Babasaheb Deshmukh

Deshmukh was born on 27 March 1926 into a zamindar family at Sagroli that held roughly a thousand acres of land. Because there were few schools in the area under Nizam rule, he studied away from home in Hyderabad, but returned to the village after Class 10 when his father died and did not complete his own schooling.

His concern with education became personal when his daughter was unable to study beyond Class 4: at the time there was no school for girls within about a hundred kilometres of Sagroli.

Deshmukh discussed the problem with contemporaries and social reformers, and was decisively influenced by the work of Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve, the pioneer of women's education in Maharashtra. In 1959 he donated 100 acres of land and founded the Sanskriti Samvardhan Mandal, which opened Shri Chhatrapati Shivaji High School, a residential school for girls. It began with 37 pupils housed in huts and depended on volunteers and community support, and education was provided free to underprivileged children, drawing students from across Marathwada and Vidarbha.

The campus grew to about 200 acres in the Balaghat hills near the Manjira river and came to include primary schools, vocational training in trades such as blacksmithing, carpentry and baking, and sports academies. The organisation reports having educated more than 60,000 students, and is credited with a sharp fall in child marriage in the surrounding villages. It now also hosts a Krishi Vigyan Kendra at Sagroli, and its later work covers rural livelihoods, agriculture and environmental conservation.

Deshmukh died on 16 August 2004. The organisation, which continues to be led by members of his family, refers to him as Karmayogi Babasaheb Deshmukh and marked the centenary of his birth with celebrations in 2025 and 2026.[2][3][4][5]