Our Leadership

"I grew up in a small farming village in Marathwada, where drought was not a season but a way of life. I watched my father lose three consecutive harvests. I saw my mother walk six kilometres every morning for a pot of water. I watched my peers drop out of school not because they lacked intelligence or ambition, but because hunger doesn't wait for dreams.

That is why I founded MITRA Foundation — not as an act of charity, but as an act of justice. Justice for the 800 million rural Indians whose labour feeds this nation but whose voices remain unheard in the corridors of power.

Twenty years on, I am humbled to see what a community of committed individuals — our board, our staff, our field workers, and above all our beneficiaries — can achieve together. We have not solved rural India's problems. No organisation can claim that. But we have proven, village by village, that when communities are given agency, resources, and respect, they transform themselves.

MITRA's journey has taught me one profound truth: development is not something we do to people — it is something we do with them. That will remain our north star for the next twenty years and beyond."