Sanjay Kumar

Sanjay Kumar is an Indian development worker associated with two strands of grassroots organising: the rights of homeless people in Delhi, through Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan, and the building of rural women's institutions, through Manjari Foundation.

Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan, whose name translates as the shelter rights campaign, began in 2000 with the aim of forcing homelessness onto the public agenda rather than treating it as private misfortune. Kumar is its co-founder and co-director, alongside Param Jeet Kaur. The campaign's first significant act was a head count of people sleeping on Delhi's pavements in 2001, which found close to 100,000 homeless people in the city; the figures, together with testimony carried into the media and the courts, were used to press government for shelters, welfare entitlements and basic services. The organisation runs model shelters and works on health, mental health, education, employment and citizenship documents, and it deliberately recruits from among the people it serves: about a quarter of its staff have themselves been homeless, and it hires people with psychosocial disabilities.

Manjari Foundation was set up in May 2015 by Kumar with Yatesh Yadav and Shouvik Mitra, all of them alumni of the rural development organisation PRADAN, around the idea that rural women should be the agents of change rather than the beneficiaries of it. Working from Bhilwara in Rajasthan, it organises women into collectives and federations and builds outward from them into livelihoods, quality education, health and nutrition, youth work, social enterprise, water and sanitation, renewable energy, and financial and digital literacy.[3][4][5][6]