As director and founder of Guftugu Foundation (a registered non-profit under the Indian Companies Act), Kumar swears by the power of human conversations for human development. He believes in making voices count for sparking the power of participation through sharing of knowledge of the land. He designs dialogues and dialogue spaces in vernacular to alleviate development stasis and enable progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. Kumar focuses on building layers of participation and accountability for those left behind by time, tradition and over- centralized development paradigms.

Kumar has been a specialist development communicator, trainer and an active development practitioner for 27 years. He has worked in the international development and humanitarian arena in multiple and myriad geographies of the world. A bulk of his work has been situated in countries laid low by chronic under-development, conflicts and insurgencies. His specialized work and decades of work in the field is a resource that he brings to the Foundation.

​Kumar is an independent Indian writer and a published author of “Humans on the Run – of exiles and asylum” (Oxford University press 2015), a book of stories on global human displacement and resilience from a dozen frontline countries visited by war and violence. 

​He served the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as a senior external communications professional in India, Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq. He also served UNICEF in multiple roles including as Chief of External Communications in Syria. Prior to serving the UN, Kumar worked as a print and broadcast media professional in India.