Neelam Gupta

Gupta holds a PhD in agricultural sciences and was awarded a university gold medal for academic excellence. She has carried out research and writing on education in collaboration with bodies including UNESCO, the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the Indian Council of Social Science Research.

Gupta founded AROH Foundation in 2001. The organisation initially provided research support to government programmes before moving into direct grassroots work.

Its programmes include Padho Aur Badho and Utkarsh in education, and Garima and Udaan on women's empowerment and girls' education. The foundation reports having trained more than 25,000 unemployed young people in vocational skills, given skills training to more than 12,000 women and enrolled more than 35,000 out-of-school children in formal schools. Its Integrated Village Development Programme, run across villages in several states, has installed household units, solar street lighting and solar water filtration systems in more than eighty villages.

Gupta received the CSR Professional of the Year award from CSR Times in 2018, presented in New Delhi on 2 August 2018, and again at the CSR Times Awards 2019 in New Delhi on 18 September 2019. She was given the Mahatma Award at the NGO Expo conference in New York in September 2018.

In April 2019 she received the Iconic Women Creating a Better World for All award at the Women Economic Forum in Delhi, and the Most Impactful CSR Leader 2019 award at the India CSR Leadership Summit. She accepted the Innovative Practices Award 2019 for Sustainable Development Goals on behalf of AROH at the United Nations Global Compact Network India's 14th national convention in Mumbai on 31 May 2019; AROH was also named Best NGO in Skill Development by ASSOCHAM in June 2019.[2][3][4][5]