A light that burned for rural India's most overlooked communities has gone out. Congress MP Dr. Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, expressed deep grief at the passing of Sanjit 'Bunker' Roy — social activist, educator, national squash champion, and the visionary founder of the Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan.

Tharoor, who knew Roy as a senior from their shared alma mater St. Stephen's College, Delhi, described him as 'a visionary social activist, pioneer, and educator' who 'dedicated his life to empowering rural India through self-reliance, sustainable development, and grassroots innovation.' He extended heartfelt condolences to Roy's wife, fellow activist Aruna Roy, and the global community of changemakers Roy had inspired.

What Barefoot College built in Tilonia — and beyond

In 1972, Bunker Roy founded the Barefoot College in the small village of Tilonia in Rajasthan's Ajmer district with a proposition that upended conventional development thinking: that illiterate and semi-literate villagers — particularly women — already possessed the wisdom and capability to build, innovate, and lead. No degrees required. No formal credentials. Just practical knowledge, community trust, and determination.

The institution grew into one of India's most distinctive experiments in non-formal education, blending Gandhian self-reliance principles with hands-on training in solar technology, water management, and handicrafts. Its programmes were deliberately designed to keep trained individuals rooted in their communities rather than pulled toward urban centres — reversing the brain-drain logic that has long hollowed out rural India.

The 'Barefoot Solar Engineers' who lit up the dark

Roy's most celebrated legacy is the 'Barefoot Solar Engineers' programme — a scheme that trained rural grandmothers, many of them illiterate, to design, install, and maintain solar lighting systems in off-grid homes. The simplicity of the idea belies its scale: thousands of homes across India and across the developing world gained electricity for the first time through the hands of women who had never held a formal qualification.

The model spread through international partnerships to villages in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, demonstrating that sustainable energy access does not begin in a corporate lab — it begins in a village courtyard. For a world still grappling with energy poverty and gender exclusion, that proof of concept remains alive and urgent.

A Stephanian, a squash champion, an unlikely revolutionary

Roy's biography defied easy categorisation. Educated at St. Stephen's College and a former national squash champion, he could have followed any number of elite career paths. Instead, he moved to Tilonia in the early 1970s and spent the next five decades there — a choice that itself became a statement about where India's real work needed to happen.

His wife Aruna Roy became a towering figure in her own right, anchoring the right-to-information movement and rural labour rights campaigns. Together, they represented a generation of Indian civil society leaders who built lasting institutions from the ground up, far from the corridors of power.

Tharoor closed his tribute with the Sanskrit invocation '🕉️ शांति 🙏🏼' — a prayer for peace — a small gesture that carried the full weight of a life's work now complete. The Barefoot College carries on. The solar lamps it lit are still burning.