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.

Burdened by endemic poverty and a weak, corruption-ridden economy, the Philippines took a major shift in the 1990s when it pursued a policy of liberalized, export-led, globally competitive growth. A key component in this shift was the creation the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) to revive the country’s export processing zones, replacing the earlier agency which had failed dismally in boosting export-oriented investments. PEZA was placed under the leadership of a career public servant who, in over twenty-one years, has built the organization into a showcase of successful regulatory reform, a model institution of honest and committed public service, and a key contributor to the nation’s economic growth.

This public servant was LILIA B. DE LIMA. Born in Iriga City, Camarines Sur province, and raised in a family of public servants, her upbringing instilled in her the imperatives of integrity and the ideals of public service. Trained in law, she pursued a career in government, serving in various senior assignments until in 1995, she was asked to serve as PEZA’s first Director-General charged with promoting and regulating foreign investments in the country’s economic zones. Her first challenge was to regain the trust of investors grown skeptical of the country’s institutional capability and political will to spur economic growth. And her performance was ultimately to be measured by how increased investor trust would be converted into actual gainful employment for Filipinos nationwide.

Bucking tremendous pressures and threats, Director-General DE LIMA single-mindedly pursued a program of reform: she determinedly halved the bloated 1,000-person bureaucracy she had inherited from a system of political patronage; she developed PEZA’s work culture into one marked by honesty, efficiency and, quite literally, one-stop, nonstop service. Putting the right systems in place and leading by strict and consistent example, she gradually transformed a failed agency into a model of transparent, productive, and customer-friendly efficiency, one that the World Bank has cited for demonstrating “best practices” in ecozone management worldwide.

Under LILIA DE LIMA’s leadership, PEZA enabled the rise of the Philippines as one of the region’s top investment destinations. Among the radical policies that made this possible were a shift from government-financed to private sector-led ecozone development; streamlined 24/7 PEZA operations to reliably service global locators; investor-friendly regulations, purposeful interagency partnerships, and strengthened relations with local governments in the ecozones. Defying conventional wisdom, she successfully encouraged existing locators to expand operations despite the volatilities of the global economy.

During her term, PEZA’s accomplishments have been nothing short of spectacular. The number of PEZA ecozones increased by 2,000%, from the initial 16 she inherited to 343 by 2016; the number of registered enterprises rose from 331 to 3,756; investments reached PhP 3 trillion; and ecozone exports totaled US$ 629 billion. Also during DE LIMA’s tenure, PEZA remitted to the national treasury PhP 16.6 billion in corporate income taxes and dividends, and paid off the PhP 4.6 billion debt of its predecessor agency. What is most deeply gratifying to DE LIMA, who is acutely aware of the urgency of the problem of joblessness, is that PEZA has generated, in direct and indirect employment, some 6.3 million jobs for Filipinos.

In a world where there is rampant cynicism and real pain about how governments function, examples of public servants like DE LIMA and her PEZA team are especially impressive. And yet, reflecting on her career, she says: “I cannot solve the problems of the world but if in my own little area I can make a difference, then I must make that difference.” For all workers in government, it is a credo to follow.

In electing LILIA B. DE LIMA to receive the 2017 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her unstinting, sustained leadership in building a credible and efficient PEZA, proving that the honest, competent and dedicated work of public servants can, indeed, redound to real economic benefits to millions of Filipinos.

I thank the Lord for this significant milestone in my life. Thank you most sincerely, Ramon Magsaysay Awards Foundation, for recognizing my work at the Philippine Economic Zone Authority or PEZA. Truly, this is a blessing to be awarded for work I enjoyed doing. My 21 years at PEZA was a privilege as it was a commitment. It gave me the opportunity to serve my country and help generate employment for our people. Thanks to the investors, who trusted in our capability to ensure that their operations can be set up at the soonest time and at the least cost undertaken with the PEZA hallmark brand of service, “One-stop shop, non-stop shop, no red tape, and no corruption.”

It wasn’t all a walk in the park. We inherited an extremely bloated bureaucracy. Trimming the fat by 60% was a long, torturous, and emotionally-draining process. It was the most bruising experience in my public career. Everything was thrown at me, but we did not waver and we cleaned up. As we strengthened the organization, we also instituted sweeping structural and policy reforms to remain competitive and address the ever-changing investment climate. All these paid off. PEZA gradually transformed into clean and efficient organization with highly-motivated, hardworking professional individuals. And I hope, I hope, they will continue to be so.

Our mantra from day one is absolute honesty and utmost service in all our dealings with our stakeholders. I am proud to have worked with my PEZAns, and with them I shared this award. I must likewise thank the investors, many of them I see here tonight.

The question most often asked is how I survived 4 presidents of different political persuasions and management styles. My answer is simple: Do your job with integrity and professionalism, and the bottomline will show it. It’s the best credential you can have and the only endorsement you will need.

But tonight, we honor the beloved president Ramon Magsaysay, who believed that a high and unwavering sense of morality should pervade all spears of governmental activity. I am reminded of his words of wisdom that remains as relevant today. And he said, and I quote, “I believe the president should set up the example of a big heart, an honest mind, sound instincts, the virtue of healthy and patience, and an abiding love for the common man. Guns alone are not the answer. We must provide hope for young peoples, for better housing, clothing, and food. And if we do, the radicals will wither away.”

Ramon Magsaysay has given us that heartbeat for humanity. What we have all been awarded for is in rhythm with the pulse that gleans towards what is right, what is just, what is good, and what is free to make ours a better world. This singular award, its salience and substance, and the precious memory it stands for, I shall forever treasure.

It is a land of familiar ironies and contrasts. An archipelago of astounding natural wealth and one of the world’s fastest-rising economies, Indonesia is also a country where the environment is threatened and poverty is widespread. The government is aggressively expanding power generation capacity to feed the economy but 90 percent of installed capacity still depends on “dirty” fossil fuels and, even then, over a hundred million Indonesians, or half the nation’s population, are without electricity.

It is both a daunting problem and an exciting possibility, turning Indonesia’s vast reserves of sustainable energy into power, and at the same time releasing the dormant economic power of its rural population. This is the challenge that drives the life of TRI MUMPUNI.

Born in Semarang, Central Java, her father an economist, her mother a social worker, MUMPUNI developed a social conscience early in life, and, after earning a degree in social economics, immersed herself in rural development work. A turning point came in 1980 when she married Iskandar Kuntoadji, an engineer who in 1979 helped form Yayasan Mandiri, the first Indonesian nongovernment organization to promote hydropower technology for community development. Though the group was short-lived, Kuntoadji built considerable knowledge in hydropower technology. With his technical expertise and MUMPUNI’s social development commitment and entrepreneurial abilities, in 1993 the young couple formed People-Centered Business and Economic Institute, with the Indonesian acronym IBEKA, short for Institut Bisnis dan Ekonomi Kerakyatan. As a nongovernment organization, IBEKA committed itself to developing micro hydropower systems for impoverished rural communities.

This proved to be a daunting undertaking. As IBEKA’s leader, MUMPUNI had to struggle with restrictive state regulations, complex financing requirements, and the draining demands of social mobilization work. To meet the twin challenges of a social enterprise, remaining viable as a business without compromising its social mission’she had to focus all her energies on working at the level of the poorest communities, as well as with the highest government authorities. Operating deeply in the country’s remote regions had its grave dangers: in Aceh in 2008, MUMPUNI and her husband were kidnapped by former rebels, brought into the jungle, and forced to raise money from family and friends to ransom their freedom.

Skill, creativity, and determination, however, have turned IBEKA into an outstanding Indonesian example of social entrepreneurship, and cast MUMPUNI as a much-admired and influential leader in the field of community-based renewable energy. From its base in Subang, West Java, IBEKA has built sixty micro hydropower plants, with capacities ranging from 5 kilowatts to 250 kilowatts, providing electricity to half a million people in rural Indonesia. Equally important, it has done this through a community-based development approach that goes beyond the technology to the socioeconomic empowerment of communities. Putting a premium on community participation and ownership, IBEKA organizes electric cooperatives, trains villagers in technical management and resource conservation, and provides support in fund-facilitation and income-generating activities.

MUMPUNI works at the national level in promoting the role of hydropower in development, and in designing and implementing new models of government-business-community joint ventures in micro hydropower facilities. Boldly enterprising, she has effectively lobbied for changes in state policy that now allow independent micro hydropower plants to sell electricity to the government’s national grid. Despite what IBEKA has already accomplished, MUMPUNI knows that the task ahead remains formidable: there are still some twenty thousand villages without any electricity. But this is not just about technology and numbers. She says, “Electricity is not our main goal, but the potential to build villages that are economically empowered. This is my highest task.”

In electing TRI MUMPUNI to receive the 2011 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her determined and collaborative efforts to promote micro hydropower technology, catalyze needed policy changes, and ensure full community participation, in bringing electricity and the fruits of development to the rural areas of Indonesia.

I believe that poverty is not the problem of development; poverty is a symptom of the larger problem of local communities who are disconnected from the local resources surrounding them, that can contribute to their human well-being. We are now living in a world of great disconnectedness: this is apparent at so many different levels. Many people, especially the poor, carry a sense of inadequacy from being part of a system that sees them not for what they are, but as numbers and elements of some statistical ledger.

IBEKA was founded by my husband and I in the 1990s, to unify what was even then breaking apart and disconnected; IBEKA sought to change this by sharing the world the way it is meant to be shared. Community has to be reconnected to their local resources, and the technology used has to be brought closer to the community. Thus the idea of “Community-Based Electrical Power Supply” was born. I thank my dear husband Iskandar for pioneering the concept and serving as my inspiration. Also for the many sacrifices he has made over the years, in ensuring that our vision of personal happiness is continually augmented by our caring for others! He has always been by my side, showing that a deep spirit of love binds us in this magnificent enterprise of life.

I assert that, contrary to general belief, we live in a generous world of great abundance: alongside this belief is my conviction that eradicating poverty succeeds only if this natural abundance is shared, nurtured, and guarded. Furthermore, natural wealth is to be shared at the grassroots level; wealth cannot be created or sustained by “top-down” approaches. Through the construction of micro-hydro generation plants in isolated communities previously without electricity, IBEKA has shown that our approach can succeed. Now, we would like to broaden our approach by using other technologies that will allow for increased economic impact but still in a sustainable way.

IBEKA and our community partners are propagators of sound eco-management. We are also guardians. IBEKA seeks to ensure that every investment made will create tangible welfare at the community level: every rupiah we spend must be put to good use. That is why we create community institutions that assume responsibility for operation and maintenance of facilities, as well as ultimate ownership.

Economic productivity is the outcome of such community-driven designs. IBEKA offers different micro hydropower models: one is an isolated power-grid operated and maintained by the community for their community’s own electrification; the other model is where redundant energy can be sold back to the grid. Income generated from such sale is put to collective use for village development purposes, such as giving scholarships to poor families. The great beauty of both approaches is that the entire structure is consensus-based, not imposed from the outside!

I am deeply honored to be part of a lineage of Ramon Magsaysay award recipients that include people like Mother Theresa and Muhammad Yunus: champions of the frail and poor, They and other Magsaysay awardees have always intuitively understood that in order for us all to be happy, we need to bring together disparate pieces into a whole: they are holistic thinkers with a deep respect for the community, and for the individuals that make up these pockets of living cultures.

I would like to end with a warm thank-you to all my colleagues at IBEKA, without whose passion and commitment I would not be standing here today: so this award honors you, too, dear fellow travelers on this path of unification!

My deepest thank you to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for honoring us with this great prize: it is my heart-felt wish that all 1.8 billion people in the Asia-Pacific region will share equitably and fairly in our wonderful natural resources, and that all people everywhere have access to basic energy in the form of electricity at a fair and affordable price! My final wish is that we all become good stewards of our responsibilities, and inspire others to share all the good things of this world!

Building technology to serve the poor is a major challenge in the world today. Technology’s benefits must be brought to people, whatever their status, wherever they are, and in ways they can own and sustain. This is essential to promoting development, addressing poverty, and empowering communities.

For the past fifteen years, a small non-profit organization in the province of Negros Occidental, the Philippines has been addressing precisely this challenge. The ALTERNATIVE INDIGENOUS DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION, INC. (AIDFI) is a social enterprise that tackles the problem of rural poverty by designing, fabricating, and promoting environment-friendly technology which is accessible and income augmenting, for the poor.

AIDFI was initially born out of the social turmoil that accompanied the collapse of the sugar industry in Negros during the 1980s. Hundreds of workers and farmers were displaced and the survival of peasant families was severely threatened. In the wake of this crisis, a small group of social activists which included Auke Idzenga, a Dutch marine engineer, decided to form AIDFI to address the basic needs of the affected farmers. Agricultural production and technology development were their initial strategies, but meager funds and the loss of key members forced the organization to close down. When Idzenga returned to Negros in 1997, however, AIDFI was revived, this time with a clearer focus on innovating technology to help poor, rural families.

AIDFI’s first success came when it redesigned an ancient and largely abandoned technology called the ram pump. The ram pump uses the natural kinetic energy of flowing water from rivers or springs, to push water uphill without the use of gas or electricity. As reinvented by AIDFI, the ram pump can lift water to an upland reservoir, with a volume of 1,500 to 72,000 liters of water per day. Partnering with organizations and local governments, AIDFI does not only introduce machinery, but a whole “social package” which includes community consultation, training of village technicians, transfer of ownership of the water system to the community, and the organization of local water associations to manage the water generation and distribution system.

In introducing the ram pump system to upland communities that do not have easy access to water, AIDFI technicians are able to provide clean, cheap water for household use, livestock raising, aquaculture, and small-scale agriculture. Since reinventing the ram pump technology, AIDFI has fabricated, installed, and transferred 227 ram pumps that now benefit 184 upland communities in Negros Occidental and other provinces across the country. AIDFI has also brought the ram pump technology to help waterless upland communities in other countries; it is now carrying out complete ram pump technology transfer in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Nepal.

AIDFI continues to innovate on technology for the poor. To increase rural incomes, AIDFI has designed and fabricated an essential oil distiller that can process lemongrass into organic oil for industrial users. It transfers this technology to the farmers and provides packaging and marketing support, and a distribution network that now reaches other countries. Going even further, AIDFI has established a “technopark” in their office premises to actually showcase and demonstrate AIDFI-designed technologies that range from cooking and agricultural implements to a biogas plant and a windmill which can generate up to 800 watts of electricity.

In promoting grassroots enterprise, AIDFI has placed the premium on small-scale, accessible, low-maintenance technology that is customized for local needs, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and one owned and managed by the people themselves. Its struggle to exist as a viable organization has been most trying in both institutional and human terms, but AIDFI has pioneered a way that has already transformed the lives of thousands of rural families.

In electing ALTERNATIVE INDIGENOUS DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION, INC., to receive the 2011 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes their collective vision, technological innovations, and partnership practices to make appropriate technologies improve the lives and livelihoods of the rural poor in upland Philippine communities and elsewhere in Asia.

It’s a great honor for me and the Alternative Indigenous Development Foundation to be here on the stage receiving Asia’s most prestigious award. It’s a crown on the hard work done by mostly silent heroes who come from the grassroots. We are very thankful to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for selecting us. This award will help spread our organization’s work faster. May I request all my colleagues to stand up and share the spotlight and then be fully energized.

For AIDFI this means developing the rural communities or, rather, cultivating communities. Young people in the uplands are losing interest in farming because of its low status. But with our essential oil project right in the middle of the mountains, we have proven that with innovative technologies and techniques beneficiaries feel proud and start cooperating again, a value long lost because of the need for economic survival. For these kinds of projects we need decentralized access to water and energy, preferably renewable energy. These require machines, which can be produced locally and lead to industrialization.

The AIDFI ram pump model is our flagship, and the only technology we have successfully elevated out of the pioneering stage. Now we have installation teams all over the country. We are also carrying out technology transfer to other countries: Afghanistan, Colombia and Nepal, with more to come. We have exported some ram pumps to Malaysia and Japan as well.

We believe our success is due to our passion, drive, consistency and hard work. All this despite the absence of government support. All our technologies could spin off into small factories or enterprises that can help provide basic needs and create employment in rural communities.

Development work is not easy at all in the Philippines context. Everything is strangled by politics.

Lately we encountered how a mishandled agrarian reform case of one member of our essential oil project resulted in the complete blockage of the factory, depriving 25 cooperative members of their livelihood for months. In defending this case I have also been called a troublemaker, received a Petition non Grata, even called a terrorist by a regional government official.

We in AIDFI have felt the fresh wind of this new government especially at the top. We have seen the serious concern of the agrarian reform secretary for our case. At the same time the Land Bank and the Department of Agriculture have shown serious interest in adapting our ram pump for irrigation. But we know it is still a long way to get this seriousness down to the lowest levels. National government cannot do this alone; strong cooperation with the academe and NGOs, among others, is vital. Government has the resources and NGOs like AIDFI have the grassroots connections, the passion and drive to work with the poor.

We also should rethink and see the opportunities in the uplands, areas long neglected. Unless we do this, the late Bishop Fortich, himself a Magsaysay awardee, warned, “the social volcano is going to burst.” My fondest hope is that our government will create an environment in which programs like ours can thrive. With the Filipinos’ great ability, the Philippines’ tremendous potentials, and strong cooperation among stakeholders, we can be a great nation.

And don’t worry. Despite the difficulties, AIDFI and I will remain at the service of the poor from the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia.

Nangi Village, where MAHABIR PUN was born, rests high in the Himalayan foothills of western Nepal. Here and in surrounding Myagdi District live the PUN Magar, whose men for generations have soldiered across the globe as Gurkhas. Yet, their worldly careers have done little to change their sleepy homeland, so far from the traffic patterns that knit together the rest of the world. Indeed, Nangi is seven hours’ hard climb from the nearest road. No telephone lines have ever reached it. Despite this, these days the people of Nangi are definitely connected to the world outside. Wireless Internet technology has made this possible. MAHABIR PUN has made it happen.

PUN passed his boyhood grazing cattle and sheep in mountain pastures and attending a village school that had no paper or pencils or books. Wanting more for his son, PUN’s father moved the family to Nepal’s lowlands, where, in Chitwan, PUN finished high school and became a teacher, working for twelve years to help his younger siblings through school. Finally, a timely scholarship led him to a bachelor’s degree at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Then, in 1992, after more than twenty years away, PUN returned home to Nangi, determined to make things easier for other youths than they had been for him.

Nangi’s leaders were busy establishing a village high school. PUN eagerly joined in. Once a month, he made the two-day trip to the nearest major town of Pokhara to check his email and maintain his links to friends abroad. This led, in 1997, to the donation of four used computers from Australia. Powering them with hydro-generators in a nearby stream, PUN began teaching computer classes at the Nangi High School. More computers followed, but it proved impossible to get a telephone connection to Pokhara and the Internet.

PUN emailed the British Broadcasting Corporation, asking for ideas. In 2001, the BBC publicized his dilemma and within a year volunteers from Europe and the United States were helping him rig a wireless connection between Nangi and the neighboring village of Ramche, using TV dish antennas mounted in trees. Some small grants soon led to the construction of improvised mountaintop relay stations and a link to Pokhara. By 2003, Nangi was online.

As word of PUN’s project bounced around the World Wide Web, backpacking volunteers carried more and more donated computers, parts, and equipment into the hills. PUN expanded the wireless network to embrace twelve villages-distributing ninety used computers to local schools and communication centers, connecting them to the Internet, teaching teachers how to use them, and then troubleshooting until everything worked.

Today, connectivity is changing Myagdi. Using PUN’s “tele-teaching” network, good teachers in one school now instruct students in others. Local health workers use Wi-Fi to consult specialists in Pokhara. Once-isolated students surf the Net and are learning globe-savvy skills. Villagers e-market local products such as buffaloes, honey, teas, and jams and use the Web to draw paying trekkers to campsites outfitted with solar-powered hot showers. In parallel projects, the people of Nangi have added a library, health clinic, and new high-school classrooms. Meanwhile in Kathmandu, PUN has successfully lobbied parliament to legitimize and democratize wireless technology in Nepal.

PUN, now fifty-two, is both self-effacing and charismatic. “I’m not in charge of anything,” he says. Yet, he seems to be the driving force of much around him. Eventually, he says, the people of Myagdi District will have to carry on for themselves. In the meantime, he hopes to play his unique role indefinitely. “As long as I can walk,” PUN says happily, “I can do this.”

In electing MAHABIR PUN to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his innovative application of wireless computer technology in Nepal, bringing progress to remote mountain areas by connecting his village to the global village.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow awardees, and brothers and sisters.

All of us grow up with lots of wishes. And we know for a fact that many of the wishes that we make can’t be fulfilled. As a young boy my wishes were to have enough food to eat, and warm clothes and shoes to wear. I wished to have books to read, pens and papers to write on. As I grew older, I wished to go to college and to become an engineer so that I could get a better job and have a good life. However, many of my were wishes not fulfilled.

Memories of my old days’ unfulfilled wishes have become my vision of creating better educational opportunities for rural children and creating job opportunities for disadvantage people so that they can have meaningful, peaceful and better lives. The wireless network that we created in some of the mountain villages for educational, medical, and local e-commerce purposes was just a small part of my vision to create better learning opportunities for the children, to provide medical assistance to villagers during emergency situations, and to bring communication tools for the villagers. We still have a long way to go to make the wireless technology truly useful for the people, and to replicate the wireless network all over the country.

I am not the only person to have this vision. This was the vision of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, who worked hard to improve the lives of fellow Filipinos and helped them live freely, happily and with justice. This is a common vision of all young people, parents, and community leaders around the world, who are working hard to help others live happily with justice and in liberty.

However, I never wished to get any kind of award. For the last fifteen years, I was working only to fulfill my vision within my capacity. Therefore this award was the greatest surprise of my life, and I am very thankful for it. This award has boosted my spirit very much and I feel much younger now even if I have crossed half a century of my life.

Let me share with you my lifelong vision, for I believe that visions will only be wishes if we don’t share it and work on it. The first vision I have is to set up vocational training schools for rural people so that the young can get better jobs in the national and international job market. The second is to help people start income generating programs in rural areas that are viable there to create the local economy and to create jobs locally. My third vision is to establish a college by 2015 and a university later on for the children of poor people, who can’t afford to go to college or university. My fourth vision is to bring information and communication technology to the remote villages of my country and use it for educational, medical, commercial and communication purposes. I am working on this vision with like-minded fellows in Nepal.

This international recognition will be helpful for us to reach the visions that I mentioned. In this way, we will be able to help a little to make the vision of late President Ramon Magsaysay come true. We will make it happen not by word but by deed.

Thank you.

Even in the best of times, it is arid in the Alwar district of Rajasthan, India. Yet not so long ago, streams and rivers in Alwar’s forest-covered foothills watered its villages and farms dependably and created there a generous if fragile human habitat. People lived prudently within this habitat, capturing precious monsoon rainwater in small earthen reservoirs called johads and revering the forest, from which they took sparingly.

The twentieth century opened Alwar to miners and loggers who decimated its forests and damaged its watershed. Its streams and rivers dried up, then its farms. Dangerous floods now accompanied the monsoon rains. Overwhelmed by these calamities, villagers abandoned their johads. As men shifted to the cities for work, women spirited frail crops from dry ground and walked several kilometers a day to find water. Thus was Alwar when RAJENDRA SINGH first arrived in 1985.

That was the year twenty-eight-year-old SINGH left his job in Jaipur and committed himself to rural development. With four companions from the small organization he led, Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS, Young India Association), he boarded a bus and traveled to a desolate village at the end of the line. Upon advice of a local sage, he began organizing villagers to repair and deepen old johads. 

When the refurbished ponds filled high with water after the monsoon rains, villagers were joyous and SINGH realized that the derelict johads offered a key to restoring Alwar’s degraded habitat. Once repaired, they not only stored precious rainwater but also replenished moisture in the soil and recharged village wells and streams. Moreover, villagers could make johads themselves using local skills and traditional technology.

As TBS went to work, SINGH recruited a small staff of social workers and hundreds of volunteers. Expanding village by village — to 750 villages today — he and his team helped people identify their water-harvesting needs and assisted them with projects, but only when the entire village committed itself and pledged to meet half the costs. Aside from johads, TBS helped villagers repair wells and other old structures and mobilized them to plant trees on the hillsides to prevent erosion and restore the watershed. SINGH coordinated all these activities to mesh with the villagers’ traditional cycle of rituals. Meanwhile, with others, TBS waged a long and ultimately successful campaign to persuade India’s Supreme Court to close hundreds of mines and quarries that were despoiling Sariska National Park.

Guided by Gandhi’s teachings of local autonomy and self-reliance, SINGH has introduced community-led institutions to each village. The Gram Sabha manages water conservation structures and sets the rules for livestock grazing and forest use. The Mahila Mandal organizes the local women’s savings and credit society. And the River Parliament, representing ninety villages, determines the allocation and price of water along the Arvari River.

Now, 4,500 working johads dot Alwar and ten adjacent districts. Fed by a protected watershed and the revitalizing impact of the village reservoirs, five once-dormant rivers now flow year round. Land under cultivation has grown by five times and farm incomes are rising. For work, men no longer need to leave home. And for water, these days women need walk no farther than the village well.

RAJENDRA SINGH is TBS’s charismatic motivator. Villagers call him Bai Sahab, Elder Brother, and listen to his every word. People have become greedy, he tells them. They should learn again to be grateful to nature. That is why, he says, in Alwar, “the first thing we do in the morning is touch the earth with reverence.”

In electing RAJENDRA SINGH to receive the 2001 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his leading Rajasthani villagers in the steps of their ancestors to rehabilitate their degraded habitat and bring its dormant rivers back to life.

Your Excellency President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, brothers and sisters, distinguished guests.

It is with great humility that I accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. This Award really belongs to those communities in Rajasthan in northern India, who have worked against tremendous odds to bring life back to their lands. They share this achievement with the men and women of the Tarun Bharat Sangh who have shown courage and determination.

Some 16 years ago when I arrived in Bheekampura village in Alwar District, we found that lack of water was driving young people away from theirhomes. Forced to abandon their families and the village, people had lost hope of seeing better days. The government had declared Alwar a “dark” zone, meaning an area suffering from severe water shortage.

However, the elders in the villages still had among them the wisdom of their ancestors. Working side by side with TBS, they built traditional earthen dams known as johads. These small-scale, low-cost structures do not look like very much but taken together in hundreds and thousands, they have changed the face of this part of India. With water has come productivity, more income, a sense of community and a real feeling of self-reliance.

In 1996, we were amazed to find Arvari River flowing even at the peak of summer. We had been building water harvesting structures in the catchment area of Arvari over the years without realizing that we were in fact recharging the river through underground percolation. Since then 4 more rivers have become perennial.

With the arrival of water, problems of sharing arose. As a result Arvari Sansad (or River Parliament) came into existence representing 72 villages. This Parliament meets four times a year.

On another front, TBS had to wage a difficult battle against powerful marble mine owners who were destroying the ecology of the Sariska Tiger Sanctuary. Being located in the periphery of this Sanctuary, we filed a petition in the Supreme Court of India. While the case was on, I and my colleagues had to face continuous harassment and character assassination. The Supreme Court in its judgment vindicated our stand and over 450 marble mines were closed down in 1992.

I may mention that Mahatma Gandhi has a special place in my perception and ideas. He wanted every village to be self-reliant. Our efforts culminating in this Award are a small tribute to Mahatma’s vision and thinking.

Since being named a Ramon Magsaysay laureate, I have told my brothers and sisters back in India that this Award is a recognition of their untiring efforts. I have told them that the decision-making process leading to the building of johads can be replicated in other parts of India and in Asian countries where communities face similar challenges.

This Award will inspire communities of Alwar and other parts of Rajasthan where we work.

On their behalf, I am proud to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you.

The slums of modern Karachi, known as katchi abadis, began as the shanty towns of Muslim Indian refugees to Pakistan at the time of Partition. They swelled in the 1950s as rural folk sought jobs in Karachi’s burgeoning industries and swelled again when civil war overtook East Pakistan in 1971.

These spontaneous settlements of the uprooted poor grew with such speed that they wholly outstripped the government’s attempts to control them, flooding the city center and forming hundreds of illegal “colonies” on its periphery. In them, the striving poor lived in squalor, without titles, without services, without sewers and drains and water mains. They still do, in more than five hundred katchi abadis. In them live 40 percent of Karachi’s population: four million people!

Addressing this reality in 1972, the government of Pakistan declared that katchi abadis should be legally acknowledged (or “regularized”) and integrated into the city proper with infrastructure and services. But for many years thereafter little was accomplished. Urban councils failed at the task and so, too, did the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority, or SKAA, which the government established in 1987 to address the squatter problem in Sindh Province. But when TASNEEM AHMED SIDDIQUI became director general of SKAA in 1991, things changed.

As a trainee at Pakistan’s prestigious Civil Service Academy, SIDDIQUI met Akhter Hameed Khan. The young SIDDIQUI imbibed the formidable Khan’s moral passion to alleviate poverty and also his community-building approach to doing so. Later, as director general of the Hyderabad Development Authority, SIDDIQUI designed Khuda-ki-Basti, a housing project for the urban poor that imitated the way illegal squatters actually build their neighborhoods. Rejecting the stereotype of the poor as freeloaders and criminals, he saw the katchi abadis as centers of dynamism whose occupants were both industrious and resourceful. Projects like Khuda-ki-Basti succeed, he says, because they tap the “poor’s huge potential for finding solutions to their own problems.”

At SKAA, SIDDIQUI cut boldly through mounds of red tape to make it easier for katchi abadis to be regularized. He wrested control of the lease-assigning process from sluggish local councils and streamlined it, thereby giving slum residents swift security of tenure and making SKAA self-financing. He utilized practical low-cost technologies for SKAA infrastructure projects, weeding out corrupt contractors and reducing costs. He worked closely with the Orangi Pilot Project and NGOs to improve SKAA’s engagement with the communities and to enhance social services such as health care, family planning, credit, and education. Critically, SIDDIQUI and his staff established a working rapport with the katchi abadi dwellers themselves. They now install and pay for their own water and sewerage systems, maintain SKAA-built storm drains, coordinate the neighborhood leasing process, and collaborate with SKAA and NGOs to introduce the social services they most need. As active partners in upgrading their own neighborhoods, they are the key to the program’s sustainability.

Despite SIDDIQUI’s fast-track approach, the process is painstaking and slow. Many katchi abadis remain beyond the benevolent reach of SKAA’s small staff of 175. SIDDIQUI himself has been transferred in and out of the agency. Still, in hundreds of Karachi’s poorest neighborhoods, a quiet transformation has been set in motion.

For someone who likes to shake up the system, fifty-nine-year-old SIDDIQUI is a man of mild manners and considerate ways. He is famously accessible. He returns phone calls. Yet, as a reformer, he has been stung by smear campaigns and bureaucratic reprisals. About this and about the magnitude of the task his agency faces daily, he says, “I am a realist.” And adds, “And an optimist.”

In electing TASNEEM AHMED SIDDIQUI to receive the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his demonstrating that a committed government agency working in partnership with NGOs and with the poor themselves can turn the tide against Pakistan’s crippling shelter crisis.

It is a great honour for me to accept this prestigious award. I feel particularly privileged because my election for this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award, while recognizing that third world societies are in transition, supports the view that good government is possible if the method of governance were to be redefined and government decision-making made more participatory.

33 years ago when I joined the Civil Service of Pakistan, I was a young idealist. In my work I saw a great opportunity and potential to do good work for the country, particularly for the down-trodden and the under privileged.

Halfway through my career, the changing society in Pakistan changed more rapidly than the government could keep pace with. As a result, the writ of the government ran thin, and many of my colleagues fell victims to despair or opportunism. Apathy, indecisiveness and compromise became the hallmark of government service in Pakistan.

Against this discouraging background, I resolved to persist in my endeavor to understand the dynamics of change from the perspective of a civil servant. It was my observation that in spite of the government’s many weaknesses, there was sufficient space for organizing people and testing new concepts for achieving the prescribed objectives. What it needed was perseverance, a clear vision and commitment.

Once an outcast from the coveted Civil Service of Pakistan, my work gradually came to be recognized as a real option for reestablishing effective government. However, I must confess that I have not done anything great. I have only done what a good civil servant is expected to do.

Briefly, a few points need highlighting:

1. At a philosophical level, one can state the obvious: that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. At a practical level, as government functionaries, rather than losing heart, it is our responsibility to search for options for maintaining social stability and economic development.

2. Rather than trying to replace government functions with non-government organizations, the government should use NGOs for research and demonstration so that its own functioning may be upgraded. It is the responsibility and mandate of the government to provide basic services to its people, especially the low-income communities.

3. The only way we can achieve effective government is by reforming it, not through slogan-mongering but through professional and persistent efforts on the part of the enlightened government functionaries, committed professionals and concerned citizens. Governments have also to discard conventional approaches and evolve pro-people processes of planning and implementation, based on structured partnerships with all relevant groups.

I hope the recognition of my work can help the cause of good governance in Pakistan. I also hope my younger colleagues in government will recognize the need for change, and find inspiration and direction in the work we have been doing in different facets of public life.

I thank you once again for the honor you have done me. I would also like to thank the many people who have and are continuing to work with me. I particularly wish to thank my wife and my children who have stood steadfast through difficult times, without whose encouragement and support I could not have pursued my professional compulsions so single-mindedly.

On any given Sunday morning in the small city of Chiayi in south-central Taiwan, a merry band of citizens can be seen boarding trucks and riding off to the countryside. In private cars and on motorcycles, others join the convoy until, from near and far, they all assemble at a single site beside a river. Donning bamboo sun hats and baseball caps, the pilgrims take up shovels and hoes, baskets and pails, to build a bridge. Leading the party will be seventy-three-year-old HO MING-TEH, a bald and jolly Pied Piper who has built more than two hundred bridges in Taiwan’s Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan Counties during the past twenty-five years.

HO Ming-teh, a devout Buddhist and former grocer, had already embarked upon a few modest projects, mending local roads and suspension bridges, when in 1971 a flood swept away an old wooden bridge in nearby Chungpu Township and took the lives of two brothers. As HO well knew, the countryside was full of decrepit wooden bridges. Moreover, no bridges at all spanned many of the region’s rivers and streams; to reach towns and markets, rural folk had to ford them. Bridges were needed—proper concrete bridges. HO resolved to build them.

Straightaway, he launched a fundraising campaign and, in just a few months, his first bridge was completed. Since then, HO’s bridges have been rising at the rate of nine a year.

Although trained as a youth in civil engineering, HO was not a professional bridge builder. He arranged for professional engineers and contractors to do the technical work. But he himself could assess the need for a bridge, draw up a plan, purchase the materials, and coordinate with local officials. He could also raise the money. To emphasize the spirit of giving, HO limited individual contributions to just a few dollars per project; yet private donations have yielded all the money needed for HO’s many bridges: more than U.S.$12 million over the years. In addition, HO invited everyone to join him each Sunday in the good deed of bridge-building, performing the many simple chores that require no technical skill. More than two hundred thousand volunteers have done so.

HO organized his projects casually, at first with no formal organization at all. But as one new bridge after another rose at his initiative, local newspapers anointed HO and his partners the Chiayi Philanthropy Group. He adopted the name formally on the day he inaugurated his one-hundredth bridge. Up till now, however, HO’s organization—which also helps poor families meet burial expenses—has no membership list or formal charter. Whoever chooses to contribute, contributes; whoever wishes to work, works. HO himself keeps the books, and his scrupulous reports to donors have earned the Chiayi Philanthropy Group a reputation for unshakable integrity.

HO’s concrete bridges vary in length from just a few meters to over one hundred; with distinctive white railings, each one is a replica of the other. Simple and strong, they dot the countryside, moving farm products swiftly and efficiently to market, opening once remote areas to tourism, and rendering daily travel safer. They are an incalculable practical boon to the people of Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan Counties.

But they are also something more. These bridges have motivated many thousands of Taiwanese to devote themselves weekly to the cheerful work of helping others. HO Ming-teh, the inspiring force, seeks no credit. Buddhism, he notes, enjoins its followers to do good. And so he does.

In electing HO MING-TEH to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his improving rural Taiwan with good deeds and sturdy bridges.

It gives me great pleasure this evening to be the recipient of the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. First of all, I would like to express my sincerest appreciation to the board of trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for bestowing upon me this special honor.

However, I must reiterate that I am just a member of the eighty-thousand-strong Chiayi Philanthropy Group in the Republic of China on Taiwan. In the past twenty-odd years, believing that “doing good is the greatest source of happiness” and that “to do good is to invoke Heaven’s blessings and accumulate virtues,” all the group members have worked together to construct a total of 215 bridges in Taiwan’s rural areas. In building these bridges, our hearts are overflowing with joy and we have never entertained any thought of being awarded for what we have done. It is our belief that bridges will not only facilitate transportation but also bring people closer together psychologically, thus conducing to a happy and harmonious society. Therefore, this award is not so much a personal commendation as a recognition of what the group as a whole has been doing. We are committed to building even more bridges to benefit even more people.

In closing, I wish to pay my high tribute to what the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation has achieved over the past decades by setting up awards in memory of the late President Ramon Magsaysay to advocate freedom, universal love, and justice. It is my earnest hope that the Foundation will encourage more people to do good and to march toward a bright future, thus contributing toward peace and stability worldwide.

For Tokyo and other Japanese metropolises, the post-World War II boom years were the best of times. Not so, however, for Japan’s remote provinces and rural areas. Here, incomes declined and populations dwindled as young people drifted away in search of better lives in the city. Oita Prefecture, on the northeast coast of Kyushu Island, was such a place. Once Japan’s gateway to the outside world and an early center for Western learning in Asia, by the 1970s Oita was merely a backwater. In a nation rising quickly to wealth, Oita idled in relative poverty.

Governor MORIHIKO HIRAMATSU has changed this.

Born in Oita City in 1924, HIRAMATSU rose through local schools and served in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Later he studied law at Tokyo University and, upon graduating in 1949, joined the powerful national ministry now known as MITI—the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. There he helped to regulate and advise Japan’s emerging electronics industry and observed the world-changing impact of computer technology. In 1975, he returned to Oita as vice-governor. Four years later he was elected governor.

How to revitalize Oita? Solving this problem became HIRAMATSU’s passion. Certain regions, he knew, had made a name for themselves by producing signature products—tangerines, pottery, shiitake mushrooms. Why not encourage every community to devote itself to a single product in which it could truly excel? This concept became the basis of HIRAMATSU’s innovative development plan: One village, one product.

Exploiting the spirit of local rivalry rooted in Oita’s feudal past, HIRAMATSU incited competition among the prefecture’s diverse communities as each one sought to identify and perfect a product of its own: Kakosu limes, Himeshima prawns, Oyama plums, and Beppu bambooware and hot springs. Building self-reliance was an important goal of the program. There were no subsidies. Instead, HIRAMATSU provided technical assistance to improve the local goods and to develop “value-added” byproducts: sauces and jams from the prefecture’s cornucopia of fruits; chowders, dried sardines, and animal feed from its marine life. The prefecture also publicized and marketed Oita’s products. Governor HIRAMATSU himself became the prefecture’s preeminent salesman.

HIRAMATSU complemented the “one village, one product” movement by aggressively recruiting high-tech industries to Oita and by building an infrastructure commensurate with the prefecture’s growing economy. Today, Oita’s flowers and mushrooms can be flown directly to markets in Tokyo—”ninety minutes fresh.” And futuristic new towns called Greenpolis, Marinopolis, and Technopolis are being developed as centers for forest, marine, and high-tech industries as well as centers for research and education.

“Think globally, act locally” is a motto HIRAMATSU repeatedly invokes. Oita should not become an economic appendage of Tokyo, he asserts, but a free-standing participant in the borderless economy of the globe. This is why Oita’s signature products are marketed aggressively abroad and why the governor has been vigorous in promoting foreign exchange programs and special events that link its citizens to dozens of countries around the world. Moreover, for several years now HIRAMATSU has been preaching the benefits of the “one village, one product” system to local governments near and far. From Louisiana (“One parish, one product”) to Fujian (“One village, one treasure”), HIRAMATSU’s idea is catching on.

Meanwhile, life in Oita is getting better. Unemployment is down. Incomes are up. And for Oita’s young people, a good future now beckons at home. Little wonder that ever-smiling HIRAMATSU has been elected governor five times running.

In electing MORIHIKO HIRAMATSU to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his awakening Oita prefecture to self-reliant economic growth through the “one village, one product” movement and a spirited call for local products with global appeal.

It is a great honor and privilege for me to receive this world-famous award, which is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Asia.” I must say, however, that I cannot accept this Award alone. I humbly accept this Award on behalf of all the people of my prefecture who are persistently working toward regional revitalization.

Furthermore, this Award will not only encourage the people of Japan involved in the “One Village, One Product” Movement but, I believe, it will inspire the people of various regions of Asia who have adopted this movement as well. The ultimate goal of the “One Village, One Product” Movement is to foster human resources. I sincerely hope that the movement will further create people who can think globally and act locally.

Last year, the first Asia-Kyushu Regional Summit was held in Oita. And the next summit will be here in Manila in October of this year. It is my earnest hope that this award, together with the summit, will further facilitate the peaceful interchange between various regions of Asia.

I would like to thank you once again for the great honor that you have bestowed upon me and, with my heartfelt gratitude, I accept this Award.

Coming of age at a time of great trial in China, FEI XIAOTONG abandoned his medical studies and turned to sociology. It was not enough to cure individuals, he concluded. The ills of China were rooted in its entire social and economic system. To cure them, one must understand the body of China. To FEI, the emerging social sciences of anthropology and sociology provided the key; yet these insightful new disciplines were largely rooted in Western studies of colonized “natives.” FEI vowed to create a sociology that spoke to the practical needs of the Chinese people.

To complete his doctoral studies at the University of London, FEI in 1936 conducted fieldwork in Kaihsienkung, a village on the Yangtze delta. Here he documented the travails of rice and silk-producing peasants beset by economic forces that they were helpless to escape or control. When the price of silk dropped on world markets, incomes dwindled in Kaihsienkung; marriages were delayed and, worse, farmers fell into debt and forfeited their lands to creditors. In Kaihsienkung, FEI glimpsed into the body of China; in it he observed that the condition of the peasants was “getting worse and worse.”

By 1938, Japanese invaders had overrun Kaihsienkung and much of eastern China. FEI retreated with fellow researchers to remote Yunnan and “experienced the hard bare facts of human existence.” Here, too, the land was becoming concentrated in the hands of a few town-dwelling landlords. FEI’s wartime research led him to call for “an effective land policy” to arrest this pernicious trend, but he also warned that land reform alone would not improve peasant life. What was needed was rural industrialization, organized to distribute the profits “as widely as possible.”

After 1945, FEI wrote prolifically about his country’s revolutionary crisis, analyzing China’s gentry-dominated class structure and the predatory economic relationship of the city to the countryside. Although not a communist himself, he greeted the 1949 victory of China’s communist revolution hopefully. As a social scientist and one who believed in seeking “truth through facts,” he sought a useful role for himself in the new China.

FEI was soon tapped to join a huge ethnographic research project to document China’s ethnic minorities. But China’s new leaders were suspicious of the social sciences. In 1952, they declared sociology illegitimate and banned it from the schools. In 1957, when FEI complained that government policies in Kaihsienkung neglected rural industries, he was declared a rightist and forbidden to teach. The ensuing Cultural Revolution brought humiliation and obscurity.

Twenty years passed. The storm clouds parted and both FEI and sociology were rehabilitated. In 1978, the Chinese government adopted a development program that followed FEI’s precept of “leave the farm but not the village.” It favored small-town-based industrialization as a road to improved peasant incomes and as an antidote to glutted mega-cities. Today, FEl’s insight is changing the face of China. Proliferating township and village enterprises are enabling millions of Chinese to improve and diversify their livelihood and providing a rural foundation for China’s unprecedented economic growth.

Now a commanding figure in the scholarly world at home and abroad, eighty-three-year-old FEI is cheered by the nascent prosperity of China’s countryside. Emerging amidst the quickening economic life is a wiser, more broad-minded populace. This bodes well for China. So also does “the vigorous blooming of hundreds of flowers in the garden of Chinese sociology.”

In electing FEI XIAOTONG to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his giving Chinese substance to the modern social sciences and applying them rigorously to the needs of China and its people.

I feel deeply grateful to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my sincere respect for the late president of the Philippines. We cherish the purpose of this award in building a society in which all people are free and live in honor and peace with one another.

We Asian people suffered a lot from humiliation and oppression in the twentieth century. What we feel proud of is that it is also in this century that we have all emancipated ourselves and become the masters of our own lands. People of my age will never forget this part of history, bitter first, then sweet. It should be a cohesive and driving force for the people of Asia to unite and march toward a more prosperous and beautiful twenty-first century.

We in Asia have ancient civilizations. Brave and industrious and great in number, we Asians ought to cherish a firm confidence in making greater contributions to world peace and prosperity in the years to come.

I have already stepped into my old age. Over the past eighty years and more, I was brought up and supported by my parents and fellow villagers, who made it possible for me to receive a modern education. Yet, I feel uneasy that I have not done enough for the Asian people, so I feel reluctant to accept this prestigious award today. However, I will not fail to live up to the encouragement and expectations of our friendly neighbors. However little time there may be in my disposition, I shall conscientiously make the best of it to do whatever is beneficial to the people of Asia and the world at large, especially by placing accumulated human knowledge in the service of our society.