India is one of the world’s largest and most powerful countries, in terms of its population, economy, and political importance. Since its independence in the past century, it has achieved massive strides in its technological and economic growth. It is now the world’s fourth-largest economy on the strength of its exports, services sector, and domestic consumption.

India’s story shows both challenges and hope. The visible signs of India’s new affluence belie many profound inequalities in its society—notably in incomes and educational opportunities. Despite the overall surge in growth, equality remains out of reach for many rural and tribal girls, who have been the most neglected for lack of adequate education. In Rajasthan, India’s largest state, girls have the highest illiteracy rate.

This disparity has had a deep detrimental impact on Indian society, where illiterate girls are forced to marry early, have children, and work—while culturally privileged males go to school. Given their limited horizons, only a lifetime of penury and servitude awaits most of these women.

In 2005, a young graduate of the London School of Economics then working in San Francisco, United States of America, decided to return home to India to take on this challenge. After two years of studying the problem, Safeena Husain established the Foundation to Educate Girls Globally (FEGG) or “Educate Girls,” a non-profit organization dedicated to mobilizing community and government resources for girls’ education in rural and educationally disadvantaged areas of India.

Starting out in Rajasthan, Educate Girls identified the neediest communities in terms of girls’ education, brought unschooled or out-of-school girls into the classroom, and worked to keep them there until they were able to acquire credentials for higher education and gainful employment. 2015 was a year of innovative collaborations. It launched the world’s first Development Impact Bond (DIB) in education, aimed at tying financial aid to achieved outcomes.

The results were dramatic. What began with fifty pilot village schools reached over 30,000 villages across India’s most underserved regions, involving over two million girls, with a retention rate of over 90%. Organized into Team Balika (Team for the Girl Child), local volunteers went door-to-door to identify out-of-school girls, address parents’ concerns, and help with documentation. At the end of the DIB project in 2018, Educate Girls had surpassed its total learning targets by 160% and its total enrollment target by 116%.

Beyond enrolling young girls, Educate Girls also launched Pragati, an open-schooling program that allows young women aged 15-29 to complete their education and avail themselves of lifelong opportunities. Its initial cohort of 300 learners has grown to over 31,500 learners.

Through its programs, it waged war on two fronts: the societal and systemic. Societal barriers kept girls at home, performing domestic chores as sisters, wives, and mothers. Systemic barriers limited the funds and resources required to improve girls’ access to education. Hovering above these was the patriarchal mindset—that needed to be challenged and proven wrong.

“Girls’ education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet to solve some of the world’s most difficult problems,” says Husain. “It is one of the best investments a country can make, impacting nine of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, including health, nutrition, and employment.

“Educate Girls remains committed to breaking the cycle of illiteracy and poverty for girls. By scaling our programs, deepening government partnerships, and embedding community-led solutions, we strive to create a brighter, more equitable future—one girl at a time,” she adds.

Educate Girls entered communities where girls and women were expected to stay in the shadows—and made them visible. By working within the system, they were able to change it, transforming schools into spaces of possibility. They challenged tradition, shifted mindsets, and showed that education is not a privilege, but a right that reshapes and rebuilds lives. It is enabling the women of India to take their rightful place in their own country, and the world.

In electing the Foundation to Educate Girls Globally to receive the 2025 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes its commitment to addressing cultural stereotyping through the education of girls and young women, liberating them from the bondage of illiteracy and infusing them with skills, courage, and agency to achieve their full human potential.

(Delivered by Safeena Husain, founder of the Foundation to Educate Girls Globally)

I started Educate Girls in my home with a computer screen in front of me and my infant daughter on my lap. Eighteen years later, to be the first Indian organization to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award is historic, humbling and completely unbelievable. 

While I planted the seed for this organization, it has been nurtured over the last decades by many, many hands.

This win is dedicated to the hard work of the Educate Girls’ current and past team members, and especially our field coordinators, who go door to door to find every single girl who is not going to school. They do it when it rains or even when the temperature hits 45 degrees centigrade. They climb mountains and cross rivers just to make sure every single home is visited and no girl is left behind. It is because of their hard work that this mission has expanded from just a few villages when we began to more than 30,000 today.

This win is dedicated to the 55,000 youth, our Team Balika volunteers, who have worked with us since inception to bring over 2 million girls back to school. They inspire us daily with their motto, “Mera Gaon, Meri Samasya, aur Main hi Samadhan,” which means “My village, my problem, and I am the solution.”

This win is dedicated to over 3,000 Preraks, our mentors, who work with adolescent girls and young women who cannot go back to formal school. They help them learn in village-based learning camps, sometimes set up in their own homes to ensure that girls can complete their secondary education. They go above and beyond the call of duty to support girls, sometimes babysitting their children, or even grazing their goats so that girls don’t miss their exams. Their hard work has ensured that over 30,000 girls are getting a second chance at education and a second chance at a future.

This win is dedicated to parents, community members, teachers, headmasters and countless others who stand up for our girls and provide day-to-day support for our programs and for our team members.

This win is dedicated to our Board, our supporters, our partners in the government and civil society. Thank you for placing your trust and faith in us. Your support provides us with the much-needed fuel to propel this mission forward.

This win is for our girls who inspire us daily with their courage, grit and resilience. For girls who cook, clean, tend to cattle, look after siblings and then study late into the night to build a brighter future for themselves, their families and their country. This award sheds light on their struggles and the numerous challenges they face.

Over the years, we have met hundreds of out-of-school girls, called “Antimbala,” or “the last girl.” They were named Antimbala because everyone hoped that they would be the last girls to be born.

So, today, in honor of Antimbala, we at Educate Girls pledge to 10X10. We commit to reaching 10 million learners over the next 10 years, working to ensure that no girl is denied a quality education.

Because when a girl is educated, magic happens! Education opens up opportunities, opportunities give her choices, and choices give her a voice and agency to help her reach her full potential.

Also, we only have to do it once. Because when she is educated, she is twice as likely to educate her children and break the cycle of illiteracy and poverty forever.

Finally, I want to thank my husband and my children for making my mission their mission and for standing behind me all these years. I want to thank my father, who is watching from above, and my mother, who is here today. Nothing can happen without the blessings of our elders.

Our deepest gratitude to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for this incredible recognition. You have energized us and given us a tailwind to help carry our mission forward, in India and beyond.

I am Safeena Husain, and I Educate Girls

Thank you.

 

 

Healthcare is broadly social and deeply personal, particularly with respect to a costly, high-mortality disease like cancer. Cancer can be emotionally and financially devastating for patients and their families, especially the poor. The problem is compounded in places like the North Eastern Region (NER) in India, a remote, “forgotten,” predominantly rural and agricultural border region where access to medical care is difficult. Even in the region’s leading state Assam, where cancer incidence is high amid a population of 35 million, the first cancer hospital was not opened until 1981. Later, a second, the Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Centre (CCHRC) was established in 1996, it was the initiative of a non-profit society of local citizens, funded by public philanthropy on land provided by government.

CCHRC would, however, expand into an innovative, widely admired, full-service cancer care facility after Indian surgical oncologist Dr. Ravi Kannan R. became hospital director in 2007, the first formally-trained oncologist to fill the position. It surprised many that Kannan, who previously headed the surgical oncology department in Adyar Cancer Institute, a major cancer institute in Chennai, would exchange a position in a big city for a small hospital in a remote part of the country. Kannan had a simple answer. It was where he was most needed.

Under Kannan’s leadership, CCHRC became a full-fledged comprehensive cancer hospital and research center. From a hospital with limited facilities when he came on board, it now has twenty-eight departments covering oncology, pathology, radiology, microbiology, epidemiology, tumour registry and palliative care, and other services and specializations. From a staff of only twenty-three, the hospital now employs 451 people.

Kannan saw from the beginning that it was not just a matter of having state-of-the-art cancer facilities. Patient compliance rate to treatment was at 28%. Patients came but did not continue their treatment due to such reasons as the difficulties of traveling long distances, the cost (including the loss of income of family caregivers), and resignation to the belief that the patient would never be cured. Clearly, the underlying reason was poverty. Thus, the hospital introduced such pro-poor initiatives as free treatment, food and lodging, adhoc employment for caregivers, and a homecare program. Hospital team members would travel long distances to train family members in pain management and palliative care, as well as provide free medicines. As a result, patient compliance rates rose to 70%. CCHRC now provides free or subsidized cancer care treatments to an average of 5,000 new patients annually, catering to approximately 20,000 poor patients for treatments and follow-ups. Kannan says, “No one should be denied access to treatment due to want of money.”

The hospital states its vision in these words: “We aim to become a state-of-the-art cancer center that will ensure that no individual develops a cancer that can be prevented, that no patient is denied appropriate cancer treatment for want of resources, that no patient dies in agony and indignity and that no family suffers treatment induced poverty and grief.” It is a clear, bold statement that the hospital translates into actual practice.

Kannan, now fifty-nine-years-old, has served the hospital for nearly seventeen years. He is particularly proud of the people around him who share his vision for the hospital, many of them young professionals attracted and inspired by his leadership. Self-sacrificing and quietly heroic, Kannan lives with his family in Assam and in this remote region continues to work without expectation of public recognition. Reiterating his mission, he says, “To be able to deliver inclusive health care and inclusive cancer care, you must have care available. You must have care that is equitable, accessible, and affordable.”

In electing Ravi Kannan R. to receive the 2023 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his devotion to his profession’s highest ideals of public service, his combination of skill, commitment, and compassion in pushing the boundaries of people-centered, pro-poor health care and cancer care, and for having built, without expectation of reward, a beacon of hope for millions in the Indian state of Assam, thus setting a shining example for all.

I bring greetings and warm wishes from India.

This recognition rightfully belongs to many, many people.

This belongs to the Cachar Cancer Hospital Society who dared to dream of such a facility over thirty years ago.

This belongs to all my 450 colleagues in Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Centre who have passionately believed in our cause and have tirelessly labored in seeing our shared dream of inclusive healthcare and cancer care become a reality for the people that we serve.

This belongs to our local communities including to our government officials and representatives who have reposed their trust in the process of creating Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in our little pocket of land in the state of Assam.

This belongs to the countless individuals and organizations across our great country of India and all across the world who have shown their steadfast commitment and support in the humble work that we do.

Most importantly, this belongs to the people we have treated, the individuals and their families, who have entrusted their lives in our hands without any reservations.

What we do in Silchar is not unique. There are several others who are engaged in similar work in healthcare and other fields who strive to improve the lot of our fellow men and women on this planet.

I believe that the Ramon Magsaysay Award recognizes all of our collaborative spirits and efforts.  I accept this Award on behalf of all of them.

As Bhupen Hazarika, an Assamese bard sang, “‘We’re in the same boat brother. If you tip one end, you gonna rock the other, it’s the same boat brother.'” All lives on this earth are so intimately linked to one another that we cannot afford to be exclusive.

An ancient Sanskrit verse goes thus: Ayam nijam paro veti ganana laghu chetasam, Udar charitanam tu vasudhaiv kutumbakam.  For the wise, the entire earth is one family.

The road to human happiness and fulfillment truly lies in holding every life on this planet sacred and worthy of our love in an all-inclusive spirit. People have given us their time, talents, and treasures not merely to help the sick regain their health but to give much-needed hope to the hopeless. Together, all of us can change the way we take care of sickness and suffering, promote universal health, and control of cancer and other diseases.

Om Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah, Sarve Santu Nir-Aamayaah | Sarve Bhadraanni Pashyantu, Maa Kashcid-Duhkha-Bhaag-Bhavet | Om Shaantih Shaantih Shaantih ||

May everyone be happy, be free from all disease, see goodness and auspiciousness in all things, and may none be distressed. May everyone be at peace.

Let us each continue to make efforts both big and small to harness the goodness around us to better the conditions of everyone in need with faith that together, we can make a difference.

Thank you to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for this great encouragement that indeed together we can all make a difference.

The world’s largest democracy, India has seen the space for an independent and responsible Indian press shrink over the past years.  The factors behind this are many: a changing media landscape because of new information technologies, the increased marketization of news and opinions, growing government control, and, most worrisome, the rise of popular authoritarianism and religious, ethnic, and nationalist fundamentalisms with their consequent divisiveness, intolerance, and susceptibilities to violence.

An important voice against these threats is television journalist RAVISH KUMAR. Raised in Jitwarpur village in Hindi-speaking Bihar, northeast India, RAVISH pursued his early interest in history and public affairs through postgraduate studies in history from Delhi University. In 1996, he joined New Delhi Television Network (NDTV), one of India’s leading TV networks and worked his way up from being a field reporter. After NDTV launched its 24-hour Hindi-language news channel—NDTV India—targeting the country’s 422 million native speakers of Hindi, he was given his own daily show, “Prime Time.”  Today, as NDTV India’s managing editor, RAVISH is one of India’s most influential TV journalists.

His more important distinction, however, comes from the kind of journalism he represents.  In a media environment threatened by an interventionist state, toxic with jingoist partisans, trolls and purveyors of “fake news,” and where the competition for market ratings has put the premium on “media personalities,” “tabloidization,” and audience-pandering sensationalism, RAVISH has been most vocal on insisting that the professional values of sober, balanced, fact-based reporting be upheld in practice.  His “Prime Time” program on NDTV India takes up current social issues; does serious background research; and presents issues in well-rounded discussions that can run up to twenty or more episodes.  The program deals with real-life, under-reported problems of ordinary people — from the lives of manual scavengers and rickshaw-pullers to the plight of government employees and displaced farmers, to underfunded state schools and the inefficient railway system.  RAVISH interacts easily with the poor, travels extensively, and uses social media to stay in touch with his audience, generating from them the stories for his program.  Striving for a people-based journalism, he calls his newsroom “the people’s newsroom.”

RAVISH is not above engaging in some theatrics himself if he feels it effective, as in an innovative show he did in 2016 to dramatize how debased the discourse had become on TV news programs.  The show opens with RAVISH coming on screen to talk to the viewers about how TV news programs had descended into a “dark world” of angry, strident voices.  The screen then goes dark and, for the next hour, there is nothing but a cacophonous audio of sound bites from actual TV programs, venomous threats, hysterical rants, the sounds of a mob baying for the blood of enemies. For RAVISH, it is always about the message, dispassionately delivered.

As an anchor, RAVISH is sober, incisive, and well-informed.  He does not dominate his guests but affords them the chance to express themselves.  He does not balk, however, at calling the highest officials to account or criticizing media and the state of public discourse in the country; for this reason, he has been harassed and threatened by rabid partisans of one kind or another. Through all the perils and aggravations, RAVISH has remained consistent in his effort to preserve and widen the space for a critical, socially responsible media.  Keeping faith with a journalism that puts service to the people at its center, RAVISH sums up what he believes a journalist is in the most basic terms: “If you have become the voice of the people, you are a journalist.”

In electing RAVISH KUMAR to receive the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his unfaltering commitment to a professional, ethical journalism of the highest standards; his moral courage in standing up for truth, integrity, and independence; and his principled belief that it is in giving full and respectful voice to the voiceless, in speaking truth bravely yet soberly to power, that journalism fulfills its noblest aims to advance democracy.

My world has changed since the announcement of the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Your hospitality has been overwhelming since I landed in Manila; the warmth and affection I have received from the foundation is no less than the honor conferred upon me. You invited me as a guest and made me feel at home; now I feel like a part of your family. Usually award ceremonies are brief affairs but this is different. It has been a humbling experience and makes me feel more responsible than before.

Inequality is mostly measured in terms of health and economy, but the time has come for us to take cognizance of knowledge inequality as well. When resources for quality knowledge have become confined to a few cities, we cannot even begin to imagine what are the repercussions of this inequality in smaller towns and villages. Clearly, the source of knowledge for a vast multitude is the propaganda machine of WhatsApp university. One cannot entirely blame today’s youth since they have been denied quality education and information. It becomes all the more important to evaluate the crisis of the media in this context. If media too begins to function like the WhatsApp university with fake news and fake knowledge, what then would be the consequences for society?  It is a good sign that India’s citizens have begun to understand this. That is why the congratulatory messages that I am receiving are also replete with worries on how the media has turned rogue.

Therefore, while I am happy for myself today I am also filled with sadness looking at the state of the profession I represent.

Indian media is in a state of crisis and this crisis is not accidental or random but systemic and structural. Being a journalist has become a solitary endeavor as uncompromising journalists find themselves being forced out of their jobs by news organizations. Nevertheless, it is heartening to see that there are still some who continue to put their lives and careers at risk to practice honest and meaningful journalism. Some women journalists are speaking out and managing to survive on freelance earning. With the internet still shut down in Kashmir, most major news channels went along with government’s stand. Yet, there are some who have dared to report from within that shutdown and face the wrath of the army of trolls.  While institutional journalism is facing a crisis, individual journalists are struggling to survive and question authority.

Can we restore the sanctity of the news? I do hope audiences will once again realize the value of truthfulness in reporting, and the diversity of voices and opinions.  Because a democracy can thrive only as long as its news is truthful. I accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award; I accept it on behalf of all those readers and viewers who continue to live in areas of knowledge inequality but have a thirst for good and truthful information and knowledge. Many young journalists realize this challenge. I am confident that in times to come, they will be able to restore the meaning of true journalism. It is possible that they may lose the battle, but sometimes resistance is not a matter of choice. Not all battles are fought for victory—some are fought simply to tell the world that someone was there on the battlefield. I accept this award on behalf of all such journalists.

Ladakh in the northern India state of Jammu and Kashmir, is a high-altitude, cold desert region where some 300,000 people struggle in the midst of a harsh environment, wars arising from the rival claims of India, Pakistan, and China, and now even climate change.  Yet here the will to autonomy, creativity, and empowerment remains vibrant.

An inspiring example is SONAM WANGCHUK.  Born in the small, remote village of Ulaytokpo in Ladakh, one of many children of a local leader, he had a difficult education because minorities were discriminated against, schools were lacking and poorly-equipped, teaching standards abysmal, textbook content locally irrelevant, and the medium of instruction alien in the mountains.  Left mostly to fend for himself, he took control of his life early on.

He was a 19-year-old engineering student at the National Institute of Technology in Srinagar, Kashmir, when he went into tutoring to finance his schooling and help woefully unprepared students pass the national college matriculation exams.  Renting a hotel function room, he advertised a coaching program that, exceeding expectations, drew close to a hundred students.  Teaching basic subjects like English and Math, using strategies like peer-to-peer teaching, it was a financial success. But the experience also demonstrated to him how poorly educated the students in village schools were.

In 1988, after earning his engineering degree, WANGCHUK founded Students’ Education and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) and started coaching Ladakhi student, 95% of whom used to fail the government exams.  To create lasting impact, SECMOL partnered with local government in a joint program of educational reform.  Piloted in a village school, the program involved training teachers in a “creative, child-friendly, and activity-based” education; introducing curricular changes to make subjects relevant to the Ladakhi culture and context; prioritizing English over Urdu to better prepare students for higher education; and promoting the Ladakhi language.  Village education committees (VEC) were organized to support schools, monitor teacher performance, and become true stakeholders. Successfully piloted, this initiative of “localizing” schools was replicated in 33 schools and became a veritable movement.

In 1994, with WANGCHUK in the lead, “Operation New Hope” (ONH) was launched to expand and consolidate the partnership-driven educational reform program.  Taking a life of its own, to date ONH has trained 700 teachers, 1000 VEC leaders, and dramatically increased the success rate of students in matriculation exams from just 5% in 1996 to 75%  by 2015.  In 1998, WANGCHUK opened SECMOL School, with a permanent faculty, volunteers, and a yearly average of 300 students. An alternative boarding school that offers review, certificate, and associate-level courses, it rebuilds the students’ confidence, develops lifeskills, revisits the fundamentals and offers courses ranging from leadership training to solar power installation.  Also a model in its use of renewable energy and indigenous technology, SECMOL has produced students who have gone on to become pioneering entrepreneurs in different fields.

A natural innovator, WANGCHUK works out of local experience.  Seeing how climate change has affected the natural water supply for agriculture, he seized on the idea of building artificial glaciers in the form of “ice stupas” for irrigation during the dry summer. Called “stupas” (for public appeal in a Buddhist land), these are conically-shaped ice mountains, that store water in winter and in summer melts to supply farm irrigation water.

Six stupas he and his team have created store roughly 30 million liters of water. Beyond Ladakh, WANGCHUK has shared his environmental and educational innovations with mountain peoples across the whole Himalayan belt,  and as far as Switzerland.  Simple and non-confrontational in his leadership approach, SONAM WANGCHUK, continues to dream of ways to help the people of Ladakh. He confidently says, “The possibilities are endless.”

In electing SONAM WANGCHUK to receive the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his uniquely systematic, collaborative and community-driven reform of learning systems in remote northern India, thus improving the life opportunities of Ladakhi youth, and his constructive engagement of all sectors in local society to harness science and culture creatively for economic progress, thus setting an example for minority peoples in the world.

I humbly accept this award, not as an individual but on behalf of all the students, teachers and people of Ladakh in the trans-Himalayas.

This award is a recognition to our efforts of the last 30 years to make education meaningful, applicable and contextual in our remote mountains and to make it available to all… rich, poor, rural and urban through government school system.

Unfortunately when it comes to education, the world is still stuck with a system that is three hundred years old when at the onset of industrial revolution, the focus was on exploiting nature for human need or greed. A kind of war was declared on nature and our schooling system unfortunately became a training camp for this plunder.

In this war we evaporated half of the forests on earth and half its wild life vanished in just the last 50 years. Nature, too, has responded with equal fury, unleashing cyclones, storms, droughts, floods and made our air unbreathable, water undrinkable, temperatures unbearable.

We suffer the consequences in the mountains of Ladakh, where the glaciers are disappearing, causing droughts and flash-floods.

At our school in Ladakh, we try and come up with measures to respond to climate change by sensitizing each citizen, arming the youth to build solar heated houses, build seasonal artificial glaciers to restore climate-damaged valleys.

Yet people ask in despair how will you scale it up globally? Where’s the money?

Whether we have resources for environment and education depends on how we look at it!  There seems to be no dearth of resources when it comes to defence and arms. The world spends 1.7 trillion dollars a year on defence. But defence in future will hardly be about India arming itself against China or China against the US.

It will have to be all countries pooling their budgets for defence—for defence against new environmental catastrophies and climate change.

Let me clarify this: in just one year the world loses 10 million lives to air pollution alone, (this is a rate similar to World Wars I & II) and half of these lives are lost in India and China. And it happens without a single bullet fired from across borders.

So don’t we need to invest in declaring peace with nature, by re-designing our education system to heal the planet and its people.

As a symbol of beginning this peace with nature I want to dedicate the prize money of this award to start an international model school in Ladakh where government and community join hands to prepare our children for these challenges of tomorrow.

In few countries is the contrast between great wealth and extreme poverty as stark as in India. Of the latter, a popular image are its street people, dirty, disheveled, and famished, huddled on pavements, in train stations, bus stands, and public shrines. An estimated 400,000 of them are mentally ill, victimized not so much by poverty as by a problem society has not sufficiently understood and addressed: the problem of mental health. Stigmatized and feared, the response of many to these street persons is to pretend they do not exist.

One man chose not to pretend. Psychiatrist BHARAT VATWANI was out dining in a restaurant with his wife Smitha, also a psychiatrist, when they were appalled at the sight of a thin, unkempt man drinking water from a street canal. Taking time to talk to the man, a mentally-afflicted college graduate, they decided to bring him to their clinic to be washed and treated. This show of empathy was not entirely surprising. VATWANI knew what poverty was like. Losing his father when he was only 12 years old forced him and his brothers to take odd jobs, like peddling books door-to-door. Struggling through school as a self-supporting student, VATWANI successfully completed his medical studies in psychiatry at Grant Medical College and at G.S. Medical College & Hospital, both in Mumbai.

After their encounter with the man who drank water from a canal, Dr. VATWANI and his wife started an informal operation of bringing mentally-ill street persons to their private clinic for treatment. This eventually led to the establishment of Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation in 1988, aimed at rescuing mentally-ill persons living on the streets; providing free shelter, food, and psychiatric treatment; and reuniting them with their families.

Starting with a two-room tenement that could take only three people at a time, Shraddha drew public attention when they rescued and treated a street person who turned out to be a respected lecturer at a Mumbai art school, who had inexplicably disappeared. Learning about what the VATWANIs had done, the school’s faculty and students organized a major art exhibition that drew 141 participating artists in India and abroad, and successfully raised US$22,357. Using this seed money, the VATWANIs bought a piece of property in Mumbai for a 20-bed facility that they opened in 1997; the unexpected donation inspired them to further expand their work with the help of private donors, volunteer professionals, and social workers. In 2006, they moved to a bigger 120-patient facility in Karjat outside Mumbai, which had five buildings on a 6.5-acre land. By then, they had strengthened their three-phase therapeutic program, consisting of the rescue and treatment of mentally-ill street persons, reuniting patients with their families, and promoting awareness of mental health in communities.

Their rescue work has been aided by the police, social workers, and referrals. Shraddha’s free custodial care and treatment ranges from personal hygiene, medical check-ups, psychiatric treatment, to appropriate medication—all done in the open, healing environment of the Karjat facility where patients can engage in simple farm activities and find solace in a multi-religious meditation center. The foundation tracks patients’ families, arranges reunions, and uses such opportunities to spread a supportive and enlightened understanding of mental health among the families and their communities. In a one-of-a-kind mission that began in 1988, VATWANI and the foundation have by now rescued, treated, and reintegrated into their families and communities more than 7,000 of India’s mentally-ill roadside destitute, with a remarkable reunion rate of 95%.

VATWANI’s painstaking, humane undertaking has had to contend with numerous challenges. A deeply spiritual person, the good doctor is often beset by doubts whether he has done enough, given the magnitude of the mental health problem in his country. Notwithstanding these self-doubts, he remains confident in his faith that in the end, “Good work shall continue when there is inherent goodness in the work.”

In electing BHARAT VATWANI to receive the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his tremendous courage and healing compassion in embracing India’s mentally-afflicted destitute, and his steadfast and magnanimous dedication to the work of restoring and affirming the human dignity of even the most ostracized in our midst.

From the beginning of Time, the world has always been a conflict between between Right and Wrong, between Truth and Evil, between Justice and Injustice. Ultimately, community leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Vinoba Bhave, Martin Luther King, The Dalai Lama, Baba & Prakash Amte, irrespective of their particular sphere of activities, support, and are torch bearers of the former. And have ended up becoming emissaries of Truth itself. Often reaching far beyond where the stone thrown into the pond of Life falls, are the implications of the ripples that the stone hitting the water has caused. And the Ramon Magsaysay Award, by recognizing individuals from Asia, has further added to the distance of the ripples created by Asian social Emissaries. It is not individual causes that we as Awardees represent, it is the hope of a collective good, a hope that Truth and God shall prevail within Mankind. And that ultimately we shall join in eternal bonding to the greater Cosmos of a God’s Creation beyond.

Despite this, the cause of the wandering mentally ill roadside destitute which our NGO Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation espouses, does deserve its place under the sun, as an unspoken tragedy that has befallen mankind. This is because the mental illness causing the destitute to end up on the roads, is not of his/her own making. The wandering mentally ill are shunned, rejected and denied. They brave the chilling winters, the searing summers and the torrential rains for months, years, often decades on end. And continue to be shunned, rejected and denied. To the point of non-existence. And to correct this Injustice, at least in India, was born Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation.

We had naively thought during its inception, that in the span of our lifetimes, a lot would change for India’s wandering mentally ill. But today, having read a lot of literature on the psyche of social workers, both the famous and the not-so-famous, the heard and the not much written about, I am well aware that the laying down of one lifetime may well be inadequate for a cause. Lincoln had his bouts of deep soul-searching depression. But the cause which he fought for viz racial discrimination has not been sorted out in its entirety, till date. Nobel Laureate Tagore wrote ‘Into that Heaven of Freedom, my Father, let my Country awake..’ 75 years on, his Country is yet to realize his vision. Lincoln and Tagore and those millions of silent strugglers all over the world, who have partaken in ideological wars over innumerable years, have taught us that Change is a Slow Process. However strong and deep rooted be the emotions, however piercing the inner outcry against social disparity or injustice, howsoever passionate the associated intrinsic desire for change, the wheels of the Gods move slowly, albeit very slowly.

And to silently continue on your chosen path, with your nose to the grind, like the faceless, nameless, anonymous soldier carrying the half-hoisted flag of Truth on his shoulder, becomes at some point of time, the wheel of silent revolution in your own silent unwritten destiny. Leading one to understand the Gospel Philosophy of the Sages of Yore that truth is Truth only when it has the capacity to stretch beyond the limits of all endurance, light is Light only when it has the capacity to pierce the darkness. I end this outpouring with a few lines from one of my earliest poems –

If Life,
could be founded on hope,
And Wisdom,
on mere understanding,
Then the horizons would be mine,
The rainbows notwithstanding,
But I had nothing,
Just this pen, paper and a few words,
And my feelings for you,
From the beginning of time….

The healing power of music is an idea that often does not rise beyond being a platitude, a comfortable truism. But a young artist in India is showing that music can indeed be a deeply transformative force in personal lives and society itself.

T.M. KRISHNA was born in 1976 to a privileged, Brahmin family in Chennai and was trained from the age of six in the aristocratic Karnatik music under masters of the form. Though he earned a degree in economics, KRISHNA chose to be an artist and quickly rose to become a highly-admired concert performer of Karnatik classical music. An ancient vocal and instrumental musical system, Karnatik music started centuries ago in temples and courts but was subsequently ‘classicized’ to become the almost exclusive cultural preserve of the Brahmin caste—performed, organized, and enjoyed by the elite who have access to it.

While grateful for how Karnatik music has shaped his artistry, KRISHNA would question the social basis of his art. He saw that his was a caste-dominated art that fostered an unjust, hierarchic order by effectively excluding the lower classes from sharing in a vital part of India’s cultural legacy. He questioned the politics of art; widened his knowledge about the arts of the dalits (“untouchables”) and non-Brahmin communities; and declared he would no longer sing in ticketed events at a famous, annual music festival in Chennai to protest the lack of inclusiveness. Recognizing that dismantling artistic hierarchies can be a way of changing India’s divisive society, KRISHNA devoted himself to democratizing the arts as an independent artist, writer, speaker, and activist.

In the 1990s, he was president of the Youth Association for Classical Music, that took Karnatik music to the youth and the public schools. To further diffuse classical music, he is at work on a curriculum for teaching Karnatik in schools and communities that have no exposure to it. In 2004, KRISHNA and a colleague created Sumanasa Foundation, that identified gifted, rural youth who lacked the opportunities to develop their talents, and brought them to Chennai to train under well-known artists at the same time that they were getting a college education. In 2008, KRISHNA and a fellow artist started the Svanubhava movement to bring together students of diverse social backgrounds to interact with renowned artists and learn about different art forms, in a program of lecture-demonstrations, film showings, and performances. Held annually in Chennai and featured in various cities, this unique platform has involved thousands of young people from some thirty schools and is now a movement directed by young artists and students and supported by India’s Ministry of Culture.

During the period 2011-2013, KRISHNA brought his passion and artistry to war-ravaged northern Sri Lanka, the first Karnatik musician to tour that region in three decades, and launched two festivals to promote “culture retrieval and revival” in that country. More recently, he conducted, with a prominent environmentalist, a free festival of “art healing” on the beach of Besant Nagar in Chennai that brought together a divided community of dalits, fisherfolk, and upper-class residents, to commune in performances that richly combined musical and dance forms formerly exclusive to the upper class and the dalits.

While much of his work is still ahead of him, he is embarked on an important path. KRISHNA is resolved to break barriers of caste, class or creed by democratizing music, cultivating thought-processes and sensibilities that unite people rather than divide them. Now a leading advocate in India of “music for all and music for a better quality of life,” he says: “Music and the arts are capable of bridging cultures and civilizations and liberating us from artificial divisions of caste and race.”

In electing THODUR MADABUSI KRISHNA to receive the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his forceful commitment as artist and advocate to art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions, breaking barriers of caste and class to unleash what music has to offer not just for some but for all.

I am a musician; practitioner of Karnatik music—one of India’s two celebrated classical systems. From when I can remember I have been part of the world of this music. Learning the art as many Brahmins do from my childhood years. I was a full time musician by 22 focused on only success as an end.

A set of unusual situations made me delve into my music’s life beyond the learning and singing of it.

What is this music, its history and purpose?

As the questioning progressed it turned into self-questioning. Who am I, what is my social address and who are the people who applaud my music, every movement of it? And it became clear to me that the music was not just about the melody and rhythm; it had been so internalized by the religion, conventions and rituals of the holding community, my community as to make it ours, ours to practice, to preserve, to protect, excluding the rest, especially those on the first step of India’s caste-based social order.

A precious, aesthetic experience can become part of a political and social commentary. This, it was clear to me, was wrong, unfair – unfair to society, unfair to the art. I must, I felt, resist this near hegemony.

Belonging to the holding community made the task anything but easy. The art—my art, which was my very life—was being seen as part of India’s dominant or ‘ace’ culture. A culture which dominates can call itself powerful; it cannot call itself culture. Power is about power, culture is about culture. Every community even the most marginalized has its own exquisite art and hosts multitudes of cultures. Power has tall citadels, culture has a level stage. The tall citadels need to be brought down; the ignored artistic traditions brought on to the proscenium stage.

Democracy demands that society’s wealth, physical and cultural be shared with openness, respect and love. This calls for empathy and not just tolerance; an embrace not putting up with one another.

Cultures are not bound by the lines that we draw on a map. It is in fact art that reveals to every human being inhabiting this complex yet beautiful planet that we have similar struggles and celebrations. But to truly sense this oneness we need to detach art traditions from socio-political constructions.

My journey in this direction has just begun and will proceed with awareness and constant learning. This award has reassured me that the art experience is seamlessly linked to life. I would not be here without the guidance and support of so many of my fellow-journeyers. This award comes to me in name alone, but belongs to the great music tradition that has nurtured me and has led me, with many others, to experience its majesty, and has opened not one but an infinity of windows to the mystery called life.

I will conclude with a few lines from a Karnatik song. A few words about it.

In the 19th century, the Tamil composer Gopalakrishna Bharati composed a musical opera describing the struggles of the Dalit Hindu saint Nandanar (6th – 7th century). In this song from the opera, Nandanar seeks entry into the temple to be in the lord’s (Siva) presence and celebrate him in song. We must remember that Dalits were not allowed inside Hindu temples even until the early part of the 20th century.

Today, in 21st century India, Dalits are demanding access, not into temples that are no longer closed to them, but into the architecture of opportunities, rights and power-sharing. Today’s Nandanars are stronger, organized, aware of their rights, far more powerful and impactful. The struggle for marginalized communities—across the globe—to ensure respect and equality in every sphere of living, be it the political, social or religious, unfortunately still finds doors closed.

Manual scavenging is blight on humanity in India. Consigned by structural inequality to the dalits, India’s “untouchables,” manual scavenging is the work of removing by hand human excrement from dry latrines and carrying on the head the baskets of excrement to designated disposal sites. A hereditary occupation, manual scavenging involves 180,000 dalit households cleaning the 790,000 public and private dry latrines across India; 98 percent of scavengers are meagerly paid women and girls. While the Constitution and other laws prohibit dry latrines and the employment of manual scavengers, these have not been strictly enforced since government itself is the biggest violator.

BEZWADA WILSON was born to a dalit family in Kolar Gold Fields township in Karnataka state. Although his family had been engaged in manual scavenging for generations, he was spared the labor to be the first in his family to pursue a higher education. Treated as an outcast in school and acutely aware of his family’s lot, BEZWADA was filled with great anger; but he would later channel this anger to a crusade to eradicate manual scavenging.

He started by changing the mindsets of his family and relatives—that being a dalit is not their fate but a status imposed by how society has been organized, and that no human being should be made to do such demeaning work as scavenging. In 1986, he sent a complaint about dry latrines to the authorities of their town, and when he was ignored sent the complaint to the Prime Minister, threatening legal action. As a result, the town’s dry latrines were converted into water-seal latrines and the scavengers transferred to non-scavenging jobs.

He boldly moved his crusade to other states, working with dalit activists, recruiting volunteers for what would take shape as a people’s movement of manual scavengers and their children, Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA). With BEZWADA WILSON as national convenor, SKA was launched in 1993 when he initiated the filing of a public interest litigation (PIL) case in India’s Supreme Court, naming all states, union territories, and the government departments of Railways, Defense, Judiciary, and Education as violators of the 1993 Prohibition Act banning dry latrines and the employment of manual scavengers.

SKA vigorously conducted district-level meetings to raise awareness about scavenging, the caste system, and the 1993 Prohibition Act, and trained local leaders and volunteers for the movement. In 2004-2005, it undertook a mass latrine demolition drive across the state of Andhra Pradesh; exposed the occupational violence faced by female scavengers; and met with officials to demand the demolition of dry latrines and the provision of alternative occupations for scavengers. In 2010, SKA led an India-wide march for the total eradication of scavenging, and again in 2015 undertook a 125-day bus journey across 30 states to mobilize the public against manual scavenging. The movement has since made significant progress. In 2013 SKA successfully lobbied for a new law that includes rehabilitation support for scavengers. It lobbied with local authorities for scholarships for children of manual scavengers, and conducted vocational training for scavengers’ daughters to move them into more decent jobs. It is now involved in crafting a new law that provides financial aid for scavengers transitioning to new occupations.

Fifty years old, BEZWADA WILSON has spent 32 years on his crusade, leading not only with a sense of moral outrage but also with remarkable skills in mass organizing, and working within India’s complex legal system. SKA has grown into a network of 7,000 members in 500 districts across the country. Of the estimated 600,000 scavengers in India, SKA has liberated around 300,000. While BEZWADA has placed at the core of his work the dalits’ self-emancipation, he stresses that manual scavenging is not a sectarian problem: “You are addressing all members of society, because no human being should be subjected to this inhuman practice.” Society itself has to be transformed.

In electing BEZWADA WILSON to receive the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his moral energy and prodigious skill in leading a grassroots movement to eradicate the degrading servitude of manual scavenging in India, reclaiming for the dalits the human dignity that is their natural birthright.

I am extremely happy and humbled by such an honour that everyone across Asia covets.

I am also here with mixed feelings to receive this award you have bestowed upon me.

I come from a socially discriminated community called Dalits, who have faced the worst form of oppression for generations over many centuries. Sadly, this form of oppression, equivalent to slavery, still continues in modern India, a country aspiring to be a world power.

Furthermore, I represent an even more segregated sections of Dalits who have been forced to do the most menial and extremely dehumanizing occupation in the world, that of manual scavenging—the cleaning and clearing of society’s human excreta manually with bare hands.

I therefore am delighted and grateful that you have chosen a humble son of such a community for this prestigious award. As I think of it, my heart swells with joy and my eyes fill with tears.

But the tears of joy are mixed with tears of grief and regret—that hundreds and thousands of my people have died and are dying in the soak pits. Millions more have succumbed gradually to incurable diseases; their kith and kin live in squalor, with little or no opportunities to improve their lives. I can go on and on to describe our pathetic conditions. But my people have also demonstrated their power of resilience.

This award goes to all the women who burnt their baskets to reject manual scavenging. And I dedicate this award to all those who lost their lives while cleaning the sewer lines. In this moment I remember my team members of Safai Karamchari Andolan spread across all states of India. They worked hard, indeed poured out sweat and blood, awakened an almost resigned community, produced evidence to fight our legal battles, lobbied with legislators, pressured an apathetic administration, demolished dry latrines—symbols of national shame—and, in 2010 and 2015, undertook a tedious bus journey traversing the country.

I also want to thank Dalit movements, women’s movements, social, secular and democratic movements, that have been fellow travelers in our journey. We have been natural allies in fighting casteist, patriarchal, and fascist forces.

I value your award as a fitting and significant recognition that will push forward our struggle in a huge way. It will boost my peoples’ determination to put an end to the obnoxious and inhuman practice. With your recognition, we are sure to gain more friends and supporters from across Asia and rest of the world, whose support is necessary to protect human dignity and human rights of all people similarly discriminated and stigmatized anywhere in the world.

In this connection, I wish to humbly remind you that there are now over 260 million people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe who fall under the “discriminated” based on work and descent. I wish that the world awakens to their plight and support their just struggles.

I end here with what our great leader Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar had said, “Ours is not a fight for wealth or for power. It is the fight for reclamation of human dignity and personhood.” We will march on to annihilate caste.

Let us join hands to tear down the walls that divide humanity on the basis of birth, caste, race and gender and let us restore equality, equity, and freedom of all people.

Jai Bhim! Mabuhay!!

Corruption is a plague on nations. In rooting out corruption, the work of government in strengthening systems of transparency and accountability is crucial. But ultimately, success still depends on ethical public servants and a vigilant public. In India, forty-year-old government officer SANJIV CHATURVEDI is an inspirational example. Coming from a family of civil servants, CHATURVEDI joined the Indian Forest Service (IFS) because he loves interacting with people in the field and working in government. Posted as a divisional forest officer in Haryana state, Northern India, he quickly came face to face with the corruption infesting government. A young, idealistic officer, he did not turn away from the irregularities that he saw but resolutely worked to correct them.

Boldly, he investigated and exposed cases of malfeasance even when these involved powerful officials in the state. In his six years in the state cadre, he exposed anomalies which included the illegal construction of a canal that threatened the critical Saraswati Wildlife Sanctuary; the use of public funds to develop an herbal park on private land owned by a high official; the underpayment of license fees; and the rigging of government auctions. In a foreign-funded afforestation program, CHATURVEDI discovered that 90 percent of the plantations existed only on paper, and that funds had been embezzled through the faked signatures of allegedly participating self-help groups and nonexistent workers. Forty forest officers were suspended as a result of his investigation.

Under intense pressure from high state officials affected by his campaign, he was deputed to New Delhi as deputy secretary and chief vigilance officer at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where he continued his anti-corruption campaign, exposing and filing cases involving irregularities in government procurement; contracts awarded to favored service providers; kickbacks in building construction; a scam in which government employees collected the pensions of dead pensioners; and the collusion between government officers and suppliers of fake medicines. Relentless, he did not waver even when cases involved high officials in state and central governments, well-connected businessmen, or members of his own staff. At great personal cost, he was harassed, suspended, demoted, hounded and humiliated with false charges, and put “in the freezer.” All these did not stop him.

CHATURVEDI is not a circumstantial whistleblower, but one genuinely seeking to reform the system from within. He meticulously investigates cases, submits documented reports, and pursues criminal and administrative action to punish the guilty. Actions he has taken have bolstered government revenues, and resulted in the recovery of stolen public funds and the suspension or removal of erring officials. Still, CHATURVEDI is not simply adversarial. He zealously performs his regular duties, carries out meaningful projects, and supports and protects honest employees. Within the sphere of his authority, he has initiated changes in operational systems to ensure transparency and accountability—whether these be better procedures in tracking public complaints or ensuring that wages and benefits of contractual employees actually go to them.

As a junior officer, CHATURVEDI’s reach and powers are limited but his integrity and courage have received wide media attention, though he does not himself seek it. On several occasions India’s president and prime minister have intervened to support and protect him from unjust persecution. While his story remains unfinished, he has already become a role model in the bureaucracy and for a public often overwhelmed by inertia and powerlessness. Amazingly, despite what he has gone through, CHATURVEDI has not yielded to disillusion. “Despite all the challenges, I have great optimism in the country, in our people,” he quietly asserts. “I have never entertained the thought of leaving the service. Never.”

In electing SANJIV CHATURVEDI to receive the 2015 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his exemplary integrity, courage and tenacity in uncompromisingly exposing and painstakingly investigating corruption in public office, and his resolute crafting of program and system improvements to ensure that government honorably serves the people of India.

This award has come at a very crucial juncture for me. It is a victory of our national motto, which is Satyameva Jayate, meaning that ultimately truth prevails. For me, it is not a personal award for me; the credit really goes to all the persons who supported me consistently in my endeavours to bring out a transparent and clean government system.

The concept of the All-India Services, to which I belong, is a very unique feature of our constitution where officers are recruited through the central government but occupy all strategic positions in the state governments. The central government has final powers of control over them. The founding fathers were well aware of the importance of these services and, in the words of Sardar Patel, one of our founding fathers and our first home minister:

“The Union will go—you will not have a united India, if you have not a good all-India service which has the independence to speak out its mind, which has a sense of security that you will stand by your word and that after all there is the Parliament, of which we can be proud where the rights and privileges are secure…. This Constitution is meant to be worked by a ring of service which will keep the country intact.”

Like many other developing countries of Asia, in our country also, corruption is a very serious problem. Corruption is not just about money changing hands. It is linked to basic human dignity and the dreams of our young generation in ensuring a fair recruitment system, the delivery of public services, and issues of illegal mining and deforestation leading to climate change. There is no such effective antidote to this problem as an honest and robust civil service. No amount of individual activism or voluntary action, however genuine, can replace this. I would like to remind those here today what the late President Ramon Magsaysay said, that it is the duty of government to bring dignity to the life of every citizen and that once you are in government service, you cease to belong to all other affiliations and belong exclusively to the people.

During my tenure in the environment, forest and healthcare sectors, I had to face stiff resistance from some of the most powerful elements of the system on a range of issues including illicit felling of trees, poaching of rare species, corruption in afforestation projects, supply of dubious medicines, irregularities in government recruitments, vested interests in the purchase and supply of medical equipment, and the problem of large scale absenteeism of health workers. However I was able to bring these issues to a logical conclusion, as in our country the system of checks and balances established by the constitution is still working, and there are institutions in the form of the judiciary, parliamentary committees and the independent media to provide support.

The majority of the population of our country is in age group of fifteen to thirty-five years, and there is a strong urge to eradicate corruption and to bring a transparent and equitable system. This popular support was reflected in the anti-corruption movement of 2011, and in recent elections. I sincerely hope that the pressure built by this young generation will help to eradicate the problem of corruption.

I once again express my deep gratitude to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for honoring me with such a prestigious award. This will give me further strength to fight the evil of corruption, and will act as a huge morale booster for all honest and sincere civil servants. I accept this award with a huge sense of responsibility, and promise to try my best to live up to the standards set by the luminary community of Magsaysay awardees.

Monumental disasters in recent years have starkly exposed the vulnerabilities of the world’s poor, but have also shown that there is a tremendous wellspring of human empathy that can be tapped to help them. The formidable challenge is to find ever better, more sustainable ways of organizing the effort to help those in need.

In India, ANSHU GUPTA left his job in a well-known firm to devote himself to this task. His journey began in 1999, when he and his wife contributed sixty-seven pieces of personal clothing for the use of the homeless during winter. This experience drew their attention to the vast quantities of underutilized cloth and other materials lying unused in India’s urban households, while many rural poor die because they do not have enough clothing. Thus GUPTA founded Goonj, a volunteer organization built on the powerful, life-changing lessons he learned: that much more than random disaster relief needed to be done; that better ways of mobilizing public concern and assistance had to be organized; and most importantly, that giving must put at the center the recipient’s rights and dignity rather than the giver’s goodness and satisfaction. For GUPTA, extreme poverty is actually a continuing human disaster; hence, giving must have no season. Choosing cloth as an entry point for giving, he has seen its importance for a person’s dignity and survival in a vast country where, aside from disastrous flooding, the winter cold kills many who are underclothed. GUPTA’s own epiphany came in meeting a poorly-clad six-year-old girl who grew up with corpses because her father eked out a living picking up abandoned dead bodies and cremating them for a fee. When he asked the girl what she did to avoid the cold in Delhi’s harsh winter, she said: “When I feel cold, I hug a dead body and sleep.”

Goonj is now a movement working in twenty-one of India’s twenty-nine states, and is much more than a channel for clothing and other recycled articles. Through its staff, its thousands of volunteers, and numerous partner organizations, Goonj redistributes contributed items, and processes cloth and others to fit the identified needs of recipient groups. Dormant, underutilized cloth—including cloth scraps and loose threads—are used to fabricate essential articles like rugs, blankets, mattresses, and even clean cloth sanitary pads, as a hygienic alternative to the rags that poor girls and women use during their menses. Goonj has branded them “MY Pads,” producing to date over three million sanitary pads that are the cheapest in the world, while raising the taboo subject of menstrual hygiene as an issue of social concern.

The Goonj strategy involves the poor in identifying their needs, employs them in recycling and fabrication, and inspires poor communities to undertake projects like building bridges and repairing schools in exchange for clothes and other essential articles. Every year, over a thousand such projects have been undertaken in rural India under Goonj’s “Cloth for Work” initiative, a program that innovatively converts cloth into a development resource.

Today, Goonj handles more than one million kilograms of materials annually; has a wide network of collection and processing centers; and runs a vigorous program that educates the public in sustained and responsible giving. It has had an impact on the lives of millions. Paradoxically, Goonj is concerned less with its organizational growth than with the spread of its ideas. GUPTA says, “We live in a world which has problems in volumes. We need solutions in volumes, and people who work on these in volume. We all need to get up and do something.”

In electing ANSHU GUPTA to receive the 2015 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his creative vision in transforming the culture of giving in India, his enterprising leadership in treating cloth as a sustainable development resource for the poor, and in reminding the world that true giving always respects and preserves human dignity.

On behalf of millions of people in India and the rest of the world, our sincere thanks for this acknowledgment. This award is recognition to the many ‘taken for granted, non-issues,’ and the viable solutions which lie amongst us. In an era of machines, this is a recognition to the needles. We see cloth as a needle in the holistic human development process, and a piece of cloth in the form of a sanitary pad as a needle in the bigger struggle for dignity for millions of women.

We don’t want to change the world; we are ordinary people, we want to improve it first. We strongly feel that somewhere, something is wrong. Because despite a whole lot of us in this room and many similar rooms across the globe who are applying so much intellect, resources, good intentions and hard work to improve our societies, poverty and other troubling issues are not getting resolved. The gap is growing, the issues becoming more complicated.

Perhaps it is time for us to change our vocabulary, to remove demeaning words like “donor” and “beneficiary,” and treat everyone as a stakeholder. It’s time to change the meaning of disaster and accept that half the world doesn’t need a disaster, as poverty is the biggest ongoing disaster. It’s time to stop imposing development agendas and policies, and listen to the people whom these decisions affect. It’s time to reduce charity and dignify giving. It’s time to re-look into our knowledge and intellect and value the wisdom of the grassroots. It’s time to stop treating money as the only currency in the world and start looking for parallel currencies for development.

Today thousands of tonnes of second-hand material, so far treated worldwide as disaster relief material or charitable subject-object, constitute our organization’s currency. Goonj’s ‘Cloth for Work’ invites communities to choose their own problem—whether it is a broken road or a dirty pond, whatever is a real concern—work on that with your wisdom, pay back to the nation in a currency you have—called “labor”—and you are rewarded in a currency that people of the nation have—called “material.” It is about the barter between these two new currencies, labor and material, creating a new economic model. Maybe somewhere in this process is the genesis of a parallel economy which is not cash-based but trash-based.

I hope that when the celebrations around this year’s award are over, there will be some people out there—from the governments, academia, development sector, research organizations, policy makers, opinion leaders and decision makers—who will see this work as a possibility which can turn the tide on the colossal waste we all are facing.

This world is the world of volume. The problems are in volume. We do need solutions in volume and the people who work on those are also needed in volume. No need to have intellectual debates on either/or. It is about AND. Right now we do need more and many different solutions.

We have just been able to touch upon some issues in our part of the world. Goonj is a constructive and positive movement by the common people, for the common people. With all humility from this prestigious stage, we want to give a copyright for others to copy our ideas. Do copy, replicate, add more wisdom and take our Goonj solution to other nations, geographies and communities. Let’s see what can be achieved with the world’s so-called waste. For us, the mission is to grow as an idea and not just as an organization.

I do have high hopes for the youth, even as they are the most troubled with the present; the future is in their hands. In the end, doing good is a collective responsibility and we all truly want to live in a better world.

Thank you for listening and calling us here. I dedicate this beautiful day and this award to my parents—up above watching as shining stars; my family; the amazing Goonj team for standing together in the best and worst of times; the volunteers, and the people of my country, for being with us. Thank you and Jai Hind.

India is a veritable laboratory of social experiments in poverty alleviation and people empowerment. There are spectacular successes as well as uncounted failures. In what succeeds can often be found the story of one person’s self-sacrificing, innovative, and driven by an extraordinary passion to lift people from poverty and suffering.

One such person is KULANDAI FRANCIS. Born to a poor family in the Salem district of Tamil Nadu, he was the only one of his siblings to go to university. FRANCIS carried with him two indelible memories of his early years: his parents sacrificing their only piece of land so he could attend university, and his mother being cheated by moneylenders out of what little she had. Resolved to live a life of service, he joined the Fathers of the Holy Cross in 1970 and, during his novitiate, found some fulfillment in doing volunteer work among people struck by famine or displaced by war. When he went to live in Natrampalayam, a remote and impoverished part of Krishnagiri district, he had the life-changing experience of sharing in both the people’s miseries and their dreams. He decided to give up being a priest to devote himself wholly to social work.

In 1979, he began the Integrated Village Development Project (IVDP) in Krishnagiri, starting out with small projects: conducting a night school in the light of gas lamps, setting up a first-aid center. Then, with the help of development organizations, he undertook a micro-watershed program that, over twenty-two years, built 331 mostly small check dams benefitting cultivators and their families in sixty villages. And still, FRANCIS was not content. He knew he needed to do something that could be sustained for the long term, even without external assistance.

The breakthrough came with the women’s self-help groups (SHGs) that IVDP began organizing in 1989. These savings-and-credit groups have grown into an all-women movement of 8,231 SHGs with 153,990 members, with total savings of equivalent to US$40 million, a cumulative loan portfolio of equivalent to US$435 million, and a reserve fund of US$8.9 million. What impresses is not just IVDP’s scale. The program has become a financially disciplined, self-reliant, member-owned, and member-managed organization; the group’s solidarity and access to credit have fueled successful village programs in health and sanitation, housing, livelihood, and children’s education, including scholarships, performance-based incentives for students and schools, a primary school for tribal children, and a computer training academy that has, to date, trained some 5,000 children.

FRANCIS has accomplished this using an approach that has broken through the financial limits of traditional microfinance approaches. Organized into clusters and federations, SHGs are directly linked to banks through group accounts, bulk deposits, and loans that have given the SHGs the power to leverage preferential bank treatment. At the same time, the women have won respect by demonstrating that the poor can manage their finances effectively and reliably.

In large part, all this has come to pass because, as FRANCIS believes, “when people want to do something, they can.” Despite his organization’s spectacular growth, FRANCIS continues to inspire by example, living a simple life with the people he is serving. A missionary in the truest sense, he muses, “Real happiness comes when I see people developing, children are improving, and suffering is removed.”

In electing KULANDAI FRANCIS to receive the 2012 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his visionary zeal, his profound faith in community energies, and his sustained programs in pursuing the holistic economic empowerment of thousands of women and their families in rural India.

The response from my heart is thanks for the recognition of IVDP through this award to me. When the award was announced I was unaffected. But a few hours later, a flurry of calls came in from all quarters, lavishing appreciation following media reports of the award. This was followed by interviews with the press and TV channels. Congratulations poured into my e-mail box. People queued up in my office to felicitate me.

I began to understand the meaning of this award to the society around me. Then I slowly woke up to the multitude of appreciation that brought to light the significance of work done in one corner of Tamil Nadu. Thanks to the foundation’s trustees for their gigantic task in scanning across India and locating IVDP’s work for recognition.

The road which I passed through was not one of roses; it was instead full of thorns. It was not easy for me to realize my objective. This honor acknowledges IVDP’s poverty alleviation programs and the sustainable solutions it found to the problems of people who faced drought that forced them to migrate in search of livelihood.

The uniqueness of IVDP is that it is for the people, by the people and of the people, where the lives of SHG members are secured, savings are safe, and loans are available at affordable cost. It is member-focused, member-owned, autonomous and with a built-in system that ensures higher percentage of repayment. Success goes to our women members who proved that the community can be transformed by them through savings and livelihood creation, through mutual cooperation and understanding.

I’m happy to place on record the fact that IVDP had changed the outlook of banks towards women in the villages. Inaccessible credit became accessible to the so-called “ineligible” poor women. Creditworthiness in turn groomed them as reliable clients. Now they are regarded as first-rate clients by the banks. Thus, our model is sustained by our women in the process of IVDP’s ongoing activities.

At this juncture, I wish to express my thanks to many-my special thanks-to my parents, the Fathers of the Holy Cross, my life partner and the IVDP team for their constant support and encouragement in sustaining my motivation in my work.

I would like to sum up my IVDP experience by asserting a fact of life, that is “to give toiling people an appropriate opportunity and they will multiply the outputs in several folds.” The requirement at present is not praying lips, but a bona fide helping hands.

I would like to accept this award and the honor and credit that goes with it on behalf of IVDP’s 150,000 women members who are the real pillars behind the organization’s landmark achievements.

My final word of response to this award is….Nandri (thank you) for the recognition to IVDP’s women!