Founders of Organisations and Institutions: GK List

Who founded what is one of the oldest question types in Indian general knowledge papers, and it is worth more marks than its simplicity suggests. A single list of founders covers the reform movements of the nineteenth century, the political bodies of the freedom struggle, the research institutes that built Indian science, the cooperatives and social movements of independent India, and the great international organisations. The questions are always one line long, which means the whole chapter is about learning names in pairs and keeping the look-alike pairs apart. This note gathers the founders that recur in SSC, Railway, Banking and State examinations, grouped so that each group can be revised on its own.

Social and religious reform organisations

Political bodies of the freedom struggle

• The Indian National Congress was formed in 1885 at Bombay; the retired civil servant A. O. Hume was its founder-secretary and W. C. Bonnerjee its first president, a pair examiners deliberately mix up.
• The All India Muslim League was founded in 1906 at Dhaka, and the Hindu Mahasabha in 1915.
• The Ghadar Party was formed in 1913 on the west coast of the United States, with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president and Lala Hardayal among its leading figures.
• Abhinav Bharat was founded by V. D. Savarkar in 1904 and India House in London by Shyamji Krishna Varma.
• The Home Rule Leagues of 1916 were led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Annie Besant; the Swaraj Party of 1923 by C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru; the Forward Bloc of 1939 by Subhas Chandra Bose.
• The Servants of People Society was founded by Lala Lajpat Rai in 1921.

Educational and scientific institutions

Two more names belong here. Vikram Sarabhai is called the father of the Indian space programme and led the work that became the Indian Space Research Organisation, while Homi Bhabha is called the father of the Indian nuclear programme. The Reserve Bank of India, by contrast, has no single founder: it began work in 1935 on the recommendation of the Hilton Young Commission, and Punjab National Bank, opened at Lahore in 1894, counts Lala Lajpat Rai among its founders.

Cooperatives, enterprises and social movements

• Verghese Kurien, the father of the White Revolution, built the Amul cooperative model at Anand and led Operation Flood; the Kaira district cooperative itself grew under Tribhuvandas Patel.
• Ela Bhatt founded the Self Employed Women Association, SEWA, at Ahmedabad in 1972.
• The Chipko movement of the nineteen seventies in Uttarakhand is associated with Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chandi Prasad Bhatt, and the Narmada Bachao Andolan with Medha Patkar.
• In business, Jamsetji Tata founded the Tata group in 1868, Dhirubhai Ambani founded Reliance, and N. R. Narayana Murthy with six colleagues founded Infosys in 1981.

International organisations and their founders

The founders of the world religions, their holy books and their places of worship form a separate chapter and are not repeated here.

Exam point traps

Four confusions appear again and again. A. O. Hume was the founder-secretary of the Congress but W. C. Bonnerjee was its first president. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York and only later moved its headquarters to Adyar in Madras, so the year of founding is 1875 and the Indian headquarters dates from 1882. The Arya Samaj belongs to Dayanand Saraswati and the Brahmo Samaj to Ram Mohan Roy, never the other way round. And bodies created by law or by a commission, such as the Reserve Bank of India, have no individual founder, so a question that offers a personal name for them is testing exactly that point.