A decent home, everywhere, is a hallmark of human dignity. Yet in the cities of Asia today, how many millions of people lack a decent home? How many find shelter beneath bridges and overpasses, beside the rails, or perched in trashwood shanties above the drainage canals? How many subsist without legal title in ubiquitous slums lacking even the simplest amenities? We do not know exactly. In some Asian cities, squatters and slum dwellers account for more than half the inhabitants. And the number is growing as newcomers arrive daily from the countryside, overtaking completely the efforts of government to either assist or contain them. To the better-off classes, these mushrooming cities of the poor are a blight and an impediment to new business parks, condominiums, and shopping malls. Eviction is the common solution. For nearly twenty years, EDUARDO JORGE ANZORENA has devoted himself to this wrenching human dilemma.

Argentinean by birth, ANZORENA entered the Society of Jesus as a young man and joined its mission in Japan. While completing his studies in theology there, he also earned a doctorate in architecture from Tokyo University, rendering his dissertation in Japanese. As he began his teaching career at Sophia University, ANZORENA also sought exposure to life beyond the confines of his privileged university and of prosperous Japan. With Mother Teresa in Calcutta and among relocated squatters in the Philippines, he confronted first-hand the common life of Asia’s urban poor and their desperate need for secure and decent shelter. He wondered what could be done?

For ideas, ANZORENA met in 1975 with groups working to improve housing in the slums of Latin America. He then embarked upon his own study of the housing crisis in Asia, locating community organizers in the region’s poorest neighborhoods and studying NGOs and people’s organizations that worked. Thus ANZORENA began his annual pilgrimage to the cities of Asia— to search for innovative answers to the perennial problems of slum life, to share his discoveries with other housing activists, and to steer needed financial assistance toward promising experiments.

In 1976 ANZORENA launched a bi-annual newsletter in which he published the fruits of his wanderings. Here housing advocates in, say, Dhaka, could read about approaches being tried in Bombay, Manila, or Mexico City, to organize communities and reduce the cost of housing, to bring new economic opportunities to the poor, and to arrange professional assistance and links to government programs. In 1988 members of ANZORENA’s network joined formally to create the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, which mounts coordinated responses to mass evictions and works to define and achieve housing rights for Asia’s poor.

Although the strategies shared by ANZORENA’s far-flung associates are varied, they possess common premises that reflect his own beliefs. Respect for the poor is the first of these. A second is that technical assistance and funding are not enough; to change communities in the long run, the people must organize to help themselves.

ANZORENA, it is said, “teaches in Japanese, prays in Spanish, and writes in English.” These days he devotes half of each year to his travels in Asia. His network continually grows. His role within it, he says, is to merely “support and encourage.” But others think of him as a catalyst and mentor: “He asks questions and makes us think. When he leaves, we always have something to do.”

In electing EDUARDO JORGE ANZORENA to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his fostering a collaborative search for humane and practical solutions to the housing crisis among Asia’s urban poor.

I want to thank very much the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for bestowing upon me the honor of this award for international understanding.

Many former Magsaysay awardees have taught me how the poor can improve their own situation and habitat with their own energies: Dr. Akhter Hameed Khan, Dr. Mohammed Yunus, Fr. Richard Timm, Duang Prateep, and the Bogum Jahru team from Korea.

I want to thank my Philippine friends because they called me to this work and guided me from the beginning to now. They are the organizations Freedom to Build, Marian, COPE, CHHED, Pagtambayayong, UPA, FDUP, and the Human Development Office of the Jesuits; and so many other individuals and people’s organizations.

Thanks to the friends from the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights, representing all the countries of Asia.

I need to thank especially the urban poor with whom I have related and collaborated during these years. But to tell you the truth, when I was called to this podium to receive the prize, I had a very strong feeling that I was not the real recipient of this award. The only thing I did was to try to understand the heroic struggle of millions of human beings who, for survival, left the countryside and are enduring the inhuman conditions of urban slums. Of course, I will transfer the whole amount of the prize to them, but still that is not enough. I feel that they are telling me:

Jorge, it is okay. Go ahead. You can receive the prize for international understanding for us and for our children. We are unnecessarily sick and we are dying before our time because our water is not clean. We do not have toilets and medicines. We do not have permanent jobs. Yet we are also citizens. With respect to our habitat, please ask society to stop the people who aggravate our situation by throwing our women and children to the streets. Please do not evict us without giving us a decent alternative. More than a hundred thousand of our families are evicted every year in Asia.

Ask society to please support our efforts to improve our environment. Hundreds of thousands of us are involved in innovative approaches to do this. If there are problems, please collaborate in improving communication between us and those in power. And in your good efforts to improve our lot, please be consistent from one government administration to the next. When you do that, and implement programs for several years, things begin to change.

The urban poor are asking just a little comprehension, respect, and support. The Magsaysay Foundation obviously understands this, which is not surprising since it is inspired by the example of Ramon Magsaysay. He commanded respect because he was a simple, humble man who cared for all people as individuals, including the poor, because he believed in their dignity and importance.

Born in British Singapore to Javanese parents, ABDUL SAMAD ISMAIL completed his Senior Cambridge Certificate in the final year of peace before World War II. Spurning the more conventional careers for English-educated Malays, he became a cub reporter at the newly launched Malay daily, Utusan Melayu. Newspaper work suited the restless, brilliant youth and it became his life-long addiction.

Rising during the war years to assistant editor of Utusan Melayu, SAMAD at twenty-one became editor of the Japanese-sponsored Berita Malai. The returning British jailed him briefly after the war, but SAMAD soon assumed effective editorial leadership of the revived Utusan Melayu. In his hands the newspaper covered sympathetically the agitations of radical labor and student movements and became an instrument in the independence struggle.

SAMAD steeped himself in anti-colonial politics. He joined left-wing Malay nationalists in pressing for a decolonization plan in which the interests of Malays would be paramount and met regularly with anti-colonial activists of all races, urging them to stand with the most oppressed social classes, especially poor Malays. Secretly he arranged material support for Indonesian revolutionaries at war with the Dutch. SAMAD’s ties to leftist leaders and organizations led the British to arrest him a second time in 1951. Never tried, he was released in 1953 to popular acclaim; he rejoined the Utusan Melayu and, with Lee Kuan Yew, founded Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP).

From his earliest days as editor SAMAD religiously printed the works of Malay poets and short story writers. He now used his influence to support the “fifties generation” of Malay writers by publishing their literary works in Utusan Melayu. Passionately he cautioned Malays not to abandon their own language for English, assuring them that Malay “will gain in richness, utility, and beauty together with the emancipation and growth of Malayan society.”

In 1959, having broken with both Utusan Melayu and Lee Kuan Yew, SAMAD moved to Kuala Lumpur. As editor of Berita Harian and, eventually, as managing editor of the New Straits Times Group, he moved print journalism into the mainstream of Malaysian political life. He developed a nationwide team of correspondents based in rural areas and, as editor and mentor, shaped the thinking and values of Malaysia’s rising writers and journalists. His own incisive articles in Malay and English dissected the country’s complex electoral processes and drew attention to embarrassing inequities in the national society. He promoted standardization of the national language and the creation of a national university. SAMAD also explored the social complexities of Malaysia’s fast-evolving multi-ethnic society in a series of novels, beginning in 1967.

Jailed again in 1976 under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act, SAMAD was released in 1981 and rejoined the New Straits Times Group as editorial adviser. Retired in 1988, he was knighted by Malaysia’s king in 1992. Today he teaches young writers and continues to write actively himself. He warns up-and-coming reporters about the blandishments of power and money and reminds them of their “moral obligation to the nation as citizens.”

A notorious workaholic and jokester, seventy-year-old SAMAD is also famous for his astute political insights and powerful mind. He is “a thinker for his people,” as one admirer puts it. Personally, his friends say, he is something of an enigma. SAMAD admits, “Only my Creator knows me well.”

In electing ABDUL SAMAD ISMAIL to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and the Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his applying his intellect and journalistic skills to champion national independence, cultural revival, and democratic nation-building in Malaysia.

I stand before this distinguished gathering with a deep sense of both pride and humility in the shadow of the great man in whose memory this award was created.

I am proud to be chosen for the Ramon Magsaysay Award and, at the same time, humbled by the achievements of your third president in pursuit of the ideals to which he dedicated his life. I only hope that I am not too unworthy a recipient of this prestigious prize.

I am grateful indeed to the board of trustees for this award. You do me and my country great honor. You honor journalists who, in the arduous years of our independence struggle, not only wrote the first draft of history, but also influenced its course. It is on behalf of these journalists of bygone years and the generations that succeeded them in our profession that I accept this award.

Very few of my former colleagues who selflessly served the cause of our country have survived to receive the recognition they so richly deserve. I count myself fortunate to have gone through those difficult decades, although not, I must admit, without retaining some scars. But the rewards have been more than gratifying. Malaysia today stands tall in the community of nations, proud and confident as it keeps its tryst with destiny.

A new generation of Malaysian journalists has emerged, schooled in the culture of nation-building that transcends ethnic, religious, and cultural barriers. They seek inspiration from the rich traditions of our diverse society to face the challenges of a new era as regional and global citizens.

Malaysia and the Philippines are irrevocably bound by ties of history that make vicissitudes in our relationship only transient and passing episodes. You have fought courageously against foreign and native oppressors in glorious battles that have become an indelible part of the region’s history. Jose Rizal is as much our hero as he is yours. In him we share a common heritage.

Some people have started to talk of a Malay diaspora, not unlike the earlier diaspora of the Chinese and Indians worldwide, though not quite on such a large scale. We may look at it as the stirring of a people, stretching from our Nusantara to South Africa and Suriman, seeking not territorial or political hegemony, but trading opportunities and markets in a world undergoing dramatic change and becoming increasingly smaller.

Finally, I would like on this auspicious occasion, which by a happy coincidence falls on the thirty-seventh anniversary of my country’s independence, to extend fraternal greetings to your people, especially media practitioners, on behalf of Malaysian journalists.

Divided by language and custom and by competition for farm and pasture lands, Afghanistan’s many peoples—Pushtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Nuristani, Hazara—warred endlessly through the centuries. In modern times, matters of religion and ideology divided them further and reinforced ancient habits of mistrust. Contained tenuously for decades by the dream of a unified Afghanistan, these divisive forces exploded in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded. The civil war that followed made Afghanistan one of the last violent crucibles of the Cold War. Yet long after the Soviets departed, the fratricidal bloodbath continues.

As a child in school, SIMA SAMAR learned what it meant to be a scorned minority in Pushtun-dominated Afghanistan; she is Hazara. She discerned, moreover, that as a female in a conservative Muslim society she was doubly “second class.” She strove to prove her own worth and embraced the reforming winds that released Muslim women from the veil. At eighteen she married and embarked on her medical education. By the time she completed her MD degree—one of the first Hazara women to do so—the Soviets had arrived and SAMAR had been politicized. As a doctor, she aided the anti-Soviet resistance movement, the mujahideen. When in 1979 her husband was arrested, never to be seen again, SAMAR and her small son fled to the safety of nearby Pakistan.

She landed in Quetta. Here thousands of refugees from war-ravaged Afghanistan lived in appalling misery. Especially wretched were the Muslim women, whose efforts to cope and care for their children were hampered by conservative mullahs who forbad them to visit male doctors and harassed those who ventured from their homes to work or attend school. Spurning a safe haven with her brothers in North America, SAMAR devoted herself to her fellow refugees.

With other women, she established a hospital for women. Later, she founded the Shuhada Clinic, which she now runs. In this small, fifteen-bed hospital, she and her staff deliver babies, perform surgery, operate a laboratory, and treat some 250 outpatients a day. Fees are low, medicines are free, and all refugees are welcome, male or female. Ariana School also founded by SAMAR, is the community’s first school for girls. Here, in a converted house, educated refugee women that she recruited lead hundreds of girls through grades one to eight; older women attend literacy classes and learn useful money-making skills. In spite of the hazards of operating in a war zone, SAMAR also runs a medical clinic in the Afghan capital of Kabul and has rehabilitated a hospital in Hazara-populated Ghazni Province, where she supports several primary schools and a high school for girls as well.

Although she is lauded by many, SAMAR’s independence and refusal to observe purdah are an anathema to religious fundamentalists. They also assail her schools for leading girls away from the cloistered women’s world of the past. SAMAR hopes to motivate other Muslim women to think and act for themselves, as she has done, but this is difficult. “Even the educated ones,” she says, “are fearful of the consequences.”

As the war in her native land grinds on interminably, SAMAR is aware that Western donors are tiring of Afghanistan. Pakistan, too, is weary of its millions of refugees. “Doctor SIMA” herself is also weary. Nevertheless, undeterred by fatigue and the mullahs and even threats to her own safety, she perseveres—practicing medicine, guiding her projects, and mobilizing international concern and financial support for Afghanistan’s many victims of war.

In electing Dr. SIMA SAMAR to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her acting courageously to heal the sick and instruct the young among the Afghan refugee community in Pakistan and in her war-torn homeland.

Correction: In earlier editions of this citation, the date given for the disappearance of Sima Samar’s husband was incorrect. It is 1979 not 1984.

I congratulate all the people of the Philippines upon the birth anniversary of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, the great hero and patriot of Asia. I believe that if all of us followed in the footsteps of the honorable late president, this world would become a cradle of equality and life would be worth living for all people.

It is a great honor for me to receive this prestigious and honored award. I consider my efforts to be too small and unworthy of this award; still, it is very encouraging to see my work recognized by the Foundation. It is an indication that Afghanistan and its unfortunate, war-stricken masses are not yet forgotten by the international community and still have some friends who bear sympathy for them and their cause.

It is the obsession of my life to serve the underprivileged of humanity, especially women, and to extend to them the recognition and the rights they deserve.

I accept this award on behalf of Afghan women who have been the most oppressed and forgotten people of the Afghan community. I have only done what I consider to be essential for the unfortunate people of Afghanistan. My attempts are too small to heal all wounds inflicted on millions of my fellow countrymen and women; I shall always need the support of others, especially the sisterhood of women, for the continuation of my work.

I thank all those who have promoted my nomination for this award, all those who have been supportive in my work, the kind donors who have made my work possible, and all the people of the Philippines for their warm hospitality.

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.

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is a stealthy killer. Although intravenous drug users are especially vulnerable, it reaches most of its victims through acts of sex. Once in the body it may sleep secretly for years before striking. It finds willing accomplices in public denial and, in countries such as Thailand, a pervasive sex industry. There, the disease has spread to hundreds of thousands of Thais in less than ten years—as HIV positive prostitutes infect their male clients and they, in turn, infect their girl friends and wives and, through the infected mothers, their newborn infants. For years, as this crisis slowly mounted, few in Thailand took heed. MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA was an exception.

An economist by training, MECHAI began his career with Thailand’s National Economic and Social Development Board. In 1974, he founded the Population and Community Development Association, or PDA, which pioneered in community-based family-planning services and training, eventually reaching 16,000 Thai villages. In MECHAI’s successful program, respected local persons imparted the benefits of fertility management to neighbors and made contraceptive methods easily available. Meanwhile, MECHAI’s penchant for humorous and uninhibited publicity demystified birth control and made his own name popularly synonymous with the condom. Working with government, PDA’s initiative helped reduce Thailand’s annual birthrate by half between 1968 and today.

MECHAI also led PDA into a wide range of other projects to improve rural life and foster self-reliant development—primary health care, water resource management, reforestation, drug rehabilitation, and credit cooperatives. Working with numerous international funders, PDA became Thailand’s largest NGO.

The first case of AIDS in Thailand was reported only in 1984 and, for a time, the number of known carriers was small. But MECHAI was aware of the disease’s explosive potential. In the face of government complacency and opposition from the country’s lucrative tourist industry, in 1987 he launched the first mass campaign to educate Thais about AIDS. He warned that without intervention, over a million could be infected within a decade. PDA flooded the country with audio and video cassettes, books, and pamphlets bluntly explaining the risks and how to avoid them. MECHAI’s provocative publicity stunts captured headlines. He found an ally in Thailand’s military, which broadcast anti-AIDS messages on its radio and TV networks.

A new government in 1991 took MECHAI in. As a senior minister, he mobilized every government agency to fight AIDS and helped formulate Thailand’s National AIDS Plan—the most comprehensive government response to the AIDS epidemic anywhere in Asia today. In relaying his message, MECHAI is consistently nonjudgmental. Part of PDA’s AIDS information campaign aims to create a supportive and nondiscriminatory environment for HIV victims in the workplace and community. Although he has advocated regulating Thailand’s sex industry, he cautions that, in this realm, “coercion has never worked.”

A private citizen once again, the ever-imaginative MECHAI is now piloting PDA’s latest venture. It enjoins Thailand’s biggest companies to “adopt” rural villages and create income-generating projects there. MECHAI hopes to wean rural families from sex trade remittances and to create opportunities for their daughters to enjoy a decent livelihood at home.

There are no borders where AIDS is concerned, warns MECHAI. His advice to neighboring countries is “react early, react strong.” Moreover, private citizens must take the lead. “Don’t think that the government will think for itself,” he says. “We have to push from the outside.”

In electing MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his mounting creative public campaigns in Thailand to promote family planning, rural development, and a rigorous, honest, and compassionate response to the plague of AIDS.

It is a very great honor for me to accept this award and I humbly thank you for the opportunity. I would like to stress, first and foremost, that the award really goes to the countless individuals who have worked consistently to provide family planning, health care, and community development services to rural areas. Their important contributions have brought about much of the positive change that we see around us, and I laud their efforts.

Today the struggle for equality and a better life continues, beset by a pandemic that has further divided our societies. That pandemic is AIDS and it threatens to condemn several countries in our region to another generation of grinding poverty. Currently, half of the population infected with HIV are aged between fifteen and twenty-four. The problem is compounded by the fact that many people in Asia, as well as some governments, are still denying the gravity of the situation and the potential impact of the HIV virus. As governments delay in responding constructively and fairly to the AIDS crisis, our societies as a whole also fail to address the problem with compassion at a time when it is most needed.

This inability to respond to the pandemic in an effective, decent manner indicates much deeper social issues at play, those of inequality, injustice, and indifference. AIDS has the potential to further divide us and we all bear responsibility for ensuring that does not happen. We must not, as a society, discriminate. Rather, we must commit ourselves to dealing with the HIV virus with the genuine understanding and humanity demanded by the situation.

I would like to thank once again the many people who have and are continuing to work in AIDS prevention and treatment. The award recognizes their efforts. Let it also serve as a gesture of encouragement to those who are directly affected by AIDS. And to the rest of us, let it be the light of inspiration to find the means and strength to build a fair and humane society.

No social relationship in Asia is more fraught with ambiguity than that between the police and the people. Called upon to maintain order and public safety, and to manage the region’s paralyzing traffic, the police provide essential civilizing services. Yet, nearly everywhere their reputation is tarnished by incompetence and abuses, large and small. For too many people, the police are not a positive good, only a necessary evil. KIRAN BEDI, India’s highest ranking female police officer and currently Delhi’s inspector general of prisons, believes the police can do better.

Taught by her unconventional parents to compete and “to think equally,” BEDI excelled both at school and at tennis, the family passion. She sailed through college and a masters degree and, in 1972, at the age of twenty-two, won the women’s lawn tennis championship of Asia. That same year she entered the police academy and, in 1974, became the first woman to enter the elite Indian Police Service. Assigned to the capital city, BEDI rose rapidly in the ranks, winning national acclaim—and a presidential award—in 1978 by single-handedly driving off a band of club-and-sword-wielding demonstrators with her police baton.

As deputy commissioner of police in Delhi’s West and North Districts, BEDI posted constables in blue-and-white “beat boxes” where citizens could consult them daily. She redirected former bootleggers to honest livelihoods by arranging friendly loans and assistance. Women’s peace committees, set up at her initiative, promoted neighborhood harmony. As community participation rose, crimes fell. Observing the link between drug addiction and chronic criminality, BEDI set up community-supported detoxification clinics, a model she later developed for wider application as deputy director of the Narcotics Control Bureau.

As New Delhi’s traffic chief, her meticulous planning and ruthlessly impartial enforcement of the rules kept the capital’s motley caravanserai of vehicles moving at the 1982 Asian Games—although she admits she made some enemies in the process.

In 1993 BEDI became inspector general of prisons (Delhi) and took charge of Tihar, India’s largest prison complex. In this brutally overcrowded purgatory dwelled more than 8,000 prisoners, 90 percent of whom were unconvicted and merely awaiting trial. BEDI rapidly transformed Tihar. Today its inmates follow a positive regimen of work, study, and play. Illiterate prisoners learn to read and write. Others earn higher degrees from cooperating colleges. In prison workshops, prisoners keep their skills tuned and earn wages to save in Tihar’s new bank. Through their panchayats (elected councils), inmates share responsibility for community discipline and for organizing games and entertainment. In yoga classes they learn meditation techniques to still anger and improve concentration. Complaints placed in the mobile petition box go directly to the top and are taken seriously. Tihar is a different world today. In it, BEDI’s charges are being imbued with positive attitudes and practical skills for life beyond the walls.

In all of BEDI’s innovations there is a pattern: each one seeks to break down adversarial relations between the police and the community, and each one seeks to replace the hard hand of punishment with the healing hand of rehabilitation.

The discipline, confidence, and competitive spirit of BEDI’s youth remain with her at age forty-five. She is impatient and inclined to buck the system. “It is tough to go against the wave,” she says, “but at least you reach where nobody else can.”

In electing KIRAN BEDI to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes her building confidence in India’s police through dynamic leadership and effective innovations in crime control, drug rehabilitation, and humane prison reform.

Twenty-two years ago, when I decided to join the elite Indian Police Service, I saw in it a great potential for the “power to do,” the “power to get things done,” and the “power to correct.” I do firmly believe that the police in any country can be the greatest protector of human rights and the rule of law—as it can as well be the greatest violator of both.

The Ramon Magsaysay Award has done a couple of magical things in my case, as it has in others. It has recognized:

1. The Power to Prevent
Crime prevention is usually given a lower priority and underestimated as an area of policing. What gets priority and headlines are detections and seizures, not prevention of delinquency and breach of peace, which have all the potential of violent crime.

2. The Power of Policing the People
“Policing is for the people,” therefore people must be made partners in policing. Once that is done in a variety of ways, it provides transparency and accountability to the whole system. Resources that cannot alone come from the police could come from participative policing.

3. The Power of the Team
Leaders of the police or government, if they want results, need to form teams and allow them initiatives, delegation, support, noninterference, and training, with total emphasis on professional integrity. While personal example is crucial, sharing of achievements will lead to more results. This will lead to not only “keeping security” but “creating security.”

The award has propelled me to consolidate and expand my work. For this I have registered a trust called India Vision. I am breathing life into it at this moment. It will carry forward projects in the fields of prison reform, drug abuse prevention, empowerment of women, mental disability, and sports promotion. I seek your greater support in these projects.

I accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award with total gratitude to the Foundation and the Philippines, on behalf of my team comprising Police-Prison-People and my family from India.