Nanaji Deshmukh

Nanaji Deshmukh (1916-2010) was a rural development worker who came to social work from a long political career. Born in Parbhani district and left poor by his father's early death, he sold vegetables to pay for his schooling, joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1940 and was sent to Gorakhpur as a full-time worker; he set up the first school of Vidya Bharati, the Sangh's education network, there in 1950. He was later a Jana Sangh organiser in Uttar Pradesh and won the Balrampur seat in the 1977 general election, but declined Morarji Desai's offer of a cabinet portfolio and withdrew from active politics to work in villages.

He had founded the Deendayal Research Institute in 1969, and after leaving politics he took its chairmanship and gave it his whole attention. The institute's work was on rural self-reliance: anti-poverty and minimum needs programmes, agriculture and cottage industry, rural health and rural education. Deshmukh ran a programme of social reconstruction across more than 500 villages in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, built around the idea that villages should be able to meet their own needs rather than depend on outside provision. At Chitrakoot he established the Chitrakoot Gramoday Vishwavidyalaya, India's first rural university, and served as its chancellor.

He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1999 and, posthumously, the Bharat Ratna in 2019. He died on 27 February 2010 on the campus of the Chitrakoot university he had founded, having refused to be moved to Delhi for treatment, and left his body to medical research at AIIMS through the Dadhichi Dehdaan Samiti.[2]