About The Founder

Anshu Gupta

Anshu Gupta is an Indian Social Entrepreneur, awarded Magsaysay Award for his work on transforming the culture of giving in India and for highlighting material as a sustainable development resource for the poor. Popularly known as the Clothing Man, Anshu founded Goonj, offering a sustainable economic model for eliminating poverty and related issues. Under his leadership, Goonj created a barter between urban surplus and village communities labor, triggering large scale rural development work. Anshu has won many national and international honors like Ashoka and Schwab Fellowship, while Forbes Magazine has listed him as one of India’s most powerful rural entrepreneurs.

Show More

Summary

Anshu studied Mass communication and did his masters in Economics. Starting as a freelance journalist, he left a corporate job in 1998 and founded GOONJ. His mission was to make clothing a matter of concern and to bring it among the list of development issues,to address the most basic but ignored need of clothing and the multifaceted role it plays in the lives of people, especially in rural India.

Anshu sees his work as a way to address a core challenge of our times; the growing gap and inequality between the urban prosperity & rural poverty.Taking the menacing growth of urban waste Anshu used it effectively and efficiently as a tool to trigger large scale development work on diverse issues in some of the most backward areas and remote communities of India. In the process hehas created a model of a parallel economy which is not cash based but trash based. With Goonj, Anshu has brought attention to a nonmarket, nonmonetary approach — one grounded in empathy and dignity. He has turned the mostly passive urban and rural masses into prime stakeholders and actors addressing their own needs by solving their own problems. He has done this by weaving together a beautiful pipeline system from the cities to the villages for channelizing resources to create empowerment and development in rural India. Anshu considers one of Goonj’s central work to be changing mindsets about the immense humanitarian potential of people facing poverty by reusing urban surplus and demonstrating a model that delivers as promised. Show More

Awards & Recognition

• .