Rajagopal PV

Founder

Photo: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA)

Rajagopal PV is the founder of Ekta Parishad (1989)[1], an Indian non-profit working on human rights, rural & agriculture and tribal welfare from New Delhi.

Rajagopal Puthan Veetil, generally known as P. V. Rajagopal (born 1948), is an Indian Gandhian activist and the founder of Ekta Parishad, a federation of people's organisations campaigning for land and forest rights for landless and forest-dwelling communities.

He is known for organising large non-violent foot marches, among them Janadesh in 2007 and Jan Satyagraha in 2012, in which tens of thousands of landless people walked to Delhi to press for land reform. He is a former vice-chairman of the Gandhi Peace Foundation in New Delhi.

Early life and education

Rajagopal was born in 1948 at Thillenkery in Kerala. He was educated at Sevagram, Gandhi's ashram in Maharashtra, where he took a diploma in agricultural engineering.

Career

In the early 1970s Rajagopal worked in the Chambal region of Madhya Pradesh on programmes to rehabilitate former dacoits, persuading armed men to surrender and take up settled livelihoods.

In 1990 he brought together several Gandhian centres in Madhya Pradesh under a single platform to campaign on livelihood issues, forming Ekta Parishad. The organisation works on land rights, forest rights and access to water, and has been credited with helping secure land entitlements for hundreds of thousands of families and with contributing to land reform legislation and policy.

After a series of state-level marches in the 1990s and early 2000s, Ekta Parishad held its first national march, Janadesh, in October 2007. Some 25,000 small farmers, tribal people and bonded labourers walked around 340 kilometres from Gwalior to Delhi. The government responded by setting up the National Land Reform Committee in January 2008.

A second national march, Jan Satyagraha, set out from Gwalior on 2 October 2012 with about 35,000 participants. In 2018 Rajagopal led the Jan Andolan march of about 25,000 people from Gwalior to Morena in Madhya Pradesh. In 2020 he launched Jai Jagat, an international peace march intended to run from Delhi to Geneva, which was suspended in Armenia because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recognition

Rajagopal received the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in 2015 and the Niwano Peace Prize in 2023.

Other honours include the Friend of the Poor award and the K. Janardhanan Pillai Endowment award (2008), the Swaraj Millennium Award (2010), the Krishi Gaurav Award, the Gareeb Bandhu Award and a Human Rights Award from the Human Rights Chapter of Geneva (2012), the Professor N. A. Karim Award for outstanding public service (2013), the Anuvrat Ahimsa Award for International Peace (2014) and the Spirit of Assisi National Award (2015).[2][3][4]

Ekta Parishad

Ekta Parishad is a mass-based Gandhian movement working across 14 Indian states, including Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar, to secure land, forest and livelihood rights for landless, Dalit and Adivasi families through nonviolent organising and dialogue with government. It has helped secure land access for hundreds of thousands of families and contributed to the Forest Rights Act.

Ekta Parishad reports the following, on its own site:

Active membership of 250,000 landless poor
Secured land rights for nearly 500,000 families
Actively working in 12,000 villages across 14 states
2007 Delhi march of 25,000 landless poor led to the Forest Rights Act, securing land for 2 million Indigenous families across India