Anupa

Bunker Roy went at 6:15 this morning at his home in Tilonia. Aruna was with him. He was 81, and he went peacefully, as he wished. Bunker Roy had studied at the Doon School and St. Stephen's and been a national squash champion, and the path to senior jobs lay open before him. In 1972 he reached the village of Tilonia in Rajasthan, began digging wells with a farmer named Meghraj, and stayed. For more than fifty years. The college that grew there gives no degrees. Its best-known classroom held women, many of whom could not read or write. They learned to build, install and repair solar lights, returned to their villages and carried light into homes. They were called "Solar Mamas". Women from countries outside India also came to learn in the same classroom. Aruna Roy left the IAS in the mid-1970s to join him in Tilonia and went on to become a leader of the movement for the right to information. Jairam Ramesh has recalled that in his last years Bunker Roy would say, smiling, that people now knew him as Aruna Roy's husband. Tonight too, somewhere in some village, the bulbs those women installed will be burning. Salutations to Bunker Roy. My condolences to Aruna Roy, his family and all his colleagues in Tilonia.