Bunker Roy

Sanjit "Bunker" Roy came from a privileged Calcutta family and, after graduating from an elite school and college, chose to spend five years as a labourer digging wells in rural Rajasthan rather than pursue the civil service career expected of him. The experience convinced him that villages already held the practical skills they needed and mainly lacked access to training, credentials and equipment, not intelligence or capability.

In 1972 he founded what became known as Barefoot College in the village of Tilonia, built on the principle that formal literacy and paper qualifications should not decide who could learn a skill. Its best-known programme trains grandmothers, deliberately chosen because they are less likely to migrate away once trained, to become solar engineers over a six-month course conducted without a shared spoken language, using colour codes and hands-on repetition instead of textbooks. Graduates have electrified thousands of remote villages across India and, through partnerships, dozens of other countries, wiring solar panels in communities with no other route to power.

Barefoot College expanded into water, healthcare and education programmes run on the same model of training local people rather than importing outside experts. Roy was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2010 and has argued for decades that development aid too often ignores the knowledge already present in the poorest communities.