Kailash Satyarthi

Kailash Satyarthi is an Indian campaigner against child labour and bonded labour, and a co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Malala Yousafzai. Trained as an electrical engineer at Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh and briefly a lecturer at the same institute, he abandoned that career in 1980 to work full time on child rights. He dropped his family surname Sharma, which marked him as a Brahmin, and took the name Satyarthi, meaning seeker of truth.

The organisation he founded in 1980, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, combined direct intervention with community organising: locating children held in workshops, brick kilns and farms, securing their release, and placing them in rehabilitation and schooling. Satyarthi and his colleagues are credited with freeing more than 138,000 children from labour, servitude and trafficking. He also pressed the case that child labour is a rights violation rather than a matter of charity, arguing that it entrenches illiteracy, adult unemployment and poverty.

A second strand of his work targeted the buyers rather than the employers. He established Rugmark, later renamed GoodWeave International, as the first voluntary labelling, inspection and certification scheme for South Asian carpets made without child labour, and ran consumer campaigns in Europe and the United States through the late 1980s and early 1990s to make retailers accountable for their supply chains.

In 1998 Satyarthi conceived and led the Global March Against Child Labour, a relay of marches covering some 80,000 km across 103 countries. The marchers' demands fed into the drafting of ILO Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour, adopted the following year in Geneva. He was a founding president of the Global Campaign for Education from 1999 to 2011, alongside ActionAid, Oxfam and Education International, and set up the Kailash Satyarthi Children's Foundation in 2004. In 2017 he led the Bharat Yatra, a 35-day march that began at Kanyakumari on 11 September and covered around 12,000 km across 22 states and union territories to break the silence around child sexual abuse and trafficking; it was followed by the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2018 and the passage of an anti-trafficking bill in the Lok Sabha.

Earlier recognition included the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 1995, the Wallenberg Medal from the University of Michigan in 2002 and the US State Department's listing of him among heroes acting to end modern-day slavery in 2007. He was the first person born in independent India to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.[3][4]