poor. Dr.Srikanth Sambrani, the first director of IRMA, remembered the selection interview, in an Indian Express article, dated 12 August 1997, thus – "I first met him in 1980, when conducting admissions interviews for the Institute of Rural Management at Anand. We were highly impressed by his paper qualifications. He walked into our small room, all 5 ft 5 in of him held like the fearless bantam he undoubtedly was. But since he had applied to IIM Ahmedabad also, we thought we would lose him. We spent an hour discussing the relative merits of IIMA and IRMA. When he turned down IIMA, it was a coup for us." Career After his post graduation with very good grades from IRMA, in 1982, he chose to work in a small rural development trust, Tribhuvandas Foundation, in Anand, Kheda district, over much more visible and better paying jobs with Government sponsored milk cooperative federations. In Tribhuvandas Foundation, he catalysed its growth from a small family run trust, to working in hundred odd villages, hiring professional rural medical doctors, and extension staff. After two years with Tribhuvandas foundation, he won the INLAKs foundation scholarship for a MSc degree in economics from St Anne's College, Oxford in 1984. After Oxford, he decided to return to rural India. He set up the URMUL Rural Health and Development Trust — in the desert district of Bikaner in Rajasthan.(1986). While working with URMUL, he won the Hubert Humphrey fellowship — and spent a year with the prestigious Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the year 1988–89. Working with the sick of the poorest of the poor, told on his personal health. He contracted tuberculosis, while collecting sputum for testing, from potential TB patients. After establishing URMUL Rural Health and Development Trust as a mainstream NGO in Rajasthan, he handed over the organisation to a successor, and shifted to Delhi. This was an unprecedented decision for Indian voluntary agencies — as the founders usually hang on to their leadership position till they die. Sanjoy Ghose wrote extensively about his grassroot experiences with the URMUL Trust in Lunkaransar Village in Bikaner. The Indian Express, a leading national daily, used his writings to launched a successful monthly column named 'Village Voice'. The "action experiment" of tapping the power of the mainstream middle class urban English media to reflect unheard rural voices spoken in local languages, grounded in very local