Sankar Halder

Founder

Founder of Mukti

Sankar Halder is the founder of Mukti (2003)[1], an Indian non-profit working on rural & agriculture, livelihood and disaster relief from Raidighi.

Sankar Halder is an Indian information technology professional and social worker who founded Mukti, a non-governmental organisation working on rural development in the Sundarbans region of West Bengal.

He founded Mukti in 2003 with a small group of volunteers and serves as its founder-president. The organisation now works on health, education, agriculture, livelihoods, environment, rights and awareness, and disaster recovery.

Early life and education

Halder was born and grew up on an island in the Sundarbans, in a poor family, and has said that the hardship he saw around him shaped his decision to work in the region. He graduated from Jadavpur University in Kolkata.

Career

Halder has worked for more than twenty years as a senior information technology consultant with an Indian multinational company, with assignments in six countries including the United States, Australia and Germany, and works as a lead technology officer on emerging technologies.

He founded Mukti in 2003. The organisation groups its work under nine programme areas and reports reaching more than a million beneficiaries a year across roughly 150,000 households, with over 300 full-time and part-time staff and more than 950 volunteers. Reported results include the planting of tens of millions of trees, treatment of more than 200,000 medical patients, and support for more than 11,000 farmers moving to organic methods. Support groups for Mukti operate in Australia, the United States and China.

In July 2026 Halder took part, with Mukti's secretary Satyajit Roy, in a panel discussion at the United Nations during the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.

Recognition

Halder has received the True Legends award from The Telegraph in 2018, a Star of Asia award, the Vivek Sanman award, an A. P. J. Abdul Kalam award and a TCS CSR award.[2][3][4][5]

Mukti

Mukti was founded in 2003 by IT professional Sankar Halder and young people from the Sundarbans to lift their delta communities out of poverty. Working from Purba Sridharpur near Raidighi across more than ten districts of West Bengal, it runs support schools, scholarships, women's self-help collectives, organic farming, health services and large-scale cyclone relief and resilient housing.

Mukti reports the following, on its own site: