Anshu Gupta

Using cloth as a metaphor for other crucial but ignored needs, his ideology stated that roti, kapda, makaan are the three most essential individual needs. The first two are always in focus, but clothing never received the attention it deserved but is essential in maintaining individual dignity.[2] In 1999, he started Goonj with his wife Meenakshi and friends to work on that basic need. He started with 67 pieces of cloth collected with his wife and friends, at their home in Sarita Vihar. The firm spread across 28 states and over 4000 villages, employing over 1000 workers.[4]

"Clothing is the first visible sign of poverty".[5] It is essential to satisfy basic clothing needs. Under Anshu's leadership, Goonj has taken ever-growing urban waste and used it as a tool to trigger development work on diverse issues in remote areas of India.

Under Goonj's initiative 'Cloth for Work', village communities across India work on their issues and get urban material for their efforts. The focus is on dignity and how cloth can help defend that dignity. Cloth for Work and other Goonj initiatives have received various national and international recognition.[6] Goonj helps victims during natural calamities such as floods and earthquakes.[7]

He is popularly known as the clothing man of India for his achievement bringing clothing into the map of development work.[8]

In "Cloth for Work", communities have built huge bamboo bridges, dug up wells, have done bunding of acres of land, developed small irrigation canals, have built drainage systems, built village schools and have taken up massive exercises of repairing roads, developing water harvesting systems to cleaning up water bodies. All these works are done but by making people understand their own community power and giving old usable old material as a reward.[9][10]

Goonj's award-winning School to School initiative is addressing the educational needs of thousands of remote & resource starved village/ slum schools by channelizing under-utilised material of city's affluent schools not as a thing to distribute but as a tool to bring about comprehensive behaviour change in the recipients and the contributors.[11]

Anshu initiated the "Not Just a Piece of Cloth" campaign after the 2004 tsunami. According to him, "we dealt with more than 100 tracks of post-disaster cloth wastage on the roads of Tamil Nadu. The unwearable cloth from this lot was turned into cloth menstrual pads ...".[9] It is seen that in the absence of a clean piece of cloth, millions of women in villages and city slums use rags, sand, ash, etc. to deal with their menses. A humble piece, of cotton cloth can save a woman from a lot of indignity, embarrassment and infections.[12]

An earthquake in Uttarkashi triggered Gupta's involvement with disaster relief and rehabilitation. For nearly two decades, he has been working on disasters from earthquakes to tsunamis, cyclones, and floods. Goonj's initiative "Rahat" evolved into an active network of stakeholders in rural and urban India, ensuring timely response for generating need-based disaster relief and rehabilitation efforts.[13]