Sanjit "Bunker" Roy

On the morning of 10th November 2026, Sanjit "Bunker" Roy passed away at the ripe age of 81 in his home in the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) The Barefoot College (Social Work and Research Centre), that he had set up in 1972, in Tilonia village of Ajmer district of Rajasthan. Bunker was a unique social activist who is the first in India to proclaim that social work is not charity or philanthropy but a means of facilitating socio-economically deprived citizens of this country to seek their own solutions to the problems of under development. This he later affirmed by renaming the SWRC as Barefoot College, where people at the grassroots taught each other and the world how to solve problems.

The great thing about Bunker was that he understood that there are many paths to development, socio-economic, political and cultural and so Tilonia in the 1970s and 1980s became a magnet that drew people with diverse philosophies and programmes of action, who after incubating their ideas there, later branched out to all parts of the country to implement them. There were those who believed in service delivery of education, health and livelihoods, those who believed in cultural rejuvenation through folk arts, those who believed in technology transfer to rural areas, those who believed in communitarian ecosystem restoration and conservation and last but not the least, those who believed in mass political mobilisation to secure justice and equality.
I myself was at a loss to decide what to do after college in 1983 because despite a Marxist persuasion, I was disinclined to join the kind of Marxist political parties that were there in India due to their orthodoxies. Then I read about SWRC and Bunker in a news article and landed up in Tilonia to find that a refreshingly unorthodox Bunker had quite a few disillusioned Marxists in his fold!! I joined some of them who were working on the banks of the Narmada River in Alirajpur district of Madhya Pradesh among the Bhil Adivasis in 1985 supported by Bunker. We went on to be part of the game changing, Adivasi Local Self Governance Movement, Forest Rights Movement and the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
Similarly, Aruna Roy, Bunker's wife, along with others, branched out from Tilonia and went on to launch the path breaking Right to Information and the Right to Livelihood Movements. All these resulted in people centred legislations that have revolutionised grassroots democracy in India.
A big problem in India is that at the time of independence, the crucial rights to education, health, livelihoods and local self governance were not included as fundamental rights in the Constitution and instead relegated to the Directive Principles of State Policy which are non-justiciable and so the state facilitated the exploitation of the masses for the benefit of the ruling classes. Bunker addressed this serious lacuna by ensuring the agency of the deprived masses in deciding their own development.

One very famous example will make this clear. Currently, solar power has become the go to means of transitioning away from fossil fuels and there is a huge push for producing it in centralised parks and also on rooftops of houses. The advances in technology have made the installation of solar power and its storage to increase its reliability economically competitive. However, there was a time in the late 1970s when solar power was first being introduced into India when it was very difficult to do this successfully. The thrust at that time was to install solar power in off grid locations in rural areas which were about 70% at that time. But the problem was servicing these solar setups in rural areas as their charge controllers and batteries malfunctioned. So in most cases after a few months these solar setups would stop functioning and rural India became a graveyard of solar panels, charge controllers and storage batteries.
Sanjit "Bunker" Roy, who passed away yesterday, was a pioneer in solar power installation in rural areas right from the early 1980s. He also encountered this ubiquitous problem of malfunctioning of solar setups. Given his grounded approach he found a very innovative solution for this problem in line with his philosophy that the people at the grassroots have the ability to solve any development problem given the right impetus. He set up a special training programme at the Barefoot College in Tilonia in Ajmer district of Rajasthan to train rural women, often illiterate, to build and repair charge controllers and maintain the solar systems once they were installed. In this way the solar systems installed by Barefoot College in those early years were the few in the country that remained functional.
With time most of rural India has been brought on the grid and so the scope for solar installations in villages reduced for some time before picking up again over the past few years due to the thrust for energy transition. Bunker, then decided to take this programme of installation of solar systems and their maintenance by rural women to other parts of the world in Asia, Africa and Latin America where large areas were still off grid. The women were given a new moniker - "solar mamas" and this became famous. Thousands of villages across 96 countries of the world have had solar setups installed and they are being maintained by solar mamas who have been trained in Tilonia.

Rest in peace, elder brother, you will be sorely missed.