Popularly known as the Clothing Man of India, Anshu Gupta founded Goonj with a mission to make clothing a matter of concern and to bring it among the list of subjects to work on, for the development sector. Anshu has done  Mass communications twice and has a masters in Economics. Starting as a freelance journalist, Anshu left a corporate job in 1998 to start Goonj.Under his leadership Goonj has taken the menacing growth of urban waste and used it efficiently as a tool to trigger large scale rural development work. By creating barter between two new currencies; labor of the beneficiaries and old material of cities, Anshu has built the genesis of a parallel economy which is not cash based but trash based. Anshu is an Ashoka and Schwab Fellow and has been listed by the Forbes magazine as one of India’s most powerful rural entrepreneurs. He has recently been conferred the Public Service Excellence Award for the year 2017 by AIMA and is recipient of 2015 Ramon Magsaysay Award , the Nobel of Asia.

Goonj uses the under utilised and excess urban household material as a tool for rural development across 23 states in the country. It thus aims to bring an equitable relationship of strength, sustenance and dignity between the cities and villages. Since 1999, Goonj has built a network of communities from urban to village India, channelizing material as a tool to address crucial gaps in rural infrastructure, water, environment, livelihood, education, health, disaster relief and rehabilitation. It's engagement with both the urban and rural population has galvanised a mass civic participation in addressing basic but neglected issues. Goonj’s model of development implemented through its various Initiatives proposes a more inclusive alternative economy where everyone is an equal stakeholder in the process. For nearly 2 two decades, Goonj has been working on varied disasters from earthquakes to Tsunami, cyclones, floods, etc