Anshu Gupta

Anshu Gupta is an Indian social entrepreneur who founded Goonj in 1999 and is credited with reframing clothing — normally an afterthought in relief work — as a basic development need and a currency for rural community labour.

Gupta trained at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication and worked as a freelance journalist writing on history, monuments and humanitarian subjects before taking corporate communications jobs at Chaitra, Power Grid Corporation and Escorts Communication. An earthquake in Uttarkashi drew him into disaster relief, and he has worked on earthquakes, cyclones, floods and tsunamis for close to three decades since. He started Goonj with his wife Meenakshi from their home in Sarita Vihar in Delhi, with an initial collection of 67 pieces of cloth; by 2022 the organisation was working across 28 states and some 4,000 villages with more than a thousand staff.

The method he devised, Cloth for Work, avoids handing out material as charity. Villages decide on a piece of work they need — a bamboo bridge, a well, field bunding, an irrigation channel, a drainage system, a school building, a road repair, the cleaning of a water body — and the urban material Goonj collects is given as a reward for that labour, so that the transaction reinforces rather than undermines self-reliance. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, when he watched more than a hundred truckloads of donated cloth discarded as unusable waste, Gupta began the Not Just a Piece of Cloth campaign, which addresses menstrual hygiene by turning waste cloth into clean, reusable sanitary material. Other strands include School to School, started in Coimbatore in 2010, through which urban schoolchildren pass on materials to rural schools, and Rahat, a standing network for need-based disaster relief and rehabilitation.

Gupta received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2015, cited for transforming the culture of giving in India, and was named Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in 2012. He became an Ashoka Fellow in 2004, and has received the All India Management Association award and the Marico Innovation Award.[2][3]