Anshu Gupta

Biography

Popularly known as the Clothing Man and recipient of 2015 Ramon Magsaysay Award, Anshu Gupta has done Mass communications twice and has a masters in Economics. Starting as a freelance jour-nalist, Anshu left a corporate job in 1998 and founded Goonj with a mission to make clothing a matter of concern and to bring it among the list of subjects to work on, for the development sector.

Under his leadership Goonj has taken the menacing growth of urban waste and used it efficiently as a tool to trigger large scale rural development work. By creating barter between two new currencies; labor of the beneficiaries and old material of cities, Anshu has built the genesis of a parallel economy which is not just cash based but trash based.


Anshu is an Ashoka and Schwab Fellow and has been listed by the Forbes magazine as one of India’s most powerful rural entrepreneurs.

Anshu brings to the table an instinctive empathy and connect with people by dignifying the act of giving. By using what the world considers a part of the problem i.e the discard of the cities, as a part of the solution it offers a doable, sustainable and viable economic model for eliminating poverty and its related issues.

In the macro picture Anshu has identified some basic needs outside the radar of the development sector and the civil society, that too by structuring imaginative solutions using urban waste.

The citation of Magsaysay award, known as Noble of Asia , conferred to him in 2015 summerises it well in a few words. It says- “The Board of Trustees recognizes his creative vision in transforming the culture of giving in India, his enterprising leadership in treating cloth as a sustainable development resource for the poor, and in reminding the world that true giving always respects and preserves human dignity.”