A quiet giant of India's rural empowerment movement has passed. Sanjit 'Bunker' Roy, founder of the celebrated Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, is no more — and tributes from across the political spectrum are beginning to pour in. Congress leader Sachin Pilot, general secretary and Chhattisgarh in-charge of the Indian National Congress, expressed deep grief on Tuesday, 10 November 2026, mourning the loss of a man who spent decades transforming village life from the ground up. Pilot wrote: 'Deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Sanjit Bunker Roy ji. His remarkable contributions to various social causes and rural empowerment will always be remembered. Through the Barefoot College in Tilonia, he transformed the lives of countless people in rural communities by empowering them, especially women.' He extended his heartfelt condolences to Smt. Aruna Roy ji and the entire family.

What Barefoot College built in Tilonia

Founded in Tilonia, a village in Ajmer district, Rajasthan, Barefoot College was not a conventional institution. It trained the rural poor — overwhelmingly women — in solar technology, water management, handicrafts, and community health, insisting that expertise need not come wrapped in a formal degree. The model was radical in its simplicity: take knowledge to the village, in the village's own language, on the village's own terms. Over decades, the college's reach extended well beyond Rajasthan, with its solar-electrification programme touching villages across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The United Nations and several governments cited its model as a blueprint for grassroots sustainable development. Roy's core philosophy — that the most marginalised communities already hold the capacity to solve their own problems — sat at the heart of every programme the college ran.

Aruna Roy and a shared life in the grassroots movement

Pilot's condolences were directed specifically to Aruna Roy, herself one of India's most consequential social activists. A co-founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), Aruna Roy was instrumental in the Right to Information movement that eventually produced the RTI Act of 2005 — arguably the most powerful transparency tool Indian citizens have ever held. Her and Bunker Roy's overlapping circles of work — grassroots accountability, rural livelihoods, women's agency — defined an entire era of non-state social action in independent India. Pilot also tagged @nikhilmkss, signalling acknowledgment of the MKSS network and the broader community of activists mourning Roy's passing.

A movement larger than one man

What Bunker Roy built refuses to be neatly filed away. The Barefoot College model has quietly run parallel to India's official rural livelihood missions since the 1970s, often out-performing state schemes in the very villages they were designed to serve. His passing leaves a question hanging in the air that he would have hated: who carries the architecture forward? The answer, as Roy himself always argued, already lives in those villages — in the solar engineers, the water managers, the community teachers his college quietly trained for half a century. That, perhaps, is the truest tribute to a barefoot legacy.