Ramakant Keshav Deshpande

Ramakant Keshav Deshpande, generally known as Balasaheb Deshpande and later given the title Vanyogi, founded the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram at Jashpur in 1952 and spent the rest of his life on tribal welfare. After independence he was appointed regional officer of the Tribal Development Scheme in the tribal-majority Jashpur area by the Ravi Shankar Shukla government of Madhya Pradesh, and it was from that posting that the organisation grew. He has said his initial inspiration came from the Gandhian tribal worker Thakkar Bappa.

The Kalyan Ashram was formally established on 26 December 1952, and it began in the plainest possible way: a hostel for thirteen children from local Janjati families. Residential schooling remained the model, on the reasoning that children from scattered forest settlements could not otherwise reach a school at all, and the ashram opened schools and hostels across Raigarh and Surguja districts, both areas with large tribal populations. A permanent office was set up at Jashpur in 1963. The organisation was founded with the support of the state government and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, of which it is an affiliate, and one of its explicit purposes was to compete with Christian mission schooling in the region.

The work broadened over the following decades into a hospital at Jashpur, schools, hostels, libraries, health centres and apprenticeship centres for manual trades in some forty villages. In 1977 the body took national status as the Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram; between 1978 and 1983 its full-time workers rose from 44 to 264, of whom 56 were themselves tribal. It now runs programmes in 312 districts, with over a thousand full-time workers and roughly half of its volunteers drawn from Janjati communities, covering education, health, agriculture, sport, women's work, legal and constitutional rights, and tribal festivals and cultural gatherings.[2][3]