Award not a liability, says Anshu Gupta

Magsaysay-Award winner Anshu Gupta's mission is to make clothing a matter of concern, to bring it in the list of subjects for the development sector. He founded an NGO Goonj in 1999 with his wife contributing 67 pieces of personal clothing for the use of homeless during winter. He spoke to Shemin Joy of Deccan Herald.

What does this award mean to you?

It is a recognition to the issues we are trying to work on. Until a few years ago, certain issues like clothing or the concept of sanitary pads were not part of development.

You were a freelance journalist and then you moved to corporate world. Why this transition to social-sector work?

I was very fond of writing and photography. I did study journalism but I never wanted to take it up full time. Leaving the corporate and getting into this, I think, was because you see a problem, you want to work on it and solve it. You are passionate about it and you start working on it. Then it slowly grows. This is how I see this.

The Magsaysay citation says that you made cloth a sustainable-development resource for poor. How did you reach at the idea of clothing as an issue?

If you talk about hundreds of thousands of communities, they end up buying clothes from the second-hand markets in India. Lot of people survive on second-hand material. Then we thought that we should take the charity element out of it. Otherwise, the old material has been an object of charity across the globe. Charity is for solving some problem. You provide cloth, food, or blanket to a needy person. Until this point, charity is fine. However, charity cannot sustain forever. We do not want people to fall victim of charity forever. People have to move out of this. Otherwise, we will not progress.

You are saying that charity should not be limited to the times of disaster.

During the initial phase of disaster, people help with food, clothes and all. That is fine. After a certain phase, people have to become part of the process of development.

Is this award a liability?

I will never call it a liability. It is recognition of causes, team effort, trust of volunteers, trust of many people on our work when we did not have anything. Even when the idea was evolving, people had trusted us. So it is a recognition to all that.