Magsaysay Awardee, Founder Goonj and Gram Swabhimaan Popularly known as the Clothing Man, Anshu Gupta is the recipient of 2015 Ramon Magsaysay award, popularly called the Nobel Prize of Asia. He started his development journey after quitting a corporate career in 1999 to initiate Goonj, the world’s first agency working on the issue of clothing as a development issue. This attention to a neglected basic need set him on 24+ years of transforming India’s culture of giving off our unused cloth and other under-utilized material for development work. Under his leadership, Goonj has taken the alarming growth of urban waste and instrumentalized it to trigger large scale rural communities-led development work, creatively and flexibly matching and seamlessly weaving urban surplus into the changing priorities and realities of rural marginalized communities. Anshu is a frequent speaker at various Global and national Forums including Ted and the World economic Forum and engages deeply as advisor and board member on many grassroots and national level social enterprises and non-profits. In 2010 Forbes listed him as one of India’s most powerful rural entrepreneurs. Anshu is also an Ashoka and Schwab Fellow. Anshu recently started on a new journey of ‘Gram Swabhimaan’ (literally meaning Village self-respect), emerging from his long standing intrigue with the world’s mainstream narration about certain people and communities. His aim in this new journey is to make these people realize their own worth and dignity and make a promise to shun labels like bechara (helpless), besahara (destitute) and gareeb (poor) to describe oneself. Anshu holds a double masters in Journalism and Advertising and PR from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication and a Masters in Economics.