- Lived:
- b. 11 January 1954, Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh → Delhi; but the work happened in the loom sheds of Mirzapur, the brick kilns and stone quarries of north India, and the committee rooms of Geneva
- Field:
- child rights — founder of Bachpan Bachao Andolan, the "Save Childhood Movement"; Nobel Peace Prize 2014
- The Big Idea:
- Child labour is not poverty's sad but necessary side-effect; it is a system with owners, and systems can be dismantled. He built the three tools that did it: the raid that frees the child, the ashram that repairs the childhood, and the label that lets a buyer half a world away refuse to fund the whole arrangement.
- In their words:
- "Let us globalise compassion." (from his Nobel lecture, Oslo, December 2014 — as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- An electrical engineer walked away from his profession at twenty-six to break padlocks on loom sheds, and by the time the world caught up with him — Nobel and all — the movement he built had walked more than a hundred thousand children out of bondage and stitched a promise onto the back of your carpet.