Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy, who passed away on November 10 at 81, was an exceptional fusion of raging self-assurance and affecting humility. He was as much at ease with world leaders and royalties as he was with an unschooled rural grandmother in Rajasthan, India.

For someone who could have risen to the top of India’s coveted administrative service, Bunker instead chose the path which he once told me, “Gandhiji laid down for lesser mortals like me.”

Over the years, particularly in the decade of the 1990s, I engaged with Bunker frequently over a variety of issues, but none animated him as much as empowering rural Indians and rural people across the world. His educational grounding could have set a very different trajectory having studied first at the elite Doon School in the Himalayan foothills of Dehradun and then equally elite St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi. Instead, he chose what “my Gandhian impulses led me to.”

The Barefoot College

A famine in Bihar in 1967 pushed him into a life of selflessness that remained his calling until his death. In 1972, he founded the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC), better known as The Barefoot College, in Tilonia near Ajmer.

“When I first arrived in Tilonia, I felt both moved and connected immediately,” he said. His nascent plan was to create a rural center where the people of Tilonia could leverage their traditional do-it-yourself skills and build on them. “There were then and there are still so many different kinds of skills that rural Indians have which do not get the respect they deserve,” he said.

Bunker began focusing on what he called “barefoot solutions” in areas such as solar energy, water harvesting and conservation, healthcare, education, rural handicrafts, wasteland development and communication. “Aruna (his wife) and I saw rural women as a source of great reserve and strength and started empowering them with some of these skills,” he said.

“It was simultaneously important that they learn communication skills coupled with literacy,” he said.

Roy firmly believed that those coming to his Barefoot College had to both unlearn and learn. “The teacher has to learn as much from the student as the student from the teacher,” he said.

Empowering Grandmothers

One particularly remarkable aspect of the couple’s approach was to train grandmothers in various hands-on jobs such as installing and maintaining solar panels. “Grandmothers do not leave the village for the city unlike young men and women. So, they became a pool of skilled barefoot engineers in a sense,” Bunker said.

A man of global ambitions, Roy expanded it to more than 30 countries where hundreds of grandmothers helped electrify some 40,000 homes in 1000 villages.

Honors and recognition came along the way such in 2008 The Guardian newspaper recognizing him as one of the 50 environmentalists who could save the planet and in 2010, Time magazine calling him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The Guardian said, “Roy's idea is that India and Africa are full of people with skills, knowledge and resourcefulness who are not recognised as engineers, architects or water experts but who can bring more to communities than governments or big businesses.” 

Early on he had to pay a heavy personal price when his family disowned him because of his career switch.

After coming to Tilonia he said, he “lived with very poor and ordinary people under the stars and heard the simple stories they had to tell of their skills and knowledge, of the wisdom that books and lectures and university education can never teach you."

“I could have strutted around as a Stephenian and become a powerful IAS (Indian Administrative Service) bureaucrat but I knew early on that what Gandhiji had said about India living in its villages was the true wisdom,” Bunker told me during one of his many conversations in the 1990s.

He forgot about the Doon School and St. Stephen’s College when he saw “water diviners, traditional bonesetters and midwives at work.”

“There is a difference between literacy and education. Literacy is reading and writing and what you pick up in school. Education is what you receive from your family, your community, and your environment,” he said.

Between 2005 and 2011, 140 African women, most of them grandmothers, traveled to Tilonia from villages in Africa to be trained as solar engineers. None of the women could read or write, nor could speak Hindi. So, they were taught using sign language and colour codes during their six-month-long training. By the time they finished the course and returned to their African villages they were qualified to install, maintain, and operate household, solar-powered lighting systems. They learned to install integrated circuit boards for solar home lights and off-grid solar units generating up to 500 kilowatts a day.

'Gandhi Walked With Me'

The Barefoot College has trained over three million people for various jobs such as teachers, midwives, water-drillers, phone operators, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, weavers, architects, dentists and doctors.

During my last conversation with Bunker over the phone from Chicago in 2022, he joked, “Amrikan ban gaye ho. Yahan aao, jutey utaro aur kuchh kaam karo. (You have become an American. Come here, remove your shoes and do something constructive.”

He then said, “Gandhiji has walked with me bare feet all these decades in a manner of speaking.”

(Sanjit 'Bunker' Roy, August 2, 1945--November 10, 2026)

(The writer is a Chicago-based veteran Indian journalist, author and commentator who has reported extensively in India and South Asia. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at mcsix@outlook.com)