Lecturer Dr. Harsh Mander

Harsh Mander is a regular columnist for Scroll, the Indian Express, the Hindu and The Wire. For more than 12 years, he wrote a fortnightly column for the Hindu and the Hindustan Times, and is a frequent contributor to journals.

Mander teaches courses on poverty and governance, including at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Previous teaching assignments have taken him to the LBS National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, the Open Society Internship for Rights and Governance at the European University, the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, St Stephen's College in Delhi, the Centre for Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and NALSAR (National Academy for Law) in Hyderabad, among others. He writes and speaks regularly on issues of social justice.

He delivered the inaugural address at the Center for South Asian Studies and a lecture on public affairs in South Asia at Cambridge University. He has also lectured at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University in the UK, ISS in The Hague, MIT, Boston, UCLA, Stanford, Washington (Stanford) and Austin Universities and various other universities.

As a member of the Prime Minister's National Advisory Council from June 2010 to 2012, Harsh Mander convened the working groups on the draft bills on food security, urban poverty and homelessness, rights of persons with disabilities, bonded labor, street vendors and urban slums, land acquisition and rehabilitation, abolition of child labor and abolition of manual garbage collection. He also co-authored the bills on communal and targeted violence, Dalits and minorities and tribal rights.  

For twelve years, from 2005 to 2017, he was a special officer of the Supreme Court of India in the Right to Food case. During these 12 years, he investigated hunger deaths for the Supreme Court, reviewed implementation and led public policy reform to promote the right to food and nutrition in several Indian states.

Harsh Mander previously served in the Indian Administrative Service in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh for nearly two decades. In 2002, he voluntarily resigned from the civil service to protest against the state's complicity in the communal massacre in Gujarat.

Mander was the chairman of the Government of India's committee on how to implement the Urban Health Mission for the urban poor. He was also a member of various official national committees such as Social Protection and both the Saxena Committee on Rural Absolute Poverty and the Hashim Committee on Urban Absolute Poverty. He was a member of the core groups on bonded labor and psychiatric hospitals of the statutory National Human Rights Commission. He was the founder chairman of the Chhattisgarh State Health Resource Centre, which launched the Mitanin Community Health Program, which was the forerunner of the national Asha program for countrywide health workers.

Harsh Mander has made many significant contributions to the highest courts of India. These include among others:

• the decriminalization of begging after nearly a hundred years
• Reopening of over 2000 criminal cases related to the Gujarat massacre in 2002
• Petitions against the detention of undocumented people who are considered foreigners in Assam
• Petition for legal action against perpetrators of hate speech leading to sectarian violence in 2020
• Petition for food and livelihood security for migrants during the Covid-19 pandemic
• Petition for humane treatment of mentally ill people in psychiatric hospitals

• Founding member of the National Campaign for the People's Right to Information.
• Founding member of ANHAD (Act Now for Harmony and Democracy).
• Member of the Ara Pacis Initiative in Rome, which aims to stimulate active reflection on forgiveness as a moral, spiritual and political instrument for reconciliation between peoples.
• October 1999 to March 2004: Country Director of ActionAid India, a development aid organization.
• Patron of the Sanjivini Society for Mental Health, New Delhi.
• Chairman of INCENSE (The Inclusion and Empowerment of People with Severe Mental Disorders).
• Committed to social causes and movements, e.g. for communal harmony and justice, homeless and bonded laborers, tribals, Dalits, children and the disabled.
• 1999 to 2004: Country Director of Action Aid India.
• 2020-22: Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Human Rights Initiative of the Open Society Foundations, from 2018-20 he was a member.

Harsh Mander started a campaign to work with the homeless and street children, providing safe hostels in mostly government schools to around 5000 homeless girls and boys in 10 cities. (These are now managed by Rainbow Foundation India).

In Delhi, Patna, Hyderabad and Jaipur, he founded and leads an initiative that runs extensive street medicine programs to reach homeless women, men and children on the streets with health services.

He conceptualized convalescent homes for homeless men and women with tuberculosis, orthopedic conditions, mental health problems and reproductive health issues to prevent them from spending time on the streets during their illness.

He founded Ashagram, the Village of Hope, in Barwani, Madhya Pradesh, to provide a dignified life for leprosy patients, with facilities for decent livelihood, surgery and rehabilitation, and education for children. Later, polio operations and care for mentally ill people in the community were also taken over.

Harsh Mander is the founder of Aman Biradari, a people's campaign for a secular, peaceful, just and humane world, which was launched after the communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002. Aman Biradari works closely with other organizations and groups for the defense of secularism, public compassion and the promotion of constitutional values.

From fall 2017, he founded and led the important national initiative he called “Karwan e Mohabbat” (German: “Caravan of Love”) to try to counter the increasing hatred and fear in the country with love and solidarity. The broad-based civil society initiative of independent individuals, grassroots organizations and social movements visits families who have lost loved ones to hatred, violence and lynching in their homes. It undertakes these journeys for atonement, solidarity, healing, conscience and justice with people who have been targeted by hate attacks across India.

Karwan e Mohabbat also prepared for a massive relief operation during the pandemic lockdowns. The team members organized 10 million meals across the country; they also ran counselling centres for migrants, organized buses for return to villages as well as for the homeless (with Medicine Without Borders and other organizations), Covid detection camps and isolation and treatment centers.

His over 25 books include:

• 'Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India', published by Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2019.
• 'Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India', published by Speaking Tiger, 2015.
• 'Locking Down the Poor: The Pandemic and India's Moral Center', published by Speaking Tiger, 2020
• 'Between Memory and Forgetting: Massacre and the Modi Years in Gujarat', published by Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2019.
• 'Reconciliation: Karwan e Mohabbat's Journey of Solidarity Through a Wounded India' (co-author), published by Westland Publications, Chennai, 2018.
• 'Fatal Accidents of Birth: Stories of Suffering, Oppression and Resistance', published by Speaking Tiger, 2016.
• 'Ash in the Belly: India's Unfinished Battle Against Hunger', published by Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2013.
• Invisible People: Stories of Courage and Hope, published by Duckbill Books, New Delhi, 2016-
• 'Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives', published by Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2001.
• 'Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre', published by Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2009.
• Untouchability in Rural India' (co-author), published by Sage Publications India, New Delhi, 2006
• 'Fractured Freedom: Chronicles from India's Margins', published by Three Essays Collective, 2012.

Many of his stories have also been made into films.

List of all Publications

The Oslo Peace Research Institute has included Harsh Mander in the shortlist of nominees for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

His awards include the FAU (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) Human Rights Award 2022, the Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar Gold Plaque 2020, the Quaide Milleth Award 2020, the Ida Scudder Memorial Oration of the Christian Medical College, Vellore 2019, the South Asian Minority Lawyers Harmony Award 2012, the Chisthi Harmony Award 2012, the Rajiv Gandhi National Sadbhavana Award for Peace Work and the M.A. Thomas National Human Rights Award 2002.