- Lived:
- born 1966, Kolar Gold Fields (Karnataka) → Andhra Pradesh and Hyderabad for schooling → Delhi, from where he has run a national movement since the 1990s
- Field:
- civil rights — founder and national convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan, the movement to end manual scavenging in India
- The Big Idea:
- A practice that survives because nobody counts it can be killed by counting — and by demolition. Wilson's movement destroyed the dry latrines that created the work, dragged the state into court over the men dying in its sewers, and forced India to number its dead.
- In their words:
- "Stop killing us" — the demand the Bhim Yatra carried through five hundred districts (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- A boy from the gold fields learned as a teenager what his parents did for a living, and spent the next forty years making sure the country could never again pretend not to know.