Amlan Kusum Ganguly

Ganguly qualified as a lawyer and began his career as an apprentice to a leading criminal lawyer in Calcutta. He became disillusioned with a legal system that he felt offered little to poor litigants who could not afford fees or sustain long proceedings, and in 1996 he left the law and joined Lutheran World Service India.

While working in the slums of Kolkata in the late 1990s he found that children were frequently absent from education programmes because of chronic illnesses such as diarrhoea and malaria, and that families relied on community healers to avoid the cost of medicines. He resigned from Lutheran World Service and, with a few friends, began the work that became Prayasam.

Prayasam was started in 1996 and formally registered on 12 August 1999 under the West Bengal Society Registration Act. The name means 'endeavour'. Ganguly established it with the aim of enabling children and young people to participate actively in the decisions and factors that affect their lives.

Prayasam works with several hundred children across Kolkata's low-income neighbourhoods, some as young as five. Ganguly meets small groups regularly to guide their work, but the children themselves choose which problems to tackle, from immunisation rates and school completion to contaminated water supplies.

Under the organisation's model, groups of children and young people act as agents of change in their own communities, campaigning on immunisation, sanitation and school retention and using music, theatre, puppetry and art to reach neighbours. Children involved in the programme have been credited with reducing rates of malaria and diarrhoea in their neighbourhoods and with converting rubbish dumps into playing fields.

Ganguly's work was the subject of the documentary feature The Revolutionary Optimists, directed by Nicole Newnham and Maren Grainger-Monsen, which follows children in Kolkata working with Prayasam. The film was broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens in June 2013 and won the audience award at the 2014 Take One Action Film Festival.

Ganguly was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2006 for his concept of Area Health Minders. He received a Ford Fellowship at Columbia University in 2011, and was named a public health leader by Stanford University.

His earlier honours include the Rotary Club of Calcutta Inner City vocational excellence award in 2001 and being named 'Calcuttan of the Week' by The Telegraph in 2002. He was a finalist for the Gleitsman International Activist Award in 2013, was named Man of the Month by Disruptive Women in Health Care in 2013, and received an Adobe Project 1324 Creative Catalyst award in 2015. He has spoken at the Skoll World Forum in 2012 and at TEDx events.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]