25 People making a difference

THE ALTERNATIVE POWER LIST

25 People Who Will Never Make It To The Power List

Thinking change in India is a thankless task. A few who are sticking it out for the greater common good.

The prolific presence of Power Lists in print publications may be a reflection of the dumbing down of the media but, like haemorrhoids, eventually we all catch the disease. In Superpower India, Wealth and Power make for a compelling narrative. Who is in the top 50, and who has moved from number 49 to 48 is (presumably) irresistible and essential reading for many people, even though the names are both predictable and (slightly) boring. Are readers interested in this sort of guff? No publisher has bothered to find out; sufficient to say that since many in the list are top industrialists, the publisher is quite happy to massage the egos of a few tycoons. Since this magazine has a deserved reputation of being a bit of a maverick, we decided to imitate the hallowed Power List formula, adding a characteristic Outlook twist. We have compiled the Alternative Power List by hailing 25 people who will never make it to any conventional Power List, and whose names you've probably never heard. Or heard and quickly forgotten. Since all Power Lists are arbitrary and potentially fraudulent, with three or four editors sitting in a room and finalising the document with a little help from the marketing manager, our List cannot claim to be radically different—except, perhaps, that in our compiling conference the marketing manager was conspicuous by his absence. He would not have been interested, in any case, because no one in our List has the resources to release even a centimetre of advertising. Anticipating brickbats, we apologise in advance for an incomplete, possibly subjective, centre-left list of individuals who are powerful and who are doing sterling work in their respective areas, but do not frequent TV studios to advertise their labours. This is our small effort to correct that distortion.

IN THIS STORY:

P. Sainath Putting rural India and the farmers' crisis firmly on the national and media agenda Irrfan Khan Among the New Generation of actors, his ability to set every role on a slow, crackling flame has set new standards of excellence Prof Irfan Habib A leader among social scientists, cutting across disciplines. Uses history to counter communal propaganda, modern myths. Jean Dreze His incisive work on hunger, child malnutrition and other issues has brought the Other India into intellectual and policy focus Kandala Balagopal Fighting for the rights of the marginalised all over India, exposing state abuses C. Rammanohar Reddy Runs a magazine that has set the agenda for intellectual debate, government policies for nearly 60 years Dr Abusaleh Sharif His survey of Indian Muslims has offered both a challenge and critique to policy, showing up its gross inadequacies and spurring it to more focused action Satinder K. Lambah Winning Pakistan's trust, and keeping communication channels open, even in difficult times Bezwada Wilson Leads a nationwide crusade to abolish the dehumanising practice of manual scavenging Joe Madiath Transforming disease-ridden hamlets into sparkling model villages Madhav Chavan Leads a huge effort to improve the quality of primary education in government schools Ashok Agarwal Forced Delhi's educational bureaucracy and private schools to recognise the rights of poor children Pulok Chatterjee A quiet, low-key force in the bureaucracy J.S. Bandukwala Fearless crusader against communalism in Gujarat. Has paid a heavy price for his outspoken activism. Prof Obaid Siddiqi Making the National Centre for Biological Sciences, which he set up, a world-class institution Vishal Bharadwaj Making films that successfully challenge the tired Bollywood box-office formula, yet captivate audiences. Deep Joshi Recruiting the best professional talent to work on a wide range of remarkably profitable rural livelihood promotion projects that have transformed the lives of nearly 70,000 families Sant Balbir Singh Seechewal Using his spiritual influence to engage rural folks in large-scale environmental, anti-pollution projects Raghuvansh Prasad Singh Ensuring that the UPA gives rural development high priority, and that NREGs makes history Krishan Kumar Creating a successful model for checking female foeticide, running a district that is a model of efficient governance Gopal Gandhi A rare example of humility, ethical conduct and scholarship in public life Abhay & Rani Bang Creating an internationally acclaimed and adopted model for drastically reducing child mortality in backward rural areas William Bissell Giving traditional handlooms and handicrafts contemporary relevance Ashok Jhunjhunwala Empowering rural India through telecom and computer technology Dr Ashoke Sen Has proved that pioneering scientific thinking and world-class research is still happening in India.

Ashok Jhunjhunwala
Empowering rural India through telecom and computer technology

Dr Ashoke Sen
Has proved that pioneering scientific thinking and world-class research is still happening in India.

Atul Loke

JOURNALIST

P. Sainath

Putting rural India and the farmers' crisis firmly on the national and media agenda

Frombeing "the bad boy of Indian journalism", as a former employer called him, P. Sainath, 50, is now the non-deletable-voice-in-the-head for chief ministers, prime ministers and powers that be. With some relentless reporting from rural areas for over 13 years, covering more than a quarter of a million kilometres to tell stories that the corridors of power and urban India would otherwise not hear, spending 280-300 days of a year uncovering the mess that new economic policies have wrought in rural regions of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, is not mere journalistic work for Sainath. He has made it his life’s mission.

His searing book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, has been a non-fiction bestseller for years and is now prescribed reading in universities. His reports on farmer suicides, debt crisis and corporatisation of agriculture in The Hindu motivated the PMO to seek a meeting, resulting in Dr Manmohan Singh’s Vidarbha visit last June-July.

The poor results of the PM’s relief package, evidenced in continuing suicides, means the stories will continue. Says Sainath, "By official estimates, over one lakh farmers have taken their lives in the last 10 years. Not a single person has been punished for it. There have been lots of relief packages, but more packaging than relief. What sort of human beings and reporters would we be to stay silent, throw in the towel?"

T.Narayan

HISTORIAN

Prof Irfan Habib

A leader among social scientists, cutting across disciplines. Uses history to counter communal propaganda, modern myths.

At 75, Irfan Habib is doing more to change the way history is taught and read now than he probably did all through his long teaching career at Aligarh Muslim University. If his early works on medieval India were eagerly awaited by every social scientist "as if it was a new Satyajit Ray film", his more recent series, People’s History of India, has changed forever the way history is taught in campuses: with a rational and scientific outlook. Never an ivory tower historian, he has not only taken on both Hindu and Islamic communalists countless times, but has now fathered a new breed of historians who move easily from the past to the present, cutting across the phoney chronological borders that divided historians of the last generation. In a profession that has shunned stardom, he continues to be the superstar among not just historians, but all social scientists. His word counts, as few historians’ words have, past or present.

Nilayan Dutta

DEVELOPMENT ECONOMIST

Jean Dreze

His incisive work on hunger, child malnutrition and other issues has brought the Other India into intellectual and policy focus

Jean Dreze would probably hate to be on this list. More than a decade ago, he told Outlook, "I am suspicious of profiles", and that has not changed. The development economist of Belgian extraction (who became an Indian citizen in 2002) is far more comfortable with issues than personalities. And in the nearly three decades that he has been in India, Dreze’s powerful intellect and deep humanism have illuminated a range of them: hunger, child malnutrition, education, rural employment, reservations for women in legislatures, freedom of information.... His peers say that what Dreze uniquely brings to the table is extensive fieldwork—few economists live as much in the country’s villages—combined with outstanding analytical skills. His collaboration with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has yielded many publications, including the seminal Hunger and Public Action and India: Development and Participation. Dreze is an incisive spokesman for an India which has been largely invisible to the middle class. "I am not aware that India is more self-confident," he said in an interview with Outlook in 2005. "What does national self-confidence mean for someone who is driving a rickshaw or carrying bricks to feed the family? Only a small minority has the luxury of worrying about international perceptions of India." Few westerners choose their countries—they usually stay with what is thrust on them. That Dreze chose India has been a welcome thing.

D. Ravinder Reddy

HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER

Kandala Balagopal

Fighting for the rights of the marginalised all over India, exposing state abuses

A relentless crusader for human rights for three decades now, Andhra Pradesh HC lawyer Balagopal has fought cases from extra-judicial killings of political dissenters to atrocities against Dalits and women. And he has often suffered personal attacks for his efforts, by the police and others shamed by his exposes. But he has never faltered. His reports on encounter killings, backed by painstaking investigative work, had such credibility that even the state could not ignore it. He doesn’t take legal fees from poor clients. And he travels endlessly across rural India, giving a voice to the opinions and problems of the poor—from farmers and tribals being displaced by SEZs in Nandigram or Visakhapatnam, to beedi workers seeking minimum wages, to tribals trying to protect their homes and forests. One of the most respected civil liberties activists in the country, Balagopal has inspired an entire generation to engage with the causes he espouses.

Atul Loke

EDITOR, EPW

C. Rammanohar Reddy

Runs a magazine that has set the agenda for intellectual debate, government policies for nearly 60 years

When IIM graduate C. Rammanohar Reddy was invited nearly three years ago to take a hefty pay cut and drop his job as economics editor of The Hindu to run a magazine with less than 11,000 subscribers, he grabbed the job. For, the Economic and Political Weekly is no ordinary magazine. Despite its depressingly licence-raj look, it has ruled both intellectual debate and government policy for close to 60 years. Scholars don’t feel they’ve come of age unless they have published in the EPW—peers don’t take them seriously unless they have an EPW essay or two to their name. Intellectuals across the social sciences like Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, M.N. Srinivas and Andre Beteille have cut their academic teeth, publishing their maiden works here. The government usually reacts to most newspaper stories and editorials, but the EPW is in another bracket altogether. Its editorials go verbatim into government reports (a recent example: the Economic Survey of 2006-07 reproduced the EPW’s take on SEZs). And EPW editors and authors are routinely invited to join ministerial committees. Understaffed, underpaid, with hardly any advertisements, and dependent on its dedicated band of subscribers, the EPW carries on. As miraculously as India, some would say.

Jitender Gupta

ECONOMIST

Dr Abusaleh Sharif

His survey of Indian Muslims has offered both a challenge and critique to policy, showing up its gross inadequacies and spurring it to more focused action

The report may be named after retired judge Rajinder Sachar. But the man who collated all the information and actually wrote the Sachar Commission report is the NCAER chief economist and head of their human development programme (who in ’99 had produced the first India Human Development Report). Dr Abusaleh Sharif, 54, a down-to-earth economist, created a stir with his findings—backed by meticulous research—that Muslims were falling back on all socioeconomic indicators except two—infant mortality and the sex ratio. Which means they were not getting educated or employed, but neither were they killing the girl child or committing female foeticide. The largest ever survey of the nation’s largest minority community, the report has already had far-reaching impact on policy, with the government stressing the need for special thrust on helping Muslims.

T.Narayan

SOCIAL REFORMER

Bezwada Wilson

Leads a nationwide crusade to abolish the dehumanising practice of manual scavenging

Bezwada Wilson was born in Karnataka’s Kolar gold fields, but the only local product he and fellow Dalits from the Telugu-speaking Madiga community handled for decades was human excreta in community dry latrines. Recalling his first direct encounter with manual scavenging in 1989, Wilson says: "I wanted to die." Instead, he began waging a war against the dehumanising practice, which despite a ban in 1993, still continues, including in government institutions like the Indian Railways and army cantonments. There are officially 6.76 lakh manual scavengers in India, though unofficial estimates put the figure at 13 lakh. A PIL petition filed by Wilson’s Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA) in 2003 resulted in the Supreme Court demanding affidavits from various states. Most states were in denial mode. But in Andhra Pradesh, SKA proved that dry latrines existed with video and photographic evidence; then it began demolishing them—over 2,000 of them. Wilson, 41, says he won’t rest until he destroys India’s last one

Sanjeeb Mukherjee

CAMPAIGNER FOR RURAL SANITATION

Joe Madiath

Transforming disease-ridden hamlets into sparkling model villages

Three decades ago, when Joe Madiath was just an angry 21-year-old college Marxist spearheading a team of volunteers from Madras in cyclone relief work in Orissa, he noticed the absence of sanitation systems and the resulting mire of disease. When the relief work panned out, he stayed on to do something about it. Water contamination because of open defecation is still responsible for 80 per cent of rural disease in India. But as Madiath sees it, a toilet is not simply a safeguard against infection—it is a platform for dignity and social inclusion. Gram Vikas, founded by Madiath in 1978, now works with nearly 2,00,000 people in 559 villages in 17 Orissa districts—building biogas plants, water tanks, pipelines, toilets and complete sanitation systems. "If cities cannot contain any more people rushing there, we must create a threshold quality of life in the villages—or the cities will become unlivable too," says Madiath. But Gram Vikas needs one pledge—before a project is initiated in a village, every single household must agree to participate and contribute their labour and resources to a shared corpus, thus making them the agents of their own salvation.

Narendra Bisht

EDUCATIONIST

Madhav Chavan

Leads a huge effort to improve the quality of primary education in government schools

Shall we call him the education impresario? It seems a fitting way to describe the one-time chemistry teacher who has brought energy, scale and vision to the gargantuan task of educating India’s children. A founder of leading education NGO Pratham, Chavan’s genius lies in galvanising—and organising—people from all walks of life around simple, effective ideas that travel well and lead to large-scale action. He carries with him teachers, parents, educationists, governments of all shades of the political spectrum, industry, homesick NRIs, young, idealistic volunteers, infecting all with his positive energy and drive. The organisation that began modestly 11 years ago, working with children in a few bastis in Bombay, now has an annual budget of Rs 45 crore, works in 50 cities, and has evolved partnerships with governments in 10 states to kickstart learning levels in schools around the slogan of "Every child in school and learning well."

Narendra Bisht

LAWYER

Ashok Agarwal

Forced Delhi's educational bureaucracy and private schools to recognise the rights of poor children

Call him the scourge of Delhi’s education babus and the owners of upscale private schools. Or, call him an indefatigable fighter for good schooling for the capital’s poor and powerless. Lawyer Ashok Agarwal is both. His brahmastra is the PIL: for 10 years now, Social Jurist, the lawyer’s collective set up by Agarwal, has forced accountability upon a reluctant system, by successfully moving the courts. It has alerted them to admission irregularities, the abysmal lack of basic amenities, and dereliction of duty by teachers and principals in state-run schools. It has forced checks on extortionate fee hikes by private schools. If children from poor families are now being admitted free to Delhi private schools that took cheap land from the government but reneged on social commitments, and if a three-year-old is no longer subjected to an admission interview, this down-to-earth man of action has a lot to do with it.

Atul Loke

CAMPAIGNER AGAINST COMMUNALISM

J.S. Bandukwala

Fearless crusader against communalism in Gujarat. Has paid a heavy price for his outspoken activism.

His modest home has thrice faced mob frenzy—when he sided with Dalits during the anti-reservation stir of 1981, a year later when he complained against police ill-treatment of Muslims, and the third time by Hindu mobs during the post-Godhra communal riots of 2002. But J.S. Bandukwala remains unfazed, still the courageous face of liberal Islam, undeterred by the heavy price he has paid for his views. After a doctorate in physics from the US, Bandukwala returned to India in the ’70s to teach at Baroda’s MS University because he did not want to join the flight of scientific talent from the country. He was excommunicated from his Dawoodi Bohra community for saying, in the midst of the Satanic Verses controversy, that Salman Rushdie had a right to his views. He has been rejected for post of professor by the RSS-controlled MS University. But for countless students, he’s a revered and much-loved teacher.

Srikanth Kolari

BIOLOGICAL SCIENTIST

Prof Obaid Siddiqi

Making the National Centre for Biological Sciences, which he set up, a world-class institution

Professor Obaid Siddiqi has a charm that is more that of an artist than a scientist. Perhaps people who probe such defining yet mysterious elements of the human body like genes are first artists. Decades ago, as a student of the legendary Annapurna Devi, he was unsuccessful when he tried to pluck the strings of the sarod, but he went on to master the intricate strands of the DNA double-helix. His early work on the nature of the gene eventually contributed to the breaking of the genetic code in the 1960s. As extraordinary as Siddiqi’s scientific brilliance is his achievement as a great institution-builder. Having made a truly world-class institution out of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, which he set up in the ’80s in Bangalore, he then quietly handed over its reins in 1997 to his younger colleagues. Highly honoured abroad and at home, Prof Siddiqi remains a publicity-shy, self-effacing man who at 75 still goes daily to work in his basement lab at NCBS, still trying to crack the puzzle of how smell gets imprinted in the fruit fly’s brain. Such work in neurogenetics, sadly, can’t help answer the question of how we fail to remember India’s truly significant personages.

Tribhuvan Tiwari

DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL

Deep Joshi

Recruiting the best professional talent to work on a wide range of remarkably profitable rural livelihood promotion projects that have transformed the lives of nearly 70,000 families

Why would engineers and management professionals, with degrees from institutions like MIT and Harvard, choose to apply their brainpower to small-scale irrigation setups in tribal Jharkhand? For Deep Joshi, who did exactly that, the pressing question was, what’s stopping them? The co-founder of Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN), Joshi, now 60, says that for people with the finest management, social science or engineering education, there are few more worthy intellectual challenges than rural underdevelopment. "Development work is considered intellectually inferior, unlike high science, industry or diplomacy. We want to prove that it is both a challenging and a noble choice," he says. Taking HR and bottomline profits as seriously as any blue-chip corporation, PRADAN recruits top professionals, including IIM and IIT graduates, and puts their expertise to work on projects to enhance agricultural productivity and promote rural livelihood, via animal husbandry, dairy farming and sericulture. The result is a group that is active in seven states, helps 68,000 families support themselves, supervises over Rs 100 crore worth of newly-created economic activity, and keeps on growing.

Sanjoy Ghosh

SPIRITUAL LEADER

Sant Balbir Singh Seechewal

Using his spiritual influence to engage rural folks in large-scale environmental, anti-pollution projects

In the age of gurus and babas, Sant Balbir Singh preaches a different kind of message—protecting the environment through personal example and sustained community work. An impressed President Kalam came calling last August to see for himself how Balbir Singh has restored the Kali Bein, a holy river associated with Guru Nanak, to pristine, sparkling purity, cleaning it of weeds, effluents, sewage and other pollutants. The river’s enhanced flow has recharged groundwater levels in dozens of surrounding villages along its 164-km stretch, made dry water pumps spring to life, and made acres of water-logged land cultivable again. The sant’s work has forced the government to instal sewerage treatment plants in six towns along the river, to prevent rubbish from flowing into the river, and he has now demonstrated how the treated sewage water can be used for organic farming. Balbir Singh and his followers have also built 500 kms of link roads in the area. Now people are asking him to clean up other polluted rivers in the state.

T.Narayan

CIVIL SERVANT

Krishan Kumar

Creating a successful model for checking female foeticide, running a district that is a model of efficient governance

"I just do what I think needs to be done," says this unassuming civil servant. And what he thought must be done urgently was to tackle the appalling incidence of female foeticide in his district—Nawanshahr in Punjab—where in some villages there were only six girls to every 10 boys born every year. Developing special computer software to monitor pregnancies, cracking the whip on scanning centres, nursing homes, doctors and corrupt district health officials, and sending decoy patients to suspect clinics, Kumar improved the ratio from 774 to 910 per 1,000 in just one year. He has showed that all it needs is personal monitoring and enforcement of existing rules to make a difference. A new feather in his cap is the e-governance model he has introduced through the district’s unique Suvidha centre. It provides citizens hundreds of services, from issuing of licences to booking railway and airline tickets. A touchscreen information kiosk informs you about the status of your documents, development works in your village, bus schedules and much more.

GOVERNOR

Gopal Gandhi

A rare example of humility, ethical conduct and scholarship in public life

Few know that the Mahatma’s grandson is also one of the most unusual and multi-faceted people in public life. And he certainly does not advertise the fact.

A discreet, highly competent IAS official for much of his career, Gandhi is also the gifted and formidably multi-lingual scholar who translated Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy into Hindi, wrote a novel, Refuge, on Tamil plantation workers in Sri Lanka, and a life of lost Mughal scion Dara Shikoh in verse. Gandhi was an extremely popular High Commissioner to South Africa, even more because of his endearing personal style than his lineage. Typically, he went off quietly to do earthquake relief work in rural Gujarat before taking on that assignment. As a Governor of West Bengal who often travels incognito into the countryside, Gandhi has earned great respect for deploring state violence in Nandigram. Of course, he has also earned great flak, from critics ranging from liberal apologists for the CPI(M), to the right-wing pro-SEZ camp. Friends say he was fully aware of the repercussions, but felt it was his duty to speak.

Rajesh Joshi

DOCTORS

Abhay & Rani Bang

Creating an internationally acclaimed and adopted model for drastically reducing child mortality in backward rural areas

Did you know Gadchiroli in Maharashtra is the locus of community health research and strategies that have shaped national and even global health policy? Behind this extraordinary reputation acquired by an abysmally backward, tribal-dominated district lies the work of a doctor couple, Abhay and Rani Bang. The village healthcare programme that the Bangs, gold medallists from Johns Hopkins University, started here two decades ago is now an internationally famous model, adopted in parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa. The couple have shown the world that child deaths can be dramatically reduced by harnessing the efforts of health workers equipped with basic skills and material. In their programme, which covers 40 villages and about 80,000 people, child mortality rates have dropped extraordinarily, from 120 per 1,000 in ’98 to 26 per 1,000 now. "Some people said it happened because we were here," says Rani. "So we replicated the programme in seven other sites in Maharashtra, including non-tribal areas and urban slums—the rates dropped by more than half." Research by the Bangs, published in Lancet, also alerted the medical world to the heavy burden of gynaecological diseases borne by rural women, spearheading a shift in global policy on women’s health, then centred around reproduction and contraception, to reproductive health. All this from Gadchiroli, their home, their laboratory, their karmabhoomi.

Jitender Gupta

ENTREPRENEUR

William Bissell

Giving traditional handlooms and handicrafts contemporary relevance

It’s a familiar social predicament. You go to a lunch and someone else is wearing the exact same blue-tan-print kurta as you. Blame William Bissell. Under him, the company that invented Indian radical chic has prospered and expanded: Fabindia now has 60 outlets in India and four abroad (including two in China). Apart from garments and fabrics, it now retails furniture, organic foods and cosmetics. But Bissell’s biggest achievement is sustaining a business model that keeps traditional arts and crafts relevant and social responsibility central. Its workforce includes 50,000 weavers and artisans from all over rural India on fair wages, helping preserve and revive handicrafts and handloom techniques. It even runs a non-profit school for girls in Rajasthan. For middle-class shoppers, Bissell is the reason they have a twin for the rest of the afternoon. But for many weavers and artisans, he is the reason they have a future

ELECTRICAL ENGINEER

Ashok Jhunjhunwala

Empowering rural India through telecom and computer technology

A decade ago, the Telecommunications and Computer Networking (TeNeT) group was born on the campus of IIT, Chennai, the brainchild of Ashok Jhunjhunwala, who teaches electrical engineering at IIT. For him, entrepreneurship is not about vying for space in an SEZ or forcible acquisition of land but about fostering innovation and incubation technologies directed at rural India. Working with him is a team of some two hundred full-time researchers, engineers and other technical staff, who share his concern that in India’s growth, the countryside—where 700 million people live—is being left behind. To help bridge the gap, TeNeT’s goal is to enable 50 million broadband connections in the next five years, and impart high quality distance education through telecom, especially to rural areas. Says Jhunjhunwala: "It is safe to dream that every Indian would have a phone and net connection by 2020."

THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

Dr Ashoke Sen

Has proved that pioneering scientific thinking and world-class research is still happening in India.

Physicists have long dreamed of finding a single unified description of all four forces of nature—the electromagnetic force, the two nuclear forces and gravity. Over the last thirty years, tremendous progress towards unification has been made, thanks to a new kind of theory. This theory—the string theory—says that the basic constituents of matter are not particles, like electrons, but microscopic filaments: strings. Many of string theory’s most penetrative insights have come from Professor Ashoke Sen, widely regarded as one of the most brilliant string theorists in the world. Professor Sen, now at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute in Allahabad, is famous, among other things, for his pioneering string-theoretic approach to black holes, and for his ideas about the beginning of the universe.