Year Ender 2018

Abha and Prabhakar Goswami made an inspired choice over 20 years ago to establish I-India. What started off as the delivery of a handful of meals to street children is now an integrated model successfully solving human rights issues at the grassroots level. I-India's principle mission is to provide basic needs, love and dignified living conditions for children and communities living in extreme poverty. Their vocational education and training program, called Ladli, is designed to help the impoverished gain valuable employment skills and income as a path towards self-determination. Ladli is supported by many different organisations worldwide.

Anjali Gopalan is the Founder and Executive Director of the Naz Foundation (India) Trust. Anjali, in the early 90s, was frustrated at the lack of government response, and even civil society response, to the burgeoning HIV epidemic. Her response was to begin Naz India to focus on communities stigmatized by society and to provide quality care to those living with the HIV infection. Today, Anjali continues to push the boundaries in the field of HIV/AIDS, and helps Naz persist with this important work. In 2012, Time placed Anjali Gopalan on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is also a human rights crusader whose Naz Foundation has been spearheading the legal battle against Section 377.

Dr. Beena Chintalapuri, a cognitive psychologist, is capacitating the Indian prison system to sustainably reduce recidivism and crime rates at a historical pace. Having institutionalized Unnati in all major prisons (over 11) of Telangana, Dr. Beena has brought down their recidivism rates from 80% to 1% and is now receiving formal invitations to institutionalize her intervention, from prison departments of other states. She conducts workshops for 'hard-core criminals' and also started the country's first Masters of Psychology program inside prisons, in affiliation with Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University.

Gaurang, through his organization, Sauhard (Empathy), runs a Fellowship for college students, where he takes them through a transformative journey of, first, self-discovery of their own beliefs and aspirations, then contributing to solving social problems to create a society that will enable them to achieve their aspirations, and finally participating in political democratic processes, to build the India they aspire to live in. He takes the Fellows through a year of workshops, mentorship, exposure trips to spend time in communities very different from where they come from.

Jithin's vision is to enable children in shelter homes to escape the cycle of poverty that made their parents give their child up to a shelter home in the first place. He started Make a Difference (MAD) in 2006, at the age of 21 years, mobilizing first his friends, and then a large volunteer community, to teach English to children in shelter homes. They got the best English teaching curriculum from Cambridge, convincing the writer of the books to give them subsidized prices. After a few years Jithin realized English was not enough to support the children to go to college and pursue their careers, and MAD transformed into an overall mentorship program for the children.

A journalist by profession, Neelesh started his rural venture leaving his plush job at a leading daily, with an intention of giving back to the society. He started Gaon Connection in December 2012 along with Karan Dalal, an IT Professional and the organisation goads educated youth in villages towards citizen journalism, instead of flocking to the cities. Neelesh believes there is much more to rural India and through Gaon Connection he wants to change the stereotypical image of rural areas. He also wants to provide rural market intelligence to urban businesses that will help them understand the changing trends and needs of rural India.

Noorjehan is organizing Muslim women in India for the first time to collectively overcome sociocultural limitations that prevent them from exercising their citizenship. By using rights of women under personal laws as a reference point, she is creating a national platform for women to play a critical role in influencing their future. Noorjehan founded the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) in 2007 as a national platform for Muslim women to present an alternative progressive voice that not only addresses their legal problems but also takes steps to ameliorate their social conditions.

Smita and Ramakrishnan left their high-paying corporate jobs to start Rang De, an organisation that offers small loans to the rural poor at very low interest. The idea of Rang De was sown in the year 2006, the same year that Professor Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “their efforts to create economic and social development from below". The motivation for starting Rang De was the belief that philanthropic capital could be leveraged to lower the cost of microcredit for those who require the most.

As a gay activist, he has been one of the front-rank leaders in the LGBT movement in India and has contributed immensely towards the growth of awareness about sexual minorities in India. In 2001 he founded his production company Solaris Pictures along with his partner Saagar Gupta, a writer and art director. The company is perhaps the only production company in India to specialise in production of gay themed films, such as Gulabi Aaina, The Pink Mirror, Yours Emotionally and most recently, Evening Shadows. He is the founder Festival Director of Kashish Mumbai Queer Film Festival that is held in Mumbai, India every year for past 9 years, the first ever queer film festival to be held at a mainstream theatre. Apart from filmmaking, Rangayan is also actively involved with human rights issues and the disability sector.

Suhani Jalota is an activist working to improve public health in India. She set up the social enterprise Myna Mahila Foundation along with three women, establishing a factory that produces sanitary products, and which employs poor women in Mumbai by giving them jobs selling these products. They also spread awareness about menstrual hygiene by giving women access to these low-cost sanitary pads. Jalota received the Glamour Woman of the Year award for 2016 and also won the 2017 Queen’s Young Leader Award for her start-up and its contributions.