Kailash Satyarthi

Over 30 years ago Kailash Satyarthi left a promising career as an electrical engineer to set up Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save Childhood Movement) and since then, by his own count, he has rescued more than 80,000 children.

He also heads the Global March Against Child Labour, which represents about 2,000 social groups and union organisations in 140 countries.

His campaigns over the years have ensured that India's carpet industry has stopped using child labour.

As an analytical thinker, he made the issue of child labour a human rights issue, not a welfare matter or a charitable cause. He has established that child labour is responsible for the perpetuation of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population explosion and many other social evils.He also successfully led a movement to bring in a new law in 2012 to make employment of children under the age of 14 illegal - a law he considers his greatest achievement.

Helped by an army of volunteers, Mr Satyarthi has been  campaigning  against the exploitation of children for more than three decades, and his efforts have seen tens of thousands of children rescued from hazardous industries and rehabilitated.

Mr Satyarthi, who says his mission is to "wipe away the blot of human slavery", has often staged dangerous and daring dawn raids on factories - sometimes manned by armed guards - which employed children.

For his work, he has endured death threats and attempts at incarceration, and two of his colleagues were even murdered. But he continues with his campaign because, he has said, "somebody has to accept the challenge whatever dangers are there".

Following the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, Kailash has waged a peaceful struggle to stop children being exploited as labour instead of attending school. He has also contributed to the development of international conventions on the rights of children.

Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on 10 December 2014, Mr Satyarthi declined to deliver a lecture, saying instead: "I represent here the sound of silence. The cry of innocence. And, the face of invisibility.

"I have come here to share the voices and dreams of our children, because they are all our children."

A truly inspirational keynote speaker Kailash Satyarthi will move audiences with the tale of his crusade against child slavery and exploitative child labour.