Sanjit "Bunker" Roy

Sanjit Roy, known as Bunker Roy, is an Indian social activist and educator who founded Barefoot College at Tilonia in Rajasthan. Educated at The Doon School and St Stephen's College, Delhi, and India's national squash champion in 1965, he turned to rural development after a survey of water supplies in a hundred drought-prone areas.

He set up the Social Work and Research Centre in 1972. Its purpose shifted fairly quickly from water and irrigation engineering to a broader argument about who is qualified to solve rural problems. The method that became the college's signature was to train villagers, most of them with little or no formal schooling, to install and maintain the technology their own communities depended on: hand pumps sited close to homes and repaired locally rather than by outside mechanics, paramedical training so that basic treatment was available in the village, and later solar electrification to displace kerosene lighting.

The solar programme became the best known part of the work. Rural women, many of them grandmothers and often illiterate, were brought to Tilonia for months of practical training as solar engineers and returned to electrify their own villages, an approach that spread well beyond India. Barefoot College International has since trained women from more than ninety countries and, from 2015, began establishing vocational training centres abroad, including in Zanzibar, Madagascar, Senegal and Guatemala.

Roy also worked on the wider conditions for rural rights. He was appointed by Rajiv Gandhi to the Planning Commission, where his proposals for a code of conduct and a national council for non-governmental organisations were strongly opposed as potential instruments of political patronage. In 1983 he was the plaintiff in Roy v State of Rajasthan, in which the Supreme Court struck down a famine relief policy that paid women less than men for the same work.

He received the Padma Shri in 1986 and the Jamnalal Bajaj Award for the application of science and technology to rural development in 1985, won the St Andrews Prize for the Environment in 2003, was named a Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the Schwab Foundation the same year, and was included in Time's list of the hundred most influential people in 2010.[2][3][4]