SANJIT ‘BUNKER’ ROY, the founder of Barefoot College and one of India's best-known and globally acclaimed grassroots development workers, was a splendid example of an Indian whose life and work represented a passionate and arduous striving for uplifting village people and ensuring them their legitimate entitlements in tune with Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of heralding renaissance across vast swathes of rural India.
His sad demise on November 10, 2026, at his home in Tilonia, Rajasthan, in the presence of his illustrious activist wife, Aruna Ray and several villagers underscored his enduring legacy of exemplary service to village people till his last breath. He was 81, and his extraordinary constructive work for the rural folks constituted a shining example of revolutionising the lives of villagers in a compassionate manner.
Born into a prominent Brahmo upper-middle-class family from Kolkata in 1945, Roy had the privilege of being groomed with a secular outlook and educated in the elite Doon School in Dehradun and St Stephen’s College in Delhi. His own self-critical evaluation of his education was best expressed when he said, “I went to the wrong school, wrong college and came back with a lot of arrogance.” “After my education,” he said, “I had a lot of fancy degrees and was told that I could overcome any problem.” What transformed his life and outlook was his visit to famine-ravaged Palamu in Bihar (now Jharkhand) in 1966 and his utter inability to cope up with life in a village there in spite of studying in excellent educational institutions and securing high distinctions as a bright student. Apart from his excellence as a student, he proved himself to be an accomplished sportsperson by becoming India’s squash champion thrice.
But the inner driving force silently guiding Bunker was an irresistible yearning which could be best described by employing the caption of an article “Wanted Rural Mindedness” authored by Mahatma Gandhi.
He deeply realised that in spite of getting schooled in the best of educational institutions, he was incapable of placing himself in a rural setting marked by the absence of essential conditions for acquiring social and educational capabilities to lead a dignified life. Therefore, he preferred to stay in a village and resolved to improve the lived experience of villagers by establishing the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) in Tilonia, Rajasthan. The organisation was reckoned with great admiration across the world as Barefoot College emerged as a nucleus for harnessing the invaluable skills of village dwellers which they never got through the formal process of schooling in any educational institution, be it an institute of technology or engineering. What he did through that College for augmenting the human development indices of the village by liberating them from the whirlpool of deprivation and discrimination is worthy of emulation for our time, marked by the accelerated process of urbanisation and AI-driven algorithms mocking people’s traditional skills acquired through the process of living by using locally available resources.
Bunker Roy’s articulations in the context of Tilonia and Barefoot College that “Every failure is a beginning. Everyone had a chance in Tilonia. This is a place for cop outs, drop-outs and washouts” embodied the optimism of Gandhi, who famously said that he would harness the ability of dumb millions to liberate India from the clutches of the mighty British Empire.
That was the reason why Roy, while drawing on the strength of village people devoid of formal educational qualifications, brought together the most ordinary village people, a large segment of which consisted of women. It was fascinating to see such women, never having attended school, emerge as engineers to harness electricity from sunlight and hailed as ‘Solar Mamas’ for their contributions in bringing clean energy to thousands of houses and even communities located in distant parts of the world. Women from the villages were initially trained as handpump istrys, excelled as solar mamas and forged their tryst with empowerment and set an example for the rest of the country and indeed the world. Its model placed technical knowledge in the hands of people who were often excluded from discussions about technology and development.
Education was another important part of Roy's work. Barefoot College established night schools for children who could not attend regular classes because they worked or helped their families during the day. The initiative recognised that conventional schooling did not always accommodate the circumstances of rural children. The institution also worked on rainwater harvesting, healthcare and traditional crafts, linking its programmes to the everyday requirements of village life.
When, in 1986, he was conferred with Padma Shri, the citation catalogued his precious work in employing the phrase, ‘Tilonia Movement’, and remarking that “the idea was to start a process of generating awareness and at the same time demystifying technology, making it simple, effective, inexpensive and accessible”.
In the “Thinkers’ Category” listed by Time Magazine in 2010, he figured as one of the ‘100 Most Influential People in the World.’ Several other prestigious awards such as the Jamnalal Bajaj Award for Application of Science and Technology for Rural Development (1985), the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (2004), the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2005), the Blue Planet Prize (2011) and the Clinton Global Citizen Award in 2013 testified to his glorious legacy rooted in his enduring services driven by the passion to uplift rural areas by adopting sustainable paths of development.
A year back in 2025, King Charles III of the United Kingdom referred to the precious work done by Roy and remarked, “I am constantly singing your praises whenever I can, especially in Africa. There is much to discuss as I have many initiatives going on around the world…”
Roy’s advent in the rural setting and his adventure in finding the worth of extremely ordinary village folks need to be seen in the context of his wife Aruna Roy’s pathbreaking work as the president of the National Federation of Indian Women and founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan. She quit the IAS and engaged in relentless struggles for mobilising workers and farmers to secure their entitlements for minimum wages and their right to hold the Government to account.
The epic struggle for the Right to Information, combined with manifold movements for transparency and the Right to Food and education, originated against the backdrop of Roy's seminal work in Tilonia as a compassionate revolutionary. Aruna, in her memoir, “The Personal is Political”, acknowledged, “The need for an RTI law was built brick by brick, incident by incident. If the IAS showed what should not be, Barefoot College SWRC gave me a platform to evolve what should be.”
Bunker Roy’s legacy is of enduring significance in the context of the calamitous consequences humanity is confronting as the spectre of man-made global warming and climate change is wreaking havoc on the planet. The statement issued by his family after his passing away said, “Bunker Roy passed away peacefully at 6.15 am with Aruna (wife and activist Aruna Roy) and others around him. He went as he wanted to, in his own home in Tilonia, surrounded by some of the countless people who loved and cared for him deeply and admired him for his lifelong contribution to people, society, India, and the planet.”
He was truly a planetary citizen and his life and work would shine for ever leading the weary humanity to appreciate the meaning and significance of sustainable development in this “Age of Anthropocene” defined, among others, in terms of too much of human activity disproportionately using the energy and resources of the planet and imperilling it.