Anshu Gupta’s journey began in 1992 after a 6-year-old girl in New Delhi told him that she hugged dead bodies through the night to keep her warm. The girl’s father, Habib, and her blind mother, Amina Begum, were municipal workers, in charge of disposing of unclaimed corpses. Habib would receive 20 rupees (about 38 cents) for every corpse he picked up and cremated.
The plight of that family kept playing in the mind of Mr. Gupta, a communications and public relations professional. In 1998, he decided to give up his business career to do something to address a basic need of the poor in India – clothing.
That’s when Gupta and his wife, Meenakshi, who had worked for the British Broadcasting Corp., founded GOONJ, which means “echo.” The Guptas began by donating 67 pieces of spare clothing from their own wardrobes and, until 2003, ran GOONJ from their own home in New Delhi.
“We know that food, shelter, and clothing are basic human needs. But nobody, even within aid organizations, talks about clothing unless a disaster strikes and there are collection drives,” Gupta says. “But if we can call an earthquake or a flood that claims many lives a disaster, then why don’t we think of winter as one, too? “We don’t even have figures [to estimate the number of] people who die or suffer in winter due to lack of clothing,” he adds.
(Image via Christian Science Monitor)
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My story on Anshu Gupta and his wonderful work with Goonj appeared in the Christain Science Monitor, February 22, 2013. Read the rest of the story here…