Almost nowhere on earth is recent forest denudation resulting in disasters comparable to those in the Himalayas, chiefly at 5,000 to 14,000 feet above sea level. Geologically relatively recent, the massive upthrust which created Mount Everest and other peaks, also shaped precipitous ridges where soil is held precariously by forest cover. In the now 75,956 villages spread across the 2,000-mile long Indian-Himalayan frontier, earning a livelihood is becoming increasingly hazardous. Overgrazing by sheep, goats and cattle speeds erosion when the snows melt. Construction of roads for defense purposes and to reach hallowed shrines, opens forests for logging in a wood-short land, and replaces “fear of the tiger with fear of landslides.”

CHANDI PRASAD BHATT became increasingly aware of the threat of indiscriminate tree felling after July 20, 1970 when a cloudburst over his home district of Chamoli suddenly raised the water level of the Alaknanda River more than 60 feet. Some 400 square miles were flooded as roads and bridges washed away and Gauna Lake, formerly 330 feet deep, filled with debris. Also blocked were canals irrigating nearly one million acres in western Uttar Pradesh. Since then ever more houses, livestock and people have been lost to floods. In August 1978 the largest landslide of the century — over two miles long — blocked the Bhagirathi River. Reservoirs behind the great hydroelectric schemes that are the prime energy hope of the subcontinent, are rapidly silting up. 

BHATT in 1964 had instituted the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (Society for Village Self-Rule) to organize fellow villagers in Gopeshwar for employment near their homes in forest-based industries’ making wooden implements from ash trees and gathering and marketing herbs for aryuvedic medicine-and to combat vice and exploitation. Curtailment of the villagers’ legitimate rights to trees and forest products in favor of outside commercial interests enabled BHATT in 1973 to mobilize the forest-wise society members and villagers into the collective Chipko Andolan (Hug the Trees Movement) to force revision of forest policies dating from 1917. Women, who regularly walk three to five miles to the forest to gather and carry home fuel and fodder on their backs, took the lead. True to the movement’s non-violent philosophy, these women embraced the trees to restrict their felling. Establishment of “eco-development camps” brought villagers together to discuss their needs within the context of the ecological balance of the forest. Stabilizing slopes by building rock retaining walls, the campers planted trees started in their own village nurseries. While less than one-third of the trees set out by government foresters survived, up to 88 percent of the villager-planted trees grew. 

BHATT and his society colleagues have been helped by sympathetic scientists, officials and college students. Yet theirs is essentially an indigenous movement of mountain villagers, and Chipko Andolan has become an instrument of action and education for members, officials and outsiders, in the realities of effective resource conservation. 

Although BHATT has attended meetings in lowland India and abroad as a spokesman for Chipko, he has remained a man of his community. Now 48, he, his wife and five children continue to live the simple life of their Himalayan neighbors. In the process he has become knowledgeable and productive in helping ensure his peoples’ hard won living. 

In electing CHANDI PRASAD BHATT to receive the 1982 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes his inspiration and guidance of Chipko Andolan, a unique, predominantly women’s environmental movement, to safeguard wise use of the forest.

I thank you all for choosing me for the Community Leadership Award for starting the Chipko Movement, the save the forest movement, in the interior parts of the Himalayas. I must confess that this is not my honor, but you have honored those illiterate women, students, rural youths and scientists who are fighting to save the fragile balance of nature. 

At the beginning of the century the unsystematic development process led to the disturbance of the balance and it has left a track of destruction everywhere. In every country man is standing against nature. And that is why, everywhere, we have floods, droughts, landslides and such calamities which are called natural but in fact are the result of man’s interference with nature. 

We are all the culprits in this process and we also are the victims of each result. In fact, we are not inheriting this earth from our forefathers, but we have started borrowing it from our future generations. That is why Mahatma Gandhi said that this earth can fulfill everybody’s need, but not his greed. 

In Indian mythology the Himalaya is considered the abode of God. Kalidas, the Sanskrit poet, wrote that “in the north is situated the mountain of all mountains, the Himalaya, the soul of God, which is like a balance of this earth.” That is why God gave us inspiration to start a movement to save this wonderful creation. He made small people like us the instrument for the conservation movement. Because of the strength derived from Almighty God the forces who were destroying the Himalaya environment, and who had the full backing of the exploitative social system and of the law, were halted by small people of small villages. And in the front line came those simple, hesitant village women who had never crossed the boundaries of their household duties. 

The area of cooperation and influence of the Chipko Movement has been enlarging ever since. Started by a handful of Gandhian workers of the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal and villagers in 1973, this tender, nonviolent but very strong movement has gained sympathy across the country. Not only villagers, students and scientists, but even those whose policies were destroying the balance of nature, have joined the movement. 

The movement, which was started with the slogan “cut us before you cut the tree,” has today taken the shape of a movement to generate a healthy development process, to fight injustice and to give opportunity to people to live with dignity. 

The movement is regularly conducting eco-development camps, not only to make people conscious of saving their forests, but to plant new forest trees on the denuded lands. In fact these camps have become lively, non-formal mobile schools to train people for their own development, so that they can stand on their own, fight injustice themselves, and create a new society from their own strength and resources. Above all the eco-development program has shown how the food, fuel, fodder and fiber needs of the hill people can be met without destroying the forests. 

With the great man Ramon Magsaysay, who lived and fought and died for these values, with such a great soul you have linked our movement, and this linkage has given great honor to the ordinary village people of our remote area. I have come here to express our gratitude and thanks from these people who are struggling hard to create a new model of development without destruction. Give us courage and love so that we can continue this effort.

Throughout human history abuse of power has often been an irresistible temptation. Such abuse is most conspicuous at national and international levels, while what directly hurts ordinary people is usually little noticed. Thus those guilty of evil readily escape punishment, and their would-be imitators are not restrained. There are immediate victims but in the long term the total society, brutalized to ignore their sufferings, pays the higher price.

Speaking for the abused and upholding justice then becomes the task of those who care and have courage. Only they can insure that their society does not slip into callous disregard for its least fortunate or tyrannized members. Yet modern intellectuals increasingly are crippled by a comfort cocoon that curbs their capacity for courageous action. Or they lash out, using simplistic political formulas that lack constructive relevance.

ARUN SHOURIE came indirectly to his crusading newspaper career. From the comparative affluence of being an economist with the World Bank he became a fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research in 1976. During the Emergency he began writing articles and speeches for leaders of protest. In 1980 the publisher of the Indian Express invited him to become Executive Editor.

It is the distinction of SHOURIE and his Indian Express colleagues that by exceptionally thorough investigative reporting and incisive writing they challenged the lethargic ways threatening Indian journalism. India has gifted and intrepid writers but during and after “The Emergency” newspapers offered them shrinking forums for significant work. Numerous small magazines appeared, attempting to offer alternatives, but their articles, even when solid, tended to be dismissed by those in power.

SHOURIE and the Indian Express — with 10 geographically dispersed editions and the country’s largest circulation — could not easily be ignored, and the mirror they held up reflected some ugly images. Young men and women were being killed by the police in false arrests. In Bihar state unconvicted prisoners were deliberately blinded, not because this was their due under the law but because police thought this was what they deserved. In several states pretrial detainees outnumbered convicts four to one; some had been held in filthy jails awaiting trial for more than 10 years, damaged in mind and body by mistreatment, their case documents mislaid.

India’s political hierarchy was shaken last year when in the Indian Express SHOURIE revealed how the Chief Minister of Maharashtra State within a few months collected more than US$5 million by creating artificial shortages of cement, industrial alcohol and other prime commodities, which he then allocated. His justification was that these funds were for a charitable foundation. To Congress Party parliamentary leaders who charged “frame up,” SHOURIE responded by publishing more details, until eventually the Chief Minister resigned.

Loyal readers in India insist that more than a journalist, SHOURIE is an ombudsman who is affirming the right and duty of every citizen to initiate and secure redress. SHOURIE is equally a scholar. His assessment of the Sikh religious quandary, his book on Hinduism and his Institutions of the Janata Phase and Symptoms of Fascism are contributions to understanding in depth. Soft-spoken, graceful of manner and preferring a quiet home life with his wife and son, this 40-year-old has shown that a conscientious, resolute writer can strengthen public morality.

In electing ARUN SHOURIE to receive the 1982 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, the Board of Trustees recognizes a concerned citizen employing his pen as an effective adversary of corruption, inequality and injustice.

You have done me this great honor at a critical time. In several of our societies rulers have become parasites. Indeed, parasites have become rulers. Evil has come to be accepted as inevitable, as natural, as a mere commonplace. Ideals have come to be dismissed as idle dreams. Idealism has become a dirty word. In these circumstances it is important to affirm three great truths.

First, it is important to show where all this will end, to affirm that no good will come of this process. Already in many of our societies the hopes people had when their countries won independence have given way to despair. Already the state apparatus has been brutalized to an alarming extent. Semiliterate, vulgar, puffed-up bullies have converted the state into private property. The people are becoming accustomed to malfeasance, injustice, even to violence.

Second, it is important to affix responsibility for the process. The responsibility is not primarily of the rulers?they are merely pursuing their pleasure. The primary responsibility is ours. Their evil is done with our hands:

No President, no Prime Minister tortures a citizen with his own hands. Other citizens do the work for him.

Corruption is not the bribe the ruler takes, it is the bribe you and I give.

We have an ancient saying in India: yatha raja tatha praja, as the ruler so the ruled. Mahatma Gandhi used to say that this is just a half-truth; the other half of the truth is yatha praja tatha raja, as the ruled so the ruler. So, the state of affairs is what it is because the ruled are what they are.

Hence ‘and this is the third point and it indicates the way to the cure’ the evil of the rulers will persist as long as we partake of it, so long as we lend ourselves as instruments for its execution, so long as we assist it by putting up with it, by doing nothing to end it. But, as we are its primary cause, it will cease the moment we withdraw the assistance we give it. The real tragedy of our times, therefore, is not that the rulers use their power for evil, but that the people do not use the power that is certainly theirs, to put an end to it.

Now, pointing all this out is not a popular task. The rulers naturally do not want to hear the truth. They are afraid of sunlight. But the people do not want to hear it either. For them also truth is an inconvenience; it demands of them at the very least that they stop assisting evil, that they change their conduct.

And yet there are at all times individuals who speak the truth to the bullies and to the people. At all times they are the special targets of the cruelty of the rulers, and all too often they are the targets of the derision and scorn of the people. But they hold on to the truth. The very efforts of the rulers to snuff out the man of truth proves his point. Eventually the man of truth bears testimony to how wretched the state of affairs has become by what is done to him; he bears testimony by his suffering. This is the ultimate service he does for his people.

In the end the cause of the truthful prevails. For one thing, as long as the man of truth suffers, as long, for instance, as he is in jail, and forever after once he has been martyred, the people?s attention remains on the lesson he was trying to teach them. If the great Rizal were still around, you and I would quarrel with this formulation of his or that, with this prescription of his or that. But, martyred, he today rules your hearts, his message is forever engraved in the minds of his people.

Day to day events also drive home what the prescient man of truth was warning the people to heed. You may kill a man for affirming there is corruption, for affirming there is torture. But the people learn of corruption from the bribe they have to give at every turn; they learn of illegal detention from the neighbor who disappears. Thus it is that even if the man of truth is killed, truth prevails.

These brave, tenacious men, these men who hold fast, throwing all rational calculus to the wind, constitute a fraternity in spirit. The fraternity cuts across national frontiers, it cuts across time. Few of us can claim to belong to it.

I take this great award as being a command from you that persons like me should live up to the ideals of this fraternity, a command that we should aspire to it.

I accept the award in this spirit, with the greatest humility and utmost gratitude. In return for this great honor I cannot promise you that I will make it to the fraternity, that I will succeed. But I give you my word that I will try.

Geothermal power is the largest source of economically and technically feasible energy now available in our planet. It derives from the molten mass filling the inner core of the earth, over which the surface on which we live forms a relatively thin crust. Problems with geothermal energy are that technology for its use is new and little known, and it is accessible only in the earth’s “hot spots.” With these the Philippine archipelago is well endowed, located as it is on the “Pacific Ring of Fire.” When accurately understood and wisely used this immense arc of tectonic and volcanic activity that girdles the Pacific Ocean, previously only feared for its earthquakes and eruptions, can become a major benefactor. 

The use of geothermal heat is not new. Both Norse Vikings who settled Iceland more than 1,000 years ago and American Indians used geothermal geysers for cooking and baking. Maoris, who settled New Zealand some 600 years ago, grew their sweet potatoes in geothermally heated gardens. 

The first industrial harnessing of steam from the earth began in northern Italy more than half a century ago, but the largest geothermal installation today is at The Geysers in California where dry steam readily lends itself to conventional generating, providing more than enough electric power for the city of San Francisco. However most of the geothermal energy available in the Philippines and elsewhere is wet steam?70 percent of production from a well may be hot water?and this demands a different and more difficult technology. 

ARTURO PINEDA ALCARAZ was born in Manila in 1916 and grew up in Baguio where his father was city auditor during the gold mining boom. After studying a year at the University of the Philippines, ALCARAZ transferred to Mapua Institute of Technology when it offered the first degree in mining engineering. He earned a masters degree in geology at the University of Wisconsin and returned home in 1941 to be assigned by the Bureau of Mines to the island of Busuanga. Next posted to the Weather Bureau, its director, Maximo Lachica, introduced him to the science of seismology. 

In 1952 the Philippine Congress responded to the destructive eruptions of Mount Hibok-Hibok on Camiguin Island by creating the Commission on Volcanology. Assigned as Chief Volcanologist, ALCARAZ began to pursue more fully the study of volcanos in order to improve eruption warning and assess possibilities for use of stored heat beneath them. 

The first electric bulb in the Philippines lit by earth-heat energy was in Tiwi, Albay, on April 12, 1967. Three years later President Ferdinand Marcos set apart two geothermal reservations to be administered by the National Power Corporation (NPC), to which ALCARAZ transferred in 1974 as Chief of the Geothermal Division. The NPC, in cooperation with Philippine Geothermal, Inc., a subsidiary of Union Oil Company of California, has since brought on stream 550 megawatts of power at Tiwi and at Mac-Ban near Los Banos, making the Philippines the largest producer of geothermal electric energy from wet steam in the world. Meanwhile major geothermal energy fields in Leyte and Negros are under development by the Philippine National Oil Company Energy Development Corporation, with the cooperation of New Zealand and specialists from elsewhere. Present production is scheduled to be multiplied six times in the next seven years, thus further cutting down on oil imports. 

The Philippines may have a potential to generate 200,000 megawatts of geothermal electric power — about 40 times present total power production — at a competitive capital cost. Added to electricity from this energy source are possibilities for refrigeration, drying and salt making. 

Retired in March 1981 at age 65, ALCARAZ continues as a consultant to the Philippine National Oil Company, seeing to the training in tapping earth energy of a new generation of Filipino technicians — in New Zealand, Japan, the United States and Iceland. 

In electing ARTURO PINEDA ALCARAZ to receive the 1982 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his scientific perspicacity and selfless perseverance in guiding Filipinos to understand and use one of their greatest natural resources.

Once in everyone?s lifetime, I suppose, there comes a moment of intense joy and happiness that is so overwhelming it seems almost unbelievable. Such a moment has just come into mine. 

A year and a half ago, as I was approaching the age of compulsory retirement from government service, I was saddened by the thought that soon I would be parted from a work that has become my second love?the first, of course, being my wife. However, even after that time came, I was allowed to continue my involvement in geothermal energy development and I was happy; it was a source of personal satisfaction for it meant that my services were still of some use. 

Then like a bolt from the blue, came the announcement that the Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation had elected me as its 1982 Awardee for Government Service. I could hardly believe it. It was not possible, but it was so. Coming as it did in the twilight years of my life, it was indeed a moment of great joy for myself and my family. Suddenly life seemed to have an increased meaning?a new purpose for being. 

After the elation had somewhat abated, however, came a moment of reflection and soul-searching. I asked myself, what have I really done to deserve such a great honor? Am I truly deserving? Then I realized that whatever it was that was being ascribed to me had been attained not by individual effort, but rather by the total efforts of so many. It was just my good fortune to have been singled out to represent this collective undertaking. 

I have been cited for a role in the development of geothermal energy in the Philippines and in guiding national awareness to the use of one of the most valuable natural resources of the country. I feel deeply humbled for this signal honor accorded me, especially since it was more of a national effort rather than an individual one that brought the Philippines to its present position as one of the leading countries of the world in the use of geothermal energy. 

Without the support given by the government and its instruments — the Executive Office, the National Science and Technology Authority, the Ministry of Energy, the Philippine National Oil Company, the National Power Corporation, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and the Bureau of Mines; by co-professionals, and by a host of agencies both foreign and local, geothermal development would not have progressed as much as it has. This development, born in the cradle of necessity some years before the 1973 energy crisis and nurtured through the state policy of energy self-reliance, is winning our battle for national economic survival. 

In accepting the Award, I would like to express, on behalf of my immediate family and my geothermal family (since I am said to be the father of Philippine geothermal development) and on my own, a deep sense of gratitude to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, not only for the incomparable honor bestowed on me, but also for its recognition of geothermal energy as an important indigenous energy resource to a developing country like the Philippines. 

To the Board of Trustees, I take this occasion for a sincere and most appreciative expression of my gratitude for this signal recognition to be counted among those worthy to give honor to the ideals which characterized the life of President Ramon Magsaysay and the courageous service which he rendered to the people of the Philippines.

Rural development has been the theme of both peaceful and violent revolutions, especially since World War II. Along with peace on earth, it remains man’s compelling challenge in most countries. In India — where some 85 percent of nearly 700 million still live on the land, and burgeoning population destroys scarce resources — this need is acute.

Caught up in the struggles of India’s independence movement, MANIBHAI BHIMBHAI DESAI in the early 1940s became a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, who warned that independence for most could prove a mirage unless their daily lives were bettered. DESAI, a 26 year old graduate in physics and mathematics from a prosperous family in Gujarat, had divested himself of all property, chosen celibacy and committed himself to serving the rural poor, before he vowed to Gandhi to “lay my ashes in Uruli-Kanchan“ — to spend his life in the village near Pune in Maharashtra State which Gandhi had chosen for rural development work.

Under Gandhi’s direction DESAI had begun in Uruli-Kanchan the Goshala Ashram, a nature cure center for the rural poor which became the base for broader work. Among his early projects was a school in a simple farmhouse for 30 boys, training them to work together as tomorrow?s farmers. Today the school has its own classrooms, workshop and laboratories, and 90 teachers instruct 2,900 students on skills villagers need. To solve the crippling problem of usury, DESAI devised a carefully guided credit cooperative. Another success was organizing 25 poor families to develop 90 acres (36.4 hectares) of poor pasture and woodland, by setting up a cooperative farming society which he himself joined as a “landless laborer” and agreed to head to insure scrupulous use of credit to generate year-round income. For this region of Maharashtra, which averages about 10 inches of rain a year, he also organized irrigation cooperatives which helped bring water to 40 villages, and he solved the problem of the low price of sugarcane by building a 3,000-member cooperative sugar factory. The ashram’s finances improved, as did those of the neighboring villages, after DESAI mastered the physiology of the vine and showed them how to grow Thompson Seedless grapes commercially.

With creation of the Bharatiya Agro-Industries Foundation (BAIF) in 1967 DESAI began broad extension of Gandhiji’s advice to “begin with the cow.” By 1950 he had dissected more than 400 dead cows to teach himself veterinary science and begun a fine herd of local dairy cattle at the ashram. Now he developed at BAIF, with Danish and British assistance in kind, a major artificial insemination program to crossbreed native stock with imported cattle for greatly improved milk yields. BAIF also produces a high potency vaccine to prevent foot and mouth disease, a curse that annually damages hundreds of thousands of cattle.

The vicinity of Uruli-Kanchan is striking for a forest covering 500 acres (204 hectares) of formerly barren rocky lands donated to BAIF by the state government. DESAI personally accomplished the first greening breakthrough with only six barrels of water daily from a neighbor?s well and pouring one glass of water every 10 to 14 days around each of 10,000 seedlings which were circled with plastic to prevent evaporation. After testing many varieties of trees for future planting, he received from Hawaii a small sample of seeds of the Leucaena leucocephala, often known as the Giant Ipil Ipil, or subabul in India. In six years this “wonder tree” is providing high protein forage, fuel, green fertilizer, hedges and timber in the 6,000 villages to which BAIF has distributed seeds — and where half a million farm families also participate in cattle improvement programs. BAIF has sold another 25 tons of seed to other state governments for distribution to villagers throughout India.

After 32 years, with his more than 500 co-workers, DESAI still holds to the strategy of mobilizing local resources?people, animals, lands, plants and water — to transform village life.

In electing MANIBHAI BHIMBHAI DESAI to receive the 1982 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his practical fulfillment of a vow made to Mahatma Gandhi 36 years ago to uplift, socially and economically, the poorest villagers.

I have just been given the Ramon Magsaysay Award. I take it as a mark of recognition of our program which draws inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi and his concern for the rural poor. Thus it is indeed a day of great joy for me. May I be permitted to express my deep sense of gratitude to you.

Why is India poor? Mahatma Gandhi answered that query, saying that India is poor because her rural man is poor. He analyzed the cause of rural poverty. He said that rural man is poor because he is largely unemployed or underemployed during the major part of the year. He said provision of remunerative year-round employment would enable rural India to get rid of its age-old burden of poverty.

Whatever the common belief, rural man is a wise man. He has acquired wisdom over centuries of experience of living a difficult life. It is this wisdom that has enabled him to survive all oppression, exploitation and difficulties. His experience, moreover, has made him look at anything new with suspicion because everything new to him has so far been used against him. He is also very possessive in regard to his land and livestock, and is not prepared to part with either even if neither is remunerative; he cannot forget that these have been the only instruments which have enabled him to survive against all odds.

However, the villager is no different from other people. He too wants to be prosperous. For that he is willing to experiment with whatever he has, however little it may be, but such an experiment must offer to satisfy at least some of his own needs as he sees them. Besides, he must have faith in the abilities of his counselor, and no doubt whatever about his motives.

We have been working among the rural poor in order to provide them with means of gainful employment. The instruments we have provided have come out of whatever little the poor themselves possessed. We have also seen to it that the abundantly available and yet underemployed manpower in rural India is utilized to the maximum possible extent. Besides, we have ensured that the rural poor find the new instruments as something culturally acceptable to them.

Agriculture and animal husbandry are two major fields that we have chosen for developing and providing new means of gainful employment. To make ours an integrated effort we are side by side working on health, education and cottage industry. Among our activities are: 1) upgrading indigenous cattle with the use of deep frozen semen of excellent exotic sires through artificial insemination; 2) developing and producing veterinary biomedicals to provide adequate health-cover to farm animals, and 3) propagating Leucaena leucocephala as a means of generating employment and providing fodder, fuel and timber, using schools as an important channel of diffusion.

These activities have shown us that technical competence, managerial expertise and involvement of local leadership are essential prerequisites for making relevant technologies generally acceptable to the rural poor. We have, therefore, built up a unique organizational model. It includes technical competence for proper selection, development and adoption of relevant technology. It incorporates managerial expertise to design and operate suitable delivery systems, and it involves a specific role for local leadership as demonstrators of the utility of such a technology, and paving the way for its further diffusion. This model is nongovernmental and voluntary in nature. It operates on a non-profit basis and keeps scrupulously away from any involvement in political issues.

I believe that this approach is the most appropriate for operating programs of rural development. It is an approach which can be adopted by all developing countries around the world.

While I thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation once again for granting recognition and thus focusing world attention on our approach to problems of rural development, may I also add that we are ever willing to cooperate with others in this field in furtherance of our common objective: development of the rural man in his own environment.