Mohit Ray (born 1954) is an Indian environmental and human rights activist based in Kolkata. He has campaigned for saving the Adi Ganga, Bikramgarh Jheel and other water bodies of Kolkata. His seminal work in this field is the extensive research on the water bodies and heritage ponds of Kolkata. His work has been published by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and Ananda Publishers. He has also published a number of papers in technical journals. He writes regularly on environmental issues in different journals including The Statesman, a national daily, in Anandabazar Patrika, Ei Samay and Bartaman, the Bengali dailies. He has also campaigned for a long time against the persecution of minorities in Bangladesh and the citizenship rights of the Bengali Hindu refugees. Early life and career Ray was born in Kolkata into a Bengali Hindu migrant family from East Bengal in 1954. He graduated in chemical engineering from Jadavpur University in 1976. In 1979 he completed his post-graduation from the University of Manchester. A year later he joined Engineers India Limited and relocated to New Delhi. In 1988, he joined Development Consultants Limited and shifted to Kolkata. In 1995, Ray quit Development Consultants and began independent consultancy. He has worked as a consultant for a number of World Bank and Asian Development Bank projects. He has been a visiting faculty in the Environment Programme for M.Phil. at the School of Environmental Studies of Jadavpur University, in Academic Staff College of Jadavpur University and in the Environmental Management Department of Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management. He completed his Ph.D. in engineering from Jadavpur University in 2005. He is a small-time BJP leader; he fought in the 2016 assembly election in Bengal from Jadavpur with a BJP ticket and lost. Environmental activism Ray has remained in the forefront of environmental activism in Kolkata for last two and half decades. He been associated with a number of NGOs involved in environmental activities and he leads a small non-funded group named Vasundhara. He has been an active participant or adviser to efforts like restoring water bodies, saving Adi Ganga, questioning concreting the water bodies to rights of bicycle riders as a non-polluting vehicle. The discovery, identification and documentation of 48 heritage water bodies of Kolkata and environmental and social details of several thousand water bodies of Kolkata constitutes his seminal work in this field. Ray believes that the possibility of