Mohit Ray- He is an Indian environmental and human rights activist based in Kolkata. Having 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. Mohit 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. Ray has written a number of books in Bengali and English published by reputed publishers. He has also written fiction based on the theme of environment.

Kandala Balagopal - He was an uncompromising human rights activist, mathematician, and lawyer who was known for his work on the issue of civil liberties and human rights. He was a staunch civil liberties activist in Andhra Pradesh. He had broken away from the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC), with which he was associated since its inception in ‘80’s, on the issue of violence perpetrated by the erstwhile CPI-ML Peoples War. He was a prolific writer on people’s issues and had recently written about the developments on the Maoist front in West Bengal. K. Balagopal was a brilliant mathematician, he began his career as a teacher in Warangal but soon turned full-time human rights activist. He was a Mathematics professor at Kakatiya University before quitting in 1985.He did his Phd in Kakatiya University. He chose to become a lawyer much later, after getting fully associated with the human rights movement.