Rippan Kapur

Rippan Kapur was an airline purser who in 1979, at the age of twenty-five, started what became Child Rights and You, one of India's larger children's organisations. He died in 1994.

The organisation began with six friends and a starting capital of fifty rupees. Kapur's insight was organisational rather than programmatic: instead of running services himself, he set out to find small, capable community groups already working with poor children across India and to give them money, credibility and technical support. The model made CRY a funder and enabler of local non-governmental organisations rather than a service provider, and it remains the way the organisation works, with a network of partner organisations across Indian states.

It was set up as Child Relief and You, framed around welfare and relief. The shift to the language of rights, and to public policy advocacy alongside grassroots work, came later; the organisation subsequently took part in the campaign for a constitutional guarantee of free and compulsory schooling that contributed to the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act of 2009. The line most associated with Kapur, still used by the organisation, is that the responsibility of change lies with all of us.[2][3]