Padmanaban

Gopalan was born on 13 April 1993 in Salem, Tamil Nadu. He attended St John's Matriculation school and did his intermediate studies at Sri Vidhya Mandir, Uthangarai, before taking a bachelor's degree in production engineering at Government College of Technology, Coimbatore. While at college he started a Green Club and worked with fellow engineering students on projects including an alternative to wood made from sugarcane molasses and coconut shells, and renewable-energy mobile chargers.

Gopalan founded No Food Waste on 16 October 2014 with Dinesh Manickam and Sudhakar Mohan, after observing that colleges, companies and event venues in Coimbatore discarded large quantities of edible food while many people in the city went hungry. The organisation runs a hotline and a mobile application through which donors report surplus food; volunteers collect it and distribute it at mapped 'hunger spots'. It also carries out food waste audits with schools and institutions.

By 2015 the organisation had fed more than 17,500 people and had run food waste audits with more than 110 schools and organisations, and had opened a 'Feed the Need' food store at a government hospital serving around 200 meals a day. By 2019 it reported some 12,000 volunteers and the recovery of more than 650,000 meals. The work has spread from Coimbatore to other parts of Tamil Nadu and to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

His other initiatives are Toilet First, which builds household toilets in partnership with municipalities, companies and engineering students, and No Dumping, a waste collection and measurement project with an application for tracking waste generated in a city. He spoke at TEDx Coimbatore in 2017.

Gopalan received the International Visionary Award from The Pollination Project in California in 2015. He was given the Chief Minister's State Youth Award by the Government of Tamil Nadu in 2017 and the National Youth Award of the Government of India for 2016-17.

In March 2019 he won the Commonwealth Youth Award for Asia, presented at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, for work towards Sustainable Development Goal 2 on zero hunger. He has also received the Rashtriya Swayam Siddh Samman from the JSPL Foundation and the UN Global Compact Network India.[2][3][4][5]