Until the 1950s, Nepal’s hereditary rulers held the kingdom in isolation from the rest of the world. Afterwards, the country opened slowly and, until today, many of Nepal’s people remain scattered in thousands of rural villages accessible only by footpath. Fewer than half can read. And only one in a hundred receives a newspaper. Altogether, poor soil for journalism! Yet BHARAT KOIRALA, a journalist, has been tilling this stingy soil for nearly forty years. In doing so, he has made journalism a valuable component of his country’s belated awakening to modernity. 

Born in 1942, KOIRALA was educated at Tribhuvan University in Katmandu and soon became a newspaperman. Rising Nepal, where he began, and its sister Nepali-language Gorakhapatra, were government organs. As KOIRALA rose eventually to lead the state-owned Gorakhapatra publishing house, he practiced “a heavy dose of self-censorship,” he admits. Even so, he managed to expand the domain of the press. He encouraged his young reporters to write good stories and shielded them when the results offended someone in power. And he steered them to cover Nepal’s economic development and its impact on the rural population. True, such stories were safe, but KOIRALA understood they were also important. 

In 1984, KOIRALA established the Nepal Press Institute. In its workshops and courses, he introduced beginning and mid-career journalists not only to new skills but also to professional ethics and standards and to the role of the media as a public watchdog-laying the groundwork for an independent press in years to come. In 1985, he helped form the Nepal Forum for Environmental Journalists, to foster in-depth reporting on the country’s environment. KOIRALA linked both of these efforts to affiliated programs abroad, drawing Nepal’s rising journalists into important international dialogues. 

After leaving Gorakhapatra in 1986, KOIRALA turned his attention to Nepal’s rural world, where fully half the districts had no access to national newspapers. To fill the gap, he began mounting huge billboard-style newspapers on walls in rural towns. With funding from the Agricultural Development Bank, these popular “wall newspapers” soon proliferated in Nepal?s remote hill districts. 

When a democratic revolution overtook Nepal in 1990, KOIRALA played an important role in the transition to greater press freedom. Still impassioned about bringing information to the rural masses, he encouraged small cities and towns to put up their own newspapers and led the Press Institute to set up branches to train countryside reporters. 

Increasingly, however, KOIRALA focused his hopes on radio. Radios, he noted, are cheap. They run on batteries or solar power and their signals can reach where power lines and delivery trucks cannot. Moreover, he says, the radio “transcends literacy.” KOIRALA made it his mission to promote locally owned and operated radio stations in rural Nepal. A dozen have succeeded. Meanwhile, leading a consortium of four NGOs, KOIRALA himself launched Sagarmatha, Nepal’s first private FM radio station. It offers music and public affairs programming and also takes in trainees — a true KOIRALA touch. 

The urbane KOIRALA works quietly and always in concert with friends and colleagues. He excels at initiating projects and linking them to funders and then, as one friend puts it, letting them “thrive on their own.” Today, his impact reaches far and wide, from the country’s growing cadre of professional journalists to the wall newspapers posted across the hill districts. His diverse initiatives have a common thread. As Koirala says of community radio stations, they are “helping create a free, independent, and pluralistic media and promoting public debate in our democracy.” 

In electing BHARAT KOIRALA to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his developing professional journalism in Nepal and unleashing the democratizing powers of a free media.

Madame President, Excellencies, President and Trustees of the Foundation, Distinguished Guests, Fellow Awardees, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

It is a great honour and privilege for me to be this year’s recipient of the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts. I have, thus become the second Nepalese to be conferred this honour after 25 years. Soon after the Awards were announced I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Mahesh Chandra Regmi who received the Award in the same category in 1977. Even though Dr. Regmi suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and partially paralysed, is confined to the wheel chair he expressed his deep appreciation of the honor conferred on him and his joy that another Nepali had received the award. 

Even though I had some knowledge of the honour and prestige attached to the Ramon Magsaysay Award I could understand its full significance only when the awards were announced. The news arrived at a time when the country was looking for something positive in the midst of chaos and confusion. The Award was considered an honour not only to me or our journalist community but to the country itself. 

Certainly, the Foundation deserves the appreciation of the Nepalese people for recognizing the positive achievements of a process started many years ago that finally has begun to bear fruit. The Nepalese media which suffered for over a century under various forms of autocratic rule finally emerged as a free and independent entity following the restoration of democracy in 1990. The media became more institutionalized, received massive investment in new technology, training of journalists was undertaken at an unprecedented level and media institutions undertook many innovative approaches to increase the flow of information to and from the rural areas. Nepal is a country of villages, 80 % of the 23 million people live in over 40,000 villages some of which are located in difficult mountainous regions. Isolated by mountains and valleys these villages are cut off from the various media of communication largely located in urban centres. 

Through these new approaches that include wall newspapers put up on walls of public buildings and tea shops, audio towers that inform villagers in their own homes and radio stations that are owned and operated by rural communities, and tiny newspapers that are prized by neo-literates in remote villages are beginning to change lives and improve living conditions. A number of dedicated journalists and media organizations are at the forefront of this enterprise to provide media access to people living in far-flung areas. 

We are grateful to the Foundation for recognizing this silent revolution in a remote part of the world. I am sure the award will draw more attention of the government, civil society, the private sector and the international community to what is happening in Nepalese villages. We hope that these efforts will bring about positive changes in our villages that at the moment seem remote to many. The Award has raised the morale of a society that have fallen into despondency. 

I wish once again to thank you for the Award and its impact on Nepalese society. It should also provide encouragement to the younger generation of journalists to become involved in enterprises that encourage selfless devotion to the welfare of ordinary people. Thank you.

To all the world, leprosy is a curse. Its power to deform the face and body terrified the ancients and also their heirs. For most of history, leprosy sufferers lived apart, cast away by their frightened brethren to dwell alone or in squalid colonies of untouchables. And so it was in Pakistan when Dr. RUTH PFAU arrived in 1960. 

PFAU was born in Germany and in her youth survived the havoc of Nazism, war, and foreign occupation. Amid the ferment of postwar Europe, she became a doctor and found direction in Catholicism. She joined the Daughters of the Heart of Mary, a religious order dedicated to the relief of misery, and asked to be sent to Asia. 

Destined for a mission station in India, PFAU stopped along the way in Pakistan. There, in a Karachi slum, fellow members of her order had set up a ramshackle leprosy dispensary named after their founder, Marie Adelaide. Seeing the squalor and suffering, PFAU blurted out, “It can?t go on any more like this,” and halted her journey on the spot. 

PFAU quickly reorganized the rough-hewn dispensary into a properly run leprosy clinic, despite the ambient filth and disorder and legions of needy patients. By chance, her efforts drew the attention of the German Leprosy Relief Association, which, along with other German donors, began to provide regular funding. 

In two years’ time, she transferred the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre (MALC) to a proper hospital building and established a full-service leprosy treatment and rehabilitation center, free to patients. Volunteer specialists helped her, but PFAU built her staff mainly by training former patients to diagnose and treat the disease and to keep records. Meanwhile, she took note of the home districts of her patients and identified Pakistan’s leprosy belt-the first step in creating a national program of eradication. 

In 1968, PFAU invited the government of Pakistan to undertake a National Leprosy Control Programme in partnership with MALC. Soon, she and her team began setting up leprosy-control centers across the country. PFAU traveled to the most remote and rugged corners of Pakistan, making now-legendary treks by horseback and camelback and by foot. In her far-flung clinics, MALC-trained paramedics identified leprosy victims and drew them into treatment. Multidrug-Regimen chemotherapy, introduced in 1984, offered a timely and effective cure. But PFAU trained her staff always to treat the person, not just the disease. She fostered social rehabilitation and worked desperately to remove the public fear of leprosy, making a point of holding her patients’ hands and calmly entering their dwellings for all to see. 

Today, Karachi’s eight-story Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre is the hub of one hundred seventy leprosy control centers, with some eight hundred staff members. Leprosy still occurs in Pakistan. But by 1996, PFAU’s efforts had so reduced its incidence that the World Health Organization declared the disease to have been controlled in Pakistan, one of the first countries in Asia to achieve this goal. These days, Pfau?s regional centers sometimes double as tuberculosis or eye health clinics. Meanwhile, seventy-two-year-old Pfau, retired now, is busy helping to feed and repatriate Afghan refugees adrift in Pakistan. 

PFAU long ago claimed Pakistan as home. She would like to do more there. “If I could be reborn again,” she says, “I would certainly dedicate myself to women’s rights in Pakistan.” As MALC’s guiding spirit, she reminds people of her own life-shaping realization of many years ago: A leprosy victim, no matter how wretched, has “only one life to live out-one single life, a life just like mine.” 

In electing RUTH PFAU to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes her lifelong dedication to eradicate leprosy and its stigma in Pakistan, and other loving gifts to her adopted country.

Your Excellency President of the Philippines, Members of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, trustees, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen: 

Dear Friends, thank you all for having taken the time out to join us here today. To begin, let me briefly introduce myself: I am a medical doctor, a German, a convert and a nun, by now 72; I have survived Nazi time, World War II, and so far, all the upheavals, riots, terrorist attacks in my adopted. I have slipped into a task which I never planned. I have been very happy in my life and I am still happy, and would do the same if I was to be asked to make my life’s decision once more. 

I have an entire collection of signatures — many many signatures, and thumb impressions on sheets of paper and cards, of people who congratulated me to the award — patients, workers, friends from all over Pakistan, and beyond. The workers state proudly that it is “their” award I am receiving in their name. They are all very excited about it, so I was curious, what was special about it? Perhaps: that Asia asserts itself. Asserts itself constructively, proactively. The Asian Nobel Prize. I am happy to be able to assist Pakistan in this small way, to build the road to participate in the finding of our own identity. 

What has actually made you think of us, the Leprosy Team? Looking back the past 40 years, there seems to have been a special grace with the programme. We did embark to do the impossible — to do the possible, we said in the beginning, what would this be for a challenge? The possible everybody could do. The hut made from wooden crates, in a slum in Karachi where leprosy work started, grew into a National Leprosy Programme, and achieved its goal, leprosy control, after 35 years of hard work across the country. 

What makes me genuinely happy and grateful to God, is that this “leprosy control” does not only mean that we gained the victory over a bacillus — this is fairly easily done. Leprosy control meant for us, from the beginning, to be instrumental to change the lives of our patients ? to help them to gain back their dignity, taken from them simply because they fell prey to an ordinary bacterial disease. 

And while battling for their physical cure and their human dignity, this battle has changed us, too, has shaped our values, our “c.i.”, our corporate identity: the human person is in the centre of our concern. Our priority commitment is for tasks nobody is willing to tackle, and for disadvantaged groups who have no voice. 

When we talk today about empowerment, it means to see the beauty and the value of the other. It is an act of love, love which is able to say, “You are precious, precious in God’s eyes and precious to me.” Able to say this in a world where we witness so much strife and hatred and rivalry and denial of the right of people to be different. 

You had the courage to recognize with your prestigious award our fairly unknown group. A group upholding that we controlled leprosy. Thanks to modern multi-drug therapy and strategic planning but even more so thanks to loving concern for the patient. 

For this I do thank you in the name of all our co-workers. The team is looking towards Manila to find their way of life recognized. Thank you for helping Asia to discover, rediscover, find, cling to, confess its values — values of the intellect and heart. Thanks for strengthening us on our way. Thank you.

Like many Thai towns along the Thailand-Burma border these days, Mae Sot is a sanctuary for Burmese refugees in flight from upheaval and civil war at home. There, tens of thousands of Karens and other Burmese minorities subsist on the rough fringes of the Thai economy and await a brighter future. Their thoughts are often of their villages across the border where, for years now, the Burmese Army has waged a violent campaign to bring the region’s people into the firm embrace of the Burmese military state. This brutal war goes on and on. In Mae Sot, CYNTHIA MAUNG, a doctor, has been treating its victims for fourteen years. 

Born to a Karen family in Moulmein in 1959,  CYNTHIA MAUNG studied medicine at the University of Rangoon. She was practicing in a Karen village near her hometown when, in 1988, Burma’s military junta launched its bloody crackdown against democracy advocates. Packing a few clothes and a medical reference book, she fled with some students to Mae Sot, Thailand, where she joined other exiles. Trauma and illness were rampant among the refugees. In a dilapidated building with bare dirt floors, Dr. CYNTHIA went to work. 

Her makeshift clinic had hardly any supplies at all. She improvised by sterilizing a few precious instruments in a kitchen rice cooker and by soliciting medicines and food from Catholic relief workers and nearby refugee camps. As she and her companions lived from hand to mouth and shared in all the work, Dr. CYNTHIA treated the local scourges of malaria, respiratory disease, and diarrhea as well as shrapnel and gunshot wounds and injuries from land mines. To keep up, she trained health workers to assist in the clinic and to serve as “backpack medics” across the border. By 1996, she was supporting six thatch-and-tin clinics in the Karen-controlled war zone. Here her medics treated common illnesses, set broken bones, and performed simple frontline surgery. They also trained midwives, installed sanitary toilets, and brought lessons of hygiene, nutrition, and reproductive health to villagers-all this until the villages were overrun by the Burmese Army, uprooting thousands and raising the flood of refugees to Thailand. 

Dr. CYNTHIA expanded her clinic to meet the need. She attracted volunteer doctors, nurses, and medical interns from abroad and tirelessly solicited help from relief agencies and NGOs. They responded and, year by year, the clinic grew. 

Today, staffed by five doctors and dozens of health workers and trainees, Dr. CYNTHIA’s clinic provides free comprehensive health services to thirty thousand people a year. Last year, 563 babies were born there and 700 patients received new eyeglasses. The clinic operates its own laboratory and prosthetics workshop and receives support from some international organizations. Meanwhile, sixty teams of Dr. CYNTHIA’s backpack medics continue to assist displaced villagers across the border and to support two field clinics in the war zone. 

Life along the border is hard in many ways. At Dr. CYNTHIA’s clinic, injuries from domestic violence are equal to injuries from war. This is why, aside from treating patients, she fosters women’s organizations, youth programs, and other efforts to redress the corrosive social consequences of refugee life. 

Dr. CYNTHIA lives above her clinic in Mae Sot with her husband and two children. She dreams of going home to Burma. The World Health Organization has said that Burma’s health care system is one of the worst in the world. Dr. CYNTHIA would like to change that. In Mae Sot, she says, “We have already started.” 

In electing CYNTHIA MAUNG to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her humane and fearless response to the urgent medical needs of thousands of refugees and displaced persons along the Thailand-Burma border.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. 

I am greatly honored to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. 

I accept this award on behalf of the many health and community workers from Burma who have committed themselves to serve our nation and without whom I could not carry out my activities. 

My colleagues and I face many challenges working to assist displaced communities resulting from the conflict and presence of military dictatorship in our country. Until the late 1950’s, Burma was known as the rice bowl of Asia, a beautiful country rich in natural resources with a highly literate population. 

But fifty years of civil war have left Burmese civil society divided and disrupted. The military dictatorship in Burma has displaced hundreds of thousands, or forced them to flee to neighbouring countries where they cannot live as full members of society. Since 1988, all university education has been interrupted and there are more closing days than opening days. 

Today, the country is in a severe economic crisis with one of the poorest health and human rights violation records in the world. Even though the country’s opposition leader, Daw Aung Sann Su Kyi has been released from house arrest there has been no political change and no attempt has been made by the regime to deal constructively with ethnic conflicts. 

More than 1,500 people still remain as political prisoners in the country. Under military oppression, access to information from the outside world is very limited. Within the country all information sharing and the media are controlled by the military regime. Burma has been isolated from her neighbours and from the international community. 

The oppressive situation continues for the people of Burma — the forced relocations, forced labour, systematic rape, extortion and military offensives are go on and on, and therefore people?s basic need for survival increases. 

Thousands of children are born everyday and cannot officially be registered. Children continue to drop out of school and are often separated from their families. Trafficking and prostitution is a growing problem among people of all ages and both sexes who are helpless to defend themselves. 

Along Burma’s borders, health, youth and women’s organizations have exited, grown and supported each other for many years to address the needs of these people. Education, training and networking are our priorities. In exile, we continue to work together to promote the welfare of the people and to assist them in building the skills that will develop trust and confidence among the different communities. This will lead to creating a better understanding and establishing an agenda for a new society for Burma as a whole in the future. 

However, even with all this community support and education the underlying problem can only be solved through political reform, reconciliation, the return of freedom of expression and the establishment of healthcare and education for all. 

We strongly urge all countries, not just our neighbours, to support us in our struggle to free Burma from the military dictatorship. 

This award recognizes the dignity and courage of all the people who are working toward peace and democracy in Burma. 

We hope that one day Burma will again be a free country. Thank you for your support.

By the time SUKHO CHOI was born in 1955, ten years had passed since Korea was partitioned at the end of World War II and two had passed since the Korean War and its carnage had come to a halt-without reuniting the country. His was a rigid world of North and South. As he came of age, his own home of South Korea made a successful transition to democracy and rose to industrial prosperity; North Korea, meanwhile, descended deeply into isolation and poverty. The two societies lived worlds apart, their otherness reinforced by the Cold War and its stigmatizing propaganda. CHOI concluded it need not be so. As a Buddhist monk and leader of South Korea’s Jung To Society, he has advanced the cause of reconciliation. 

SUKHO CHOI entered the Buddhist monkhood as a youth but abandoned his robes to join South Korea’s democracy movement. On two occasions he was arrested and tortured. As the movement prevailed, Choi turned from political issues to social ones. He formed the Jung To (or Blessed Land) Society to apply Buddhist teachings to the full range of modern ills, from greed and poverty to environmental degradation. In 1991, he was ordained a Buddhist monk and thus became the Venerable POMNYUN SUNIM, the name he is known by today. 

During the next several years, CHOI and his group established a free school and a medical center and village development program in Dongeshwari, a sixteen-village hamlet of untouchables in a destitute corner of India. But CHOI was increasingly consumed by matters closer to home. 

North Korea was long accustomed to dearth. But the 1990s brought floods and drought and by mid-decade people were starving. Tens of thousands of them fled across the border to China. CHOI visited these “food refugees” repeatedly and surveyed five hundred of them in 1997 and 1998. From them he learned the desperate circumstances of their lives in China and the appalling dimensions of the famine in North Korea. He calculated some three million people had died. 

As his organization assisted the refugees, CHOI raised the alarm at home. “People are dying,” he told South Koreans. “More than were killed during the whole Korean War. It’s happening right now, right at this moment.” He urged them to put aside their fears and suspicions and to help the North Korean people. This, he said, was the true path to reconciliation and reunification. They responded by donating some two million dollars for food aid and thousands of articles of clothing for North Koreans. One million of them also petitioned the South Korean government to send massive quantities of food and medicine to the North. Meanwhile, CHOI carried his message to relief organizations and governments abroad, beseeching them to increase their efforts in North Korea and to end Cold War embargoes. In New York, his local followers committed themselves to assist North Korean farmers with fertilizer, seeds, and tools and to build a factory there that now supplies essential nutrients for eleven thousand children. 

CHOI’s ongoing advocacy and relief efforts reflect his belief that Buddhists must engage the real world and act to relieve suffering. He does so in concert with other engaged Buddhists around the world and also with like-minded Buddhist and Christian NGOs in Korea. 

All of this is part of CHOI’s larger vision for “a new humane society” that also reconciles people with nature. Like the good teacher he is, SUKHO CHOI—the ever-smiling Venerable POMNYUN SUNIM—can convey his complex vision simply. What the world really needs, he says, is “Pure Minds, Good Friends, and Clean Lands.” 

In electing SUKHO CHOI to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his compassionate attention to the human cost of Korea’s bitter division and his hopeful appeal for reconciliation.

It is a great honour for me to have been selected as the recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding this year, but I only have done what I had to do as a monk and indeed I do feel that I am unworthy of the award. I have realized, however, that this award is not given only to myself, but to everyone who took part in the humanitarian assistance to North Korea and the process of reconciliation. I accept this award on behalf of everyone who has been involved in the due course and I would like to express my profound appreciation to the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for giving me this award and to everyone who is here today. Also, I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to all the other awardees tonight. 

I hope this award will create more interest in achieving peace on the Korean peninsula in the international community and that together we can harbour peace and expand humanitarian assistance and protection of the North Korean refugees. It should be given to the North Koreans who are still going through very difficult times. Furthermore, there are conflicts and wars still going on even as I speak in some parts of the world. For the sake of everyone who is suffering from wars, disasters and ideological conflicts, I hope that they will be resolved soon. Peace Movement starts from understanding and recognising their differences and to be awakened to the fact that we are all connected as one. Hence, we all need to make a transition from relationships of competition and hostility to harmonious ones. Upon receiving this award, I shall put my best efforts forward to realize peace in Asia and the Korean peninsula. 

In closing, let me express my sincere gratitude to the late President Magsaysay in whose memory these awards were established. I would also like to express my respect for the people of the Philippines, for having such an honourable award. I thank everyone who is gathered here today, and in the name of the Lord Buddha and the teachers of humanity, I pray that there will be peace, love and happiness among all living beings. 

Thank you very much.

It is a tradition exemplified by Gandhi himself. After years of sojourning abroad, an educated Indian returns home and, forgoing a comfortable career, applies himself to the great social questions. Mohandas K. Gandhi was a lawyer by training. These days, Indian sojourners abroad are more likely to be learning computer science and engineering and preparing to join India?s high-tech economy, or North America’s. SANDEEP PANDEY was such a person yet he has chosen Gandhi’s path.

Born to India’s middle classes, PANDEY studied at Benares Hindu University before attending graduate school in the United States. While pursuing a Ph.D. in control theory at the University of California-Berkeley, he joined V.J.P. Srivastavoy and Deepak Gupta to form Asha (Hope), to support education for poor children in India by tapping the resources of Indians abroad. The enterprising founders raised ten thousand dollars in one year, an auspicious beginning for an organization that now claims thirty six North-American chapters and has disbursed nearly one million dollars for programs in India. After launching Asha, PANDEY himself returned to India, doctorate in hand. He taught briefly at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology and, in 1992, left the institute to devote himself full-time to Asha’s larger purpose: to bring about socioeconomic change in India through education.

In the Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh, PANDEY confronted the impoverished world of low-caste families and dalits, or untouchables. In this world, few children went to school at all; even those who did, grew up to swell India’s vast unemployment rolls. With local volunteers in the villages of Reoti and Bhainsaha, PANDEY has created schools that instill self-reliance and values for a just society. Asha‘s teachers take no pay. Instead, they support themselves with sidelines such as making candles and greeting cards from handmade paper. Students, too, learn useful arts and crafts. Older youths participate in community improvement as volunteers and health aides. They are part of what PANDEY calls “the first grassroots volunteer base of Asha in India.”

A fuller expression of PANDEY’s vision is the Asha ashram in the dalit village of Lalpur, outside Lucknow. There students live and study among traditional artisans and engage in bee-keeping, vegetable gardening, and cottage industries. They follow a special Asha curriculum and fill the air with songs and stories that convey the school’s philosophy. The ashram also serves as a retreat center for Asha workshops and provides simple health services for the community. It is introducing new technologies and livelihood projects. To break down caste barriers, the ashram community conspicuously violates upper-caste taboos against dalits and publicizes anti-dalit crimes and abuses such as bribe taking by local officials.

As these projects matured, PANDEY built Asha’s network in India to twelve chapters and linked its grassroots endeavors to the larger task, as he puts it, of “shaping the socio-economic-political future of the country.” He denounced a government plan to favor Hinduism in state schools and called for an end to “the politics of revenge” that drives his country’s communal violence. Warning against militarist nationalism, in 1999 he organized and led a 400-kilometer Global Peace March to protest India?s nuclear arms program. These days he vocally supports reconciliation between Indians and Pakistanis. “The voice of peace has to be louder,” he says.

Thirty-seven-year-old PANDEY shares his busy activist life with his wife Arundhati and their two children. He is soft-spoken but passionate, as he motivates Asha’s volunteers and young people and shepherds a multitude of projects. How does a one-time aspiring engineer manage such a life? “I believe in the Gandhian thinking,” he says, “that once the path is chalked out, the means will follow.”

In electing SANDEEP PANDEY to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes the empowering example of his commitment to the transformation of India’s marginalized poor.

Your Excellency President of Philippines, Trustees of Ramon Magsaysay Foundation, other dignitaries, brothers and sisters:

I would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for selecting me for an award this year. I accept this award for the collective effort of the Asha team as well as of friends involved in Peace initiatives. Hopefully, this award will draw people’s attention to issues like alternative paradigm of education, nuclear disarmament, communal harmony and peace that we have been working on.

My primary work is in the area of education. I believe there is a need for an education system which will help establish a just human order on earth. Education should not just be treated as a means for getting jobs but should play an important role in shaping the personalities of individuals which will make this earth a better place to live in, irrespective of categories they belong to which differentiate among human beings. Education should build on the basic value of “trust” with which a child is born, and impart values which will make the individual more sensitive towards fellow human beings. Education must teach skills which will help an individual earn livelihood for the family by being part of the production economy. Giving more importance to the service sector rather than the primary sector is bad for the health of any economy. People involved in primary production processes must be able to live with dignity. A criterion that the education system is on the right track is when an educated person is able to bring all the levels at which he/she has to live — the levels of self, body, family, society, nature, larger universe — in harmony with each other.

Work related to education is at the grassroots and belongs to the “micro” category. Here we are trying to experiment and build models which could be considered good models for life.

Then I am also involved with various campaigns which belong to the “macro” category. Here we question the larger level decisions which can impact human life adversely at the grassroots. Our campaign for nuclear disarmament and peace is meant to get rid of nuclear weapons from the face of earth. India and Pakistan have escalated a nuclear arms race, thereby jeopardizing the security of the entire South Asian region. In the case of nuclear energy, it poses serious threat due to its radiation hazard all along the process of its production. In fact, nuclear energy is equally dangerous and this programme must also be halted.

I believe that true security lies in a relationship of trust and therefore countries like India and Pakistan should endeavor to create a border which should not only be free of military on both sides but should also allow free access to the other country. The prerequisite for this is an amicable solution of the problem of Kashmir which respects the wishes of the local people.

The rise of right wing politics spells danger for the internal peace of India. We have recently witnessed one of the worst communal riots of independent India. And all in the name of a movement for the construction of a religious place. The monster of communalism is acquiring fascist tendencies and now for us it has become a struggle to save the core democratic and pluralistic values of Indian society.

India today is going through very troubled times. We have primarily been a culture of tolerance. Today, fueled by the onslaught of new economic policy and aggressive campaign of multinational companies, a belligerent ideology is being imposed on the nation. Violence is being glorified on one hand in the name of religious intolerance and on the other nuclear weapons. The former is creating bloody internal conflicts whereas the latter has created a continuous war like situation on the border. It has been a painful decision to accept the Magsaysay in such times.

I only hope that this award for our efforts will highlight the blindness of violence and make people see the light of reason and compassion.

Partisan politics is the public face of democracy, the most visible manifestation of political liberty. It thrives in the Philippines. Yet in the Philippines and everywhere else, as we know, the liberty of partisan politics depends ultimately upon restraints imposed by law and by the authority of governing institutions. Few people understand this paradox of freedom better than HILARIO G. DAVIDE, JR., chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines.

The child of a mountain barrio in Cebu Province, DAVIDE walked barefoot to school as a boy and worked his way through the University of the Philippines, passing the bar in 1959. He embarked upon a career in the law and, at thirty-seven, represented Cebu as a delegate to the 1971 Constitutional Convention. Shocked by martial law, he mobilized fellow Visayans to challenge the dictatorship. In 1978, his opposition party gained a small foothold in the Marcos-dominated Interim Batasang Pambansa, where Assemblyman Davide called for an end to martial law and sponsored bills opposing corruption and promoting electoral reforms.

As a member of President Corazon Aquino’s Constitutional Commission following the People Power Revolution of 1986, DAVIDE authored the articles governing the legislature in the new law of the land and also added this pathbreaking provision: “The State shall protect and advance the right of people to a balanced and healthful ecology in accord with the rhythm and harmony of nature.” DAVIDE then restored confidence in the electoral process as head of the Commission on Elections and, subsequently, led an exhaustive formal investigation into eight military-led attempts to overthrow the Aquino government.

Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991, DAVIDE made his mark as a hardworking jurist noted for meticulously argued opinions and a strict interpretation of the law. He wrote decisions strengthening the hand of the state against violators of the Philippine environment and, in one landmark case, asserted the right of children to sue for a healthy habitat both for themselves and for “generations yet unborn” — a decision that helped to save 800,000 hectares of the country’s virgin rain forest.

Appointed chief justice in 1998 by President Joseph Estrada, DAVIDE pledged to strengthen and reform the country’s judiciary. He strove to isolate the appointment of judges from political favor and to raise standards for recruitment and performance. He disciplined erring judges and hastened the judicial process with advances in efficiency and time-saving alternatives such as mediation. And he continued to foster a preferential option for the environment. In all he did, DAVIDE emphasized transparency and integrity and, in doing so, he enhanced the authority of the Court as the country’s ultimate arbiter of justice.

The collapse of the Estrada presidency put this authority to the test. As presiding judge in the impeachment trial, DAVIDE personified the dignity and impartiality of the constitution itself. And when the power struggle reached its climax and spilled into the streets, his timely intervention on behalf of “the welfare and will of the people” averted violence and brought the crisis to an end. The moral authority of the Supreme Court carried the day. But DAVIDE’s own reputation for integrity and independence also weighed heavily in legitimating the unprecedented transfer of power to a new president.

Sixty-six-year-old DAVIDE is known to lead by example, keeping up earnestly with his own heavy workload and living modestly. Looking ahead, he says he will “leave politics to the politicians” and devote himself to judicial reform. About this work, his feelings run deep. As he says, “Administering justice is a sacramental task.”

In electing HILARIO G. DAVIDE, JR.to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his life of principled citizenship in profound service to democracy and the rule of law in the Philippines.

I am honored to accept from the Foundation the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service for the year 2002. I accept this award less for myself, and more for the millions of other public servants in Asia who toil selflessly for their fellowmen and their country to make Asia “a better place,” without contemplation of a reward. I hope it will inspire them to persevere with their dedication, and encourage others to emulate them.

The fate of a nation hinges on every action taken by each public servant. The Philippine Constitution declares that a public office is a public trust and requires all public servants to serve with utmost responsibility, integrity, loyalty and efficiency. This means unqualified sacrifice and a commitment to give only the best. Government service is therefore a life of selfless oblation.

By God’s grace I had been guided by two dedicated public servants — Papa and Mama — who served the people as educators, perhaps the noblest of all modes of public service. They brought me up in the countryside, upon earth that demanded much labor. Ours was a very difficult life; and in the midst of difficulties, we in the family loved each other even more and learned to work, give and share, and aspire for nobler things. That upbringing has served me well as a public servant.

It has been a tremendous privilege for me to serve the people in various capacities in the past, and now through the Judiciary. The responsibility was not a choice I pursued, but one that I was nevertheless honored to assume. Thus, I have welcomed every public duty with passion for excellence and a commitment to apply only the best of my abilities to it. The people deserve nothing less.

Words are not enough to express my appreciation and gratitude to the Foundation and its officers and trustees for this award. This is doubtless the most profound honor I have received. Yet it imposes an equally profound duty: to do more for the people, above and beyond the call of duty with boundless devotion and love. In this way I would also perpetuate the memory of the man in whose honor the award is named after — President Ramon Magsaysay — whose 95th birthday anniversary we celebrate today, and whose family I now greet.

May I also take this opportunity to thank the men and women whom I have been blessed to work with — my fellow Justices and magistrates in the Judiciary, all court personnel and civil servants whose labors made mine a little less burdensome.

I thank my beloved wife, Gigi, and the members of my family, who have shared with me the costs and consequences of government service, and for which sacrifice they returned only encouragement and inspiration no sum can measure. I thank my parents, who instilled in me the values and principles I have lived to make me worthy of the award.

Lastly, I offer this honor to God, in tribute for all the blessings He has showered on me and my family, through times trying and otherwise. To Him, indeed, belongs the glory.

More power to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation.