. in backward and remote pockets of India. Under Goonj’s flagship intiative ‘Cloth for Work’ village communities across India work on their own issues and get the urban material as a reward for their efforts. Cloth for work and all other initiatives of Goonj have received various, national and international, awards and accolades. 

He won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2015, for "his creative vision in transforming the culture of giving in India, his enterprising leadership in treating cloth as a sustainable development resource for the poor, and in reminding the world that true giving always respects and preserves human dignity."  Also, Gupta is an Ashoka fellow and was conferred with ‘Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award' by Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in 2012, amongst many others.

साभार: विकिपीडिया