Anita Gupta

Founder

Anita Gupta is the founder of Bhojpur Mahila Kala Kendra (1993)[1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children and livelihood from Ara.

Anita Gupta is an Indian social entrepreneur from the Bhojpur district of Bihar. She is a founder of Bhojpur Mahila Kala Kendra, an organisation based in Arrah that trains rural women in handicrafts, crochet and jewellery-making, and later served as its president. She received the Nari Shakti Puraskar in 2022.

Early life

Gupta comes from a poor family in Bhojpur district. She has said that her work grew out of witnessing her grandfather beat a girl he had taken to bear his children, and her conclusion that an education would have given the girl the means to resist.

Career

Gupta and her brother started Bhojpur Mahila Kala Kendra in 1993, when she was ten years old. The organisation recruited women by pointing out that earnings of their own would allow them to send their children to school, and expanded after it registered as a society and became eligible for government funding.

Based in Arrah, the organisation has arranged training for more than 50,000 rural women in handicrafts, crochet and jewellery-making, and says it has created employment for about 10,000 of them. Its partners have included the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Office of the Development Commissioner (Handicrafts).

Recognition

In 2017 the government think tank NITI Aayog gave Gupta a Women Transforming India Award. On 8 March 2022 she was one of 29 women to receive the Nari Shakti Puraskar, India's highest civilian honour for women, from President Ram Nath Kovind at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi.[2][3][4][5]

Bhojpur Mahila Kala Kendra

BMKK, established in 1993 and run by an all-women executive committee, has formed and nurtured hundreds of self-help groups in Bhojpur district, training tens of thousands of women in skill development, cultural preservation and handicrafts.

Bhojpur Mahila Kala Kendra reports the following, on its own site: