Sunil Deshpande

Founder

Sunil Deshpande is the founder of Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra [1], an Indian non-profit working on livelihood, tribal welfare, environment and arts & culture from Lawada.

Sunil Gunwantrao Deshpande (c. 1964 – 19 May 2021) was an Indian social worker who, with his wife Nirupama Deshpande, founded Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra in the tribal village of Lawada in the Melghat region of Amravati district, Maharashtra. He was widely known as Venuputra, meaning son of the bamboo.

The centre was set up in the mid-1990s as a response to malnutrition and the absence of local livelihoods in Melghat, and it trained tribal men and women as bamboo artisans, builders and entrepreneurs.

Career

Deshpande took a master's degree in social work and began his work in social service through the student organisation Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad in the 1980s. He worked in Bihar and later at Nanaji Deshmukh's Chitrakoot project before settling in Melghat.

He established Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra at Lawada in the mid-1990s. The centre undertakes training, research, design and product development in bamboo, and in 1998 an artisans' cooperative, the Venu Shilpi Industrial Cooperative Society, was formed with fifteen tribal members. Deshpande promoted bamboo as an engineering material and trained tribal builders to construct bamboo houses, including structures erected in Bhuj, Gujarat, after the earthquake there.

He also founded Gram Gyanpeeth and organised the Hunar Khoj Yatra, a journey intended to build a nationwide network of rural artisans. Rakhis made from bamboo by tribal women under the Srushtibandh brand were presented to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018.

Recognition

Deshpande and Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra received a series of awards over three decades, among them the Abhyudaya Golden Jubilee Fellowship (1999), a rural worker award from the Asmita Institute (2002), the Rashtriya Yuva Puraskar and the Professor Yashwantrao Kelkar Memorial National Youth Award (2004), the Antyodaya and Rambhau Mhalgi Antyodaya awards (2006), the NAPSWI Lifetime Achievement Award, the All India Social Work Award and the Sant Ishwar Samman (all 2021).

In March 2021 Gondwana University announced that it would confer an honorary DLitt on him for his contribution to rural and tribal development.

Death

Deshpande died on the night of 19 May 2021 at a hospital in Nagpur, aged 57, from complications of COVID-19. He was survived by his mother, his wife Nirupama, and their daughter Mugdha.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra

Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra was started in 1995 by Sunil and Nirupama Deshpande in Lawada village in the Melghat forest region of Amravati district, Maharashtra. It trains tribal youth in bamboo craft, construction and product-making and has promoted an artisans' cooperative for marketing bamboo products. Its bamboo rakhis are made by tribal artisans and sold in India and abroad.

Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra reports the following, on its own site:

Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra has provided bamboo handicraft and bamboo housing training to more than 10,000 youth (SC/ST and others) across the country, of whom 3,622 were in the Melghat region of Maharashtra and 120 in Kutch, Gujarat.
More than 450 people trained by Sampoorna Bamboo Kendra are working and earning wages from bamboo handicraft and bamboo housing in Melghat, and the organisation has a team of 80 trainers.