Bunker Roy

Bunker Roy died at his home in Tilonia, in Rajasthan's Ajmer district, on the morning of Tuesday 10 November 2026, aged 81. A statement from people associated with him said he passed away peacefully at 6.15 am with Aruna and others around him, and that he went as he wanted to, in his own home, surrounded by people who loved and cared for him. No cause of death was made public.

The activist Nikhil Dey said the funeral would take place in Tilonia at 4 pm the same day. The former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot said Roy had made significant contributions to rural self reliance, education and development by following the principles of Mahatma Gandhi, and the Trinamool Congress MP Sagarika Ghose called him a giant of the barefoot movement and a national treasure.

Sanjit Roy, known throughout his life as Bunker, was born on 30 June 1945 in Burnpur, in the Bengal Presidency of British India. He attended The Doon School in Dehradun from 1956 to 1962 and then St. Stephen's College, Delhi, from 1962 to 1967.

He was an outstanding squash player. He won the Indian national squash championship in 1965 and represented India at three world squash championships before choosing a life of rural development work.

After a survey of water supplies in 100 drought prone areas of India, Roy founded the Social Work and Research Centre at Tilonia, in Rajasthan's Ajmer district, in 1972. Its early focus on water and irrigation broadened into empowerment and sustainability. The centre sited water pumps close to villages and trained local people to maintain them without outside mechanics, trained villagers as paramedics, and introduced solar power to reduce dependence on kerosene lighting.

The organisation became known as the Barefoot College. It rested on the belief that people without formal education could acquire technical skills, and it placed particular importance on involving women. By 2010 it had trained more than three million people as solar engineers, teachers, midwives, weavers, architects and health workers. Its best known programme brought older, often illiterate women from villages in many countries to Tilonia to train as solar engineers, known as Solar Mamas, who returned home to electrify their communities.

Roy was appointed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to the Planning Commission. There he recommended a legislated code of conduct for non-governmental organisations and a national council to recommend legitimate organisations to the government and monitor them. Both ideas were fiercely opposed as possible tools of patronage and control.

In 1983 he was the plaintiff in Roy v State of Rajasthan, in which the Supreme Court of India struck down an emergency policy that had allowed women famine relief workers to be paid less than men. He also spoke at the TED conference about how the Barefoot College helped rural communities become self sufficient.

In 1970 Roy married Aruna Roy, a former Indian Administrative Service officer who became one of India's best known social activists. The couple were long associated with grassroots work in Rajasthan. Roy made Tilonia his home for more than five decades.

Roy is remembered for proving that knowledge and skill need not depend on degrees. The Barefoot College model, in which villagers and especially rural women became engineers, teachers and health workers for their own communities, spread from one Rajasthan village to dozens of countries. His 1983 Supreme Court case remains a landmark for equal pay for women workers in India, and his honours ranged from the Padma Shri to a place on the Time 100 list.