Ramon Magsaysay Awardee Anshu Gupta has said that the kind of change needed in India is not happening as he pushed for out of the box thinking to address the challenges being faced by common man.
"The kind of change we need in India is not happening," he told a group of Indian-Americans during an interactive session in McClean, Virginia, a posh suburb of Washington DC.
The winner of the 2015 award, also known as Nobel of India, Gupta is currently on a lecture cum interaction tour of the US during which he is slated to visit a number of cities including Boston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
These events are aimed at engaging various communities in a conversation addressing social issues in India, including rural development, women's empowerment and better management of resources.
Founder of Goonj - a New Delhi based non-profit, Gupta emphasized the "non-issues" in his conversation with the audience.
"Clothing has still remained a non-issue. None of the big development agenda around the world including MDG or the more recent SDG talks about clothing. More deaths happen due to the severe winter weather. How come winter is not considered a disaster?" he questioned.
He also touched upon the topic of internal migration within India, saying "slums are not extensions of cities, but extensions of the villages."
"If we provide the right support and resources for villages to be self-reliant, there will be no need for villagers to migrate to cities. They will have options to migrate by choice and not by compulsion," he said.
Goonj, he said, utilizes the growing mounds of urban waste as a tool to trigger large-scale rural development work.
Gupta said the Goonj model is dismantling the traditional model of a cash-based economy, and replace it what they refer to as a "trash-based" economy, which barters manual labor (of beneficiaries) with urban reusable material.
"In my model of social entrepreneurship we regard each member as a stakeholder," said Anshu. "There is a pooling of resources, where everyone has something to gain from.
