Biraj Patnaik, National Foundation for India (India)

Biraj Patnaik is the Executive Director of National Foundation for India (NFI), which is India’s oldest independent domestic philanthropy. Prior to joining NFI he was the South Asia Director of Amnesty International.

Biraj was formerly the Principal Adviser to the Commissioners of the Indian Supreme Court in the landmark ‘right to food’ case for close to a decade. The Commissioners oversaw the implementation of all the food and employment schemes of the Government of India and the on behalf of the Supreme Court. From 2004 – 2014, Biraj was part of the group that worked on a number of rights-based legislations, most notably the National Food Security Act that provides subsidised food grains from the government to more than 900 million people across the country.

Biraj co-founded the ‘Mitanin’ community health worker program that trained and deployed 70,000 women health workers in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh that led to the nation-wide rollout of the Accredited State Health Activist (ASHA) program.

A well-known human rights activist, he has been part of many national and global campaigns, including the right to food campaign in India. 

Biraj is the Founder-Chairperson of the State Health Resource Centre,  Trustee of the Counter Media Trust, and serves on other boards including Mobile Creches.

Biraj holds a post-graduate degree from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He was a Chevening Gurukul Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences and a IVLP Fellow of the US State Department. He is a former Honorary Research Fellow at Coventry University, UK.