Balkrishna Acharya

Co-founder

Balkrishna Acharya is the co-founder of Rescue Foundation (2000)[1], an Indian non-profit working on anti-trafficking and women & children from Mumbai.

Balkrishna Acharya (died 2005) was an Indian anti-trafficking campaigner who, with his wife Triveni Acharya, founded the Rescue Foundation. He died in 2005 in a road accident while returning from a rescue operation.

The Rescue Foundation was registered in 2000 and works on the rescue, rehabilitation and repatriation of women and girls trafficked from within India, Nepal and Bangladesh and sold into forced prostitution. After his death, Triveni Acharya took over as its president.

Career

Acharya and his wife, who was working as a journalist in Mumbai, became involved in the plight of girls held in the city's red-light areas in the 1990s, and began carrying out rescues. The organisation's own account dates the founders' first rescue operation to that period and the formal establishment of the Rescue Foundation to 2000.

The organisation describes him as a human rights defender who led rescue missions in several parts of India. It continues to operate shelters and rehabilitation programmes for survivors, and provides counselling, vocational training and medical care.[2][3][4]

Rescue Foundation

Rescue Foundation runs intelligence-based rescue operations alongside state police and Anti-Human Trafficking Units. Survivors are then supported with shelter, healthcare, vocational training and repatriation. It works from Mumbai with centres in Palghar, Pune and Delhi.

Rescue Foundation reports the following, on its own site: