PATHANKOT — A civic campaign in this Punjab border district is steadily changing what its market streets offer: portable public toilets, installed one by one across trading hubs where, until recently, there were none. Twenty-five units are now in place, set up in coordination with the local Vyapar Mandal (traders’ association) — the latest handed over at Gurjeet Market, where a local trader has volunteered to keep it running.
The rollout is the centrepiece of “Shahar Zinda Karo” (“Bring the City to Life”), a sanitation drive led by Pathankot-based educator and self-described public interest worker Srijal Gupta. The model is deliberate: rather than lobby the municipality and wait, the campaign installs a unit, then hands it to the market’s own traders to maintain. At Gurjeet Market, the keys went to the Beopar Mandal, with a shopkeeper, Pritam Singh, taking on upkeep as a volunteer — an arrangement Gupta describes as shared ownership rather than one-off charity. The initiative was earlier covered by The Tribune.
“A city cannot call itself dignified if its markets have no toilets,” Gupta said. “This is not the government’s job alone — it is ours. Our approach is simple: first we bring Pathankot to life, then we make it beautiful.”
Pritam Singh, the trader who volunteered to maintain the Gurjeet Market unit, said: “When they installed the toilet, they did not just walk away — they handed it to us to look after. It is a small thing to keep it clean. The market is ours, so its upkeep is our duty too.”
A campaign built market by market
The toilet rollout sits within a wider civic effort Gupta runs under the banner #MuskurahatWalaPathankot (“Smiling Pathankot”), carried across Hindi, Punjabi and English outreach and signed off, in Punjabi, as Aam Banda, Khaas Gal — an ordinary man with something to say. A companion programme, the Shree Jal Abhiyan, distributed oral rehydration salts, cooling drinks and protective caps to outdoor workers through the summer heat. The choice of recipients — rickshaw pullers, street vendors, daily-wage labourers — reflects a pattern in the work: campaigns aimed less at showpiece infrastructure than at the everyday users of a city’s public realm, for whom a working toilet or a shaded rest is a matter of dignity rather than convenience.
His guiding phrase, repeated across the campaign, is Pehle Zinda Karo, Phir Sundar Karo — first bring the city to life, then make it beautiful. It doubles as a theory of civic development: dignity infrastructure first, aesthetics later.
The campaign’s next step is already scheduled. On August 9, ahead of Independence Day, organisers plan a cleanliness march titled “Zinda Kooch” (Living March), mobilising more than 100 volunteers to distribute 200 dustbins to shopkeepers under the tagline “Iss 15 August, Kuda Toh Azaadi” (“This August 15th, Freedom From Garbage”) — a pointed echo of the Dandi March, casting sanitation as a form of self-reliance.
An unusually wide reach for a small-town organiser
What makes Gupta an unusual figure is the distance between the scale of this street-level work and the reach of his other platforms. Alongside the dustbins and toilets, he curates TEDxCaledonian, a TED-licensed event now in its fourth edition. The 2026 programme, themed “Confluence,” is scheduled for October 10–11 and will feature British MP and former UK cabinet minister Sir Grant Shapps among its confirmed speakers.
Past editions have drawn a speaker list more common to a European policy summit than a school auditorium in Punjab: former European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, former Maltese Prime Minister Dr. Joseph Muscat and former Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio have all appeared — a roster that measures the network Gupta has assembled from a district more often associated with its cantonment than its convening power.
The platform grew out of the school he built. Gupta founded Caledonian International School, a UNESCO ASPnet-affiliated institution, in Pathankot in 2017 alongside his wife, and serves as its ASPnet Coordinator. He is also the author of Pratisthana’s Promise, writing that frames his civic work in terms of place and belonging.
Brussels, and a two-way argument about small towns
Gupta’s reach has extended into European institutional settings. In February 2026 he met European Parliament President Roberta Metsola and was interviewed at the Parliament by a Member of the European Parliament. The same month, he addressed the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels on the theme of sustainable cities — carrying to a European forum a perspective shaped in Pathankot’s markets, and making a quiet argument that lessons in urban dignity need not flow only from capitals downward, but can travel from a border district outward.
That engagement rests on more than appearances. Gupta authored a Pathankot Global Gateway Vision 2030 concept note aimed at EU–India cooperation, later developed into a white paper for outreach to MEPs. His institutional affiliations include the Aspen Institute (Vanguard Member), Chatham House (Geopolitics of Technology Leadership Fellow, 2026 cohort) and the Obama Foundation (Founding Member), alongside the World Economic Forum, the Indo-French Chamber of Commerce and the Generation Global programme.
Putting a border town on the map
Threaded through the campaigns and the fellowships is a single conviction: that a small town is not a place to leave, but a place to build — and that the platforms usually reserved for capitals can be brought to it. TEDxCaledonian is one half of that idea; the other is JunctionX Pathankot, a local edition Gupta is working to bring to the city.
JunctionX is the city-level programme of Junction, the Finland-based network billed as Europe’s leading hackathon, through which local teams host their own chapter of a global event. Where TEDxCaledonian brings the world to Pathankot, Gupta frames JunctionX as sending Pathankot’s talent the other way — putting the district’s young engineers and designers on an international stage.
“Talent is not the monopoly of big cities,” Gupta said. “If the world’s best platforms can come to Pathankot, then Pathankot’s young people can go out to the world. That exchange, in both directions, is the whole point.”
Taken together, the two platforms form a single wager — that a mid-sized border district, approached with enough seriousness, can host former prime ministers and export its own innovators at the same time.
A civic figure, not yet a candidate
Gupta is careful to keep the civic and the electoral separate. He describes himself as a public interest worker rather than a politician, though his name has surfaced in local discussion ahead of Punjab’s 2027 Assembly elections, where his community forms one of Pathankot’s larger voting blocs. For now, he frames his work as service rather than campaign — a distinction he maintains even as the two inevitably brush against each other.
The toilet campaign offers a compact statement of his method: a local, visible act of civic maintenance, handed to the community to sustain, run by a man equally at home installing a market toilet and addressing a committee in Brussels.
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