Sonam Wangchuk

Sonam Wangchuk began his professional life as an engineer working to reform education in his native Ladakh, in the Indian Trans-Himalayas, gaining international recognition as an innovator and a climate activist. He then became the face of Ladakh’s demand for constitutional protections and autonomy, using hunger strikes to open dialogue with the Indian government.

In 2025 he was temporarily detained when authorities linked him to violent protests in Ladakh’s capital city, Leh, and the institutes he founded faced regulatory scrutiny (see Ladakh). The following year he gained attention across India when he lent his support to a youth-led protest in the national capital, New Delhi, calling for reforms in nationwide examination processes for college admissions. To show his commitment to the cause, he embarked on a weeks-long fast before he was abruptly carried away from the protest site and taken to a hospital by local police.

Early life and education

Wangchuk’s family was one of only five households in the alpine hamlet of Uleytokpo—about 44 miles (70 km) from the city of Leh in present-day Ladakh, then part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Since the remote village did not have a formal school, Wangchuk received rudimentary lessons from his mother, Tsering Wangmo, whom he once described as “never schooled but highly educated.” Wangchuk began attending formal school only about age nine, when the family moved to Srinagar, after his father, Sonam Wangyal, was elected to the state’s legislative assembly.

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Wangyal was a noted politician—first with the National Conference and later the Indian National Congress—who is remembered for campaigning for the rights and welfare of the Ladakhi people. Perhaps the most lasting image of Wangyal’s public life came when he went on a hunger strike in 1984 in support of tribal protections for indigenous Ladakhis. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi famously flew to Leh, assured him that his demands would be addressed, and persuaded him to break his fast, symbolically handing him a soft drink.

Having spoken only Ladakhi as a child, Wangchuk struggled at school in Srinagar, where the language of instruction was mainly Urdu, the administrative language in Jammu and Kashmir. It did not help that the teachers rarely spared the stick. That motivated his transfer to a more accommodating high school in New Delhi, returning to Srinagar later to pursue a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the Regional Engineering College Srinagar (now National Institute of Technology Srinagar).

SECMOL and ice stupas

After graduating in 1987, Wangchuk teamed up with a small group of Ladakhi students to set up an education-focused nonprofit called the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL). It sought to address the massive gaps in Ladakh’s education system, which had resulted in an extremely high failure rate of 95 percent in state exams at the time. Among the shortcomings identified by SECMOL were a curriculum largely disconnected from local language and culture and inadequately trained teaching staff.

SECMOL started by giving supplementary lessons to academically weak students and partnered with local schools to institute reforms, emphasizing hands-on learning, remedial language lessons, and teaching methods and materials rooted in local culture. The approach drove down the failure rate in schools and in 1994 led to the launch of Operation New Hope, which expanded the educational reform program across Ladakh. Launched by SECMOL in collaboration with governmental and nongovernmental bodies, Operation New Hope later became part of the regional government’s official education policy.

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SECMOL’s own alternative-education boarding school campus near the Phey village caters specifically to students who have failed school exams. Powered by solar energy and built out of rammed earth and straw-clay, the school not only instructs children in foundational academic subjects but also trains them in cooking, agriculture, construction, sanitation, sports, and a host of other life skills. Students are encouraged to build contraptions and innovate to solve problems.

In 2013 Wangchuk came up with an idea to improve on a method to freeze glacial meltwater developed by fellow engineer Chewang Norphel. The idea was intended to address the shortage of water that cultivators face during the dry season in Ladakh, which is a high-altitude cold desert. With the help of his students, Wangchuk froze stream water into conical artificial glaciers—or ice stupas—to store water during the winter and release it throughout the drier spring and summer.

The ice stupa won him a 2016 Rolex Award for Enterprise, and he was later invited to build one in the Swiss Alps. For his contributions to reforming education in Ladakh, Wangchuk was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award, a prestigious Asia-wide honor presented for selfless and transformative service to society, in 2018.

Wangchuk founded the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL) with his wife, Gitanjali J Angmo, in 2017. With a focus on sustainability and self-reliance similar to that of SECMOL, the institute is a higher-education center that awards fellowships for work on climate-friendly innovations that benefit communities in Ladakh and other mountainous regions. HIAL received widespread praise in 2021 for building portable solar-heated tents for the Indian army.

Social and political activism

Wangchuk was a foundational figure in the New Ladakh Movement, a youth-led social campaign launched in 2013 aiming to foster positive change in education, the environment, and the economy. The outfit contested the 2015 local council elections but did not win any seats; it decided not to enter politics thereafter and to remain committed to social issues.

In 2019 the Indian government revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and statehood, separated Ladakh from it, and turned both into union territories. Wangchuk thanked the Narendra Modi-led administration for the move, which he saw as “fulfilling Ladakh’s longstanding dream” to be independent of Jammu and Kashmir and governed directly by the central government. The next year he called for a mass boycott of Chinese products after Indian and Chinese troops briefly clashed in Ladakh’s Galwan river valley.

Over the next couple of years, Wangchuk and many Ladakhis grew increasingly concerned that constitutional safeguards for autonomy—especially those protecting indigenous tribes and their lands—were not forthcoming, leaving the union territory vulnerable to outside interests. An oft-repeated demand was Sixth Schedule status, a constitutional provision that gives tribal communities in a handful of specific states greater autonomy over their land and resources.

In January 2023 Wangchuk announced that he would go on a five-day “climate fast” seeking Sixth Schedule status and drawing attention to how mining and commercial interests were putting the region’s fragile ecosystem—and the tribal livelihoods linked to it—at risk. However, the police did not give him permission to protest at his intended site, the high-altitude Khardung La, citing health and safety risks; Wangchuk claimed the police had instead detained him at HIAL. He did go on hunger strikes over similar demands in the following years, most notably a 21-day fast in 2024, where he included statehood for Ladakh in his demands. Talks between Ladakhi representatives and the central government during this time yielded no significant results.

In September 2024 Wangchuk and Ladakhi volunteers marched to New Delhi and went on a hunger strike to demand the reopening of discussions with the government. After being detained by the police at least twice, they fasted there for 16 days until the government assured that talks would resume. However, the talks fell through once again, and Wangchuk began a five-week fast unto death in Leh in September 2025. The protest was cut short after two weeks when clashes between youth-led groups and the police left four people dead in police firing in the city. The central government said Wangchuk’s “provocative statements” during the hunger strike had incited the violence, though Wangchuk denied the allegations, describing the unrest as an outpouring of youth dissatisfaction and appealing for peace. Nevertheless, Wangchuk was detained under the extremely strict National Security Act two days later. Local police said it was looking into his alleged links to Pakistan, citing a recent climate conference he had attended in the neighboring country, with whom India shares a fractious relationship (see India-Pakistan conflict). He spent 170 days in custody until the government revoked the order.

In the months following his release, Wangchuk extended his support to the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical youth-led social media movement that grew out of an offhand comment by Chief Justice Surya Kant and snowballed into a campaign against apparent lapses in national exams. In June 2026 he joined the movement’s protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar and sat on a hunger strike demanding the resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan and asking for a speedy resolution to the question of Ladakh’s autonomy. On the 21st day of his fast, the Delhi Police removed him from the grounds by force and took him to a hospital.

Though the Delhi High Court upheld the police’s move to shift Wangchuk to a hospital, his wife condemned it and said he had been “kept in a solitary manner, ostensibly under the pretext of medical treatment.” From the hospital, Wangchuk appealed to protesters to continue with a planned peaceful march to Parliament on July 20. When the march—mostly comprising students and young people—was met with baton charging and tear gas from police forces, Wangchuk said he would continue his fast at the hospital. When members of the ruling party, the parliamentary opposition, and the CJP requested him to break his fast, Wangchuk said he would break his fast if the government vowed not to take legal action against students who took part in the protest and that it would not use “excessive police force to repress the movement.” On the 26th day of his fast, he was convinced to break it by a delegation of union ministers who met him at the hospital. His decision came after a public assurance from Modi that his cabinet would take “strict action” on the issue of examination mismanagement through parliamentary process, and Wangchuk’s other demands were addressed. Although the protest at Jantar Mantar and neighboring areas continued for a while, it was called off on July 25 after Pradhan resigned as education minister. CJP’s leaders announced at a press conference that its key demand had been met and the government had assured the group that its two other asks—of compensation to the families of the students who died by suicide and revocation of police cases on student protesters—would also be met.

Allegations and action against Sonam Wangchuk

Wangchuk and SECMOL first came under scrutiny in 2007 when a Leh district magistrate accused the institute of violating foreign funding laws, illegally occupying land, and having alleged ties to China. SECMOL refuted the allegations and said the charges were cleared by a court in 2013, though the accusations drove the nonprofit to withdraw from an educational reform program it was conducting in partnership with the Leh government.

Following the violence that erupted in Leh in 2025, the spotlight returned to supposed foreign funding violations when the government revoked SECMOL’s license under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), which governs how nongovernmental organizations can receive and use foreign funds. Among other accusations of financial irregularities—some involving Wangchuk personally—the central government flagged a 493,000-rupee ($5,425 at 2025 rates) donation from a Swedish platform for a study on awareness of “food security and sovereignty.” Angmo said that the government had misinterpreted it as a study related to the “sovereignty of the nation.” SECMOL and Wangchuk’s explanations for this and other charges were found insufficient by the government. A month earlier the government also canceled a 40-year land lease allotted to HIAL in 2018, alleging that the land had not been used for its intended purpose. Wangchuk termed it a “witch hunt.”