| Bunker Roy | |
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Sanjit Bunker Roy at Time 100 event, 2010 |
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| Born | August 2, 1945 Burnpur Bengal, present-day West Bengal |
| Residence | Rajasthan, India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Occupation | Social activist & Founder of Barefoot college |
| Spouse | Aruna Roy 1970 - present |
Sanjit 'Bunker' Roy (born 2 August 1945) is an Indian social activist and educator. In 1972 he founded the Barefoot college in Tilonia, Rajasthan. The Indian non-governmental organization was registered as the Social Work and Research Centre.[1] He was selected as one of Time 100, the 100 most influential personalities in the world by TIME Magazine in 2010.[2]
In 2002 he was selected for Geneva-based Schwab Foundation's award.[3]
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Bunker Roy was born in Burnpur Bengal, present-day West Bengal. His father was a mechanical engineer and his mother retired as India's trade commissioner to Russia.[4]
He went to the Doon School from 1956 to 1962 and attended St. Stephen's College, Delhi from 1962 to 1967. He earned his master's degree in English. He then decided to devote himself to social service, to the shock of his parents.
Bunker Roy, after his education, decided to work in the villages much to the chagrin of his parents. His dream of using traditional expertise rather than "bookish knowledge" for the uplift of neglected communities. He has worked all his life with the Barefoot College, an NGO that he founded.[5]
Barefoot College has trained more than 3 million people for jobs in the modern world, in buildings so rudimentary they have dirt floors and no chairs.[6] The rural youth selected by the community have to be impoverished, subsisting on barely one meal a day to receive training at Barefoot college.
Roy was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi belief essential for the development of India and his thoughts have been adapted to the work-style of his college. The philosophy of Mao Zedong, and modeled his organization after Mao's Barefoot Doctors.
He was in the thick of a controversy when the Aga Khan Foundation . Quoting The Hindu on the controversy,
This is perhaps the first time in the history of the prestigious Aga Khan Awards that anyone has returned the award. The Barefoot College was one of the nine recipients of the architectural awards in 2001. The Tilonia project was found exemplary by the master jury of the Award Foundation as it "augmented traditions and knowledge of a rural community, enabling untutored residents to design and build for themselves". Bunker Roy now wants a debate on the barefoot concept, which is based on the traditional wisdom of the villages and on the capacity and resourcefulness of their common residents. "Who is a barefoot architect? The return of the award should provoke a debate. In this case the ideology of the Barefoot College has been misunderstood and misrepresented," he lamented. "It had been an agonising decision but we have to keep our honour," Bunker Roy told Frontline. "There was no question of accepting Raina as the architect since he was a beginner and was still learning from the elders in the village. When Romi Khosla and Raina came down to Tilonia to discuss the issue with the men and women here in April this year we had agreed to acknowledge Raina as a designer but of course not as an architect," he observes.
In 1970, Roy married his classmate Aruna Roy, then an officer in the Indian Administrative Service. Aruna was later to achieve fame as a political and social activist. Later Aruna became a prominent leader of the Right to Information movement, and in 2000 received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership.[7]
Bunker Roy has won many awards like