Shantilal Muttha

Shantilal Muttha is a social entrepreneur from Pune who founded Bharatiya Jain Sanghatana, one of the largest volunteer-based disaster response networks built by Indian civil society, and later the Shantilal Muttha Foundation, through which he took up values education in government schools.

Born on 15 August 1954 in the village of Dongarkinhi and a graduate of BMCC in Pune, Muttha built a property business expressly to fund social work. He began organising at the age of 31 through the Akhil Maharashtra Jain Sanghatana, running mass weddings and introductory gatherings to reduce dowry payments and the ruinous cost of marriage ceremonies, and campaigning against female foeticide.

The turn to disaster work came with the Latur earthquake of 1993, after which he built a standing mechanism for civil-society disaster response and Bharatiya Jain Sanghatana was formally registered as an organisation. He also set up what is described as the first educational rehabilitation centre of its kind in India for children orphaned by disasters, a residential facility offering schooling and emotional support that has since taken in several hundred children. Separately he developed a community-led method of restoring water bodies to reduce the effects of drought, which has been applied in more than 3,500 villages across seven states.

His principal work in education is Mulyavardhan, a values-education programme designed for state schools, which the Foundation reports has reached more than ten million children and 400,000 teachers, making it the largest programme of its kind taken to scale in Indian public schools. His awards include the Rajiv Gandhi Manav Seva Award in 2017, the Ahimsa Award in 2018 and a National Water Award in 2022.[3][4]