Changing lives
Kulandei Francis from India is among the six persons who have been chosen for the 2012 Ramon Magsaysay Award which is
considered to be Asia's Nobel Prize.
Incidentally, India has the most number of Magsaysay Awardees with a 48-awardee count, followed by the Philippines with
a 36-awardee count. By the end of 2011, there are already 272 individuals and 18 organization recipients
of the Magsaysay Award.
Francis has been chosen for the award for his "self-sacrificing, innovative, and extraordinary passion to lift people
from poverty and suffering".
Born to a poor family in Salem district of Tamil Nadu, Francis was the only one of his siblings to go to university.
His parents had sacrificed their only piece of land so he could attend university. The memory of his mother being cheated
by moneylenders out of what little she had, prompted Francis to resolve to live a life of service.
In 1979, he began the Integrated Village Development Project (IVDP) in Krishnagiri district, starting out with small
projects: conducting a night school in the light of gas lamps, setting up a first-aid center. Then, with the help of
development organizations, he undertook a micro-watershed program that, over 22 years, built 331 mostly small check
dams benefitting cultivators and their families in 60 villages.
The IVDP began organizing women's self-help groups (SHGs) in 1989. These savings-and-credit groups have grown into
an all-women movement of 8,231 SHGs with 153,990 members, with total savings of equivalent to USD 40 million, a cumulative
loan portfolio of equivalent to USD 435 million, and a reserve fund of USD 8.9 million. The program has become a
financially disciplined, self-reliant, member-owned, and member-managed organization; the group's solidarity and access
to credit have fueled successful village programs in health and sanitation, housing, livelihood, and children's education,
including scholarships, performance-based incentives for students and schools, a primary school for tribal children,
and a computer training academy that has, to date, trained some 5,000 children.
The five others who have been selected for the award are Chen Shu-Chu from Taiwan, Romulo Davide from Philippines,
Syeda Rizwana Hasan from Bangladesh, Yang Saing Koma from Cambodia, and Ambrosius Ruwindrijarto from Indonesia.
Chen Shu-Chu, the child of vegetable vendors in the city of Taitung, southeastern Taiwan, knew personally the
miseries of the poor. When her mother fell gravely ill, the thirteen-year old Chen saw her father desperately asking
neighbors for money so her mother could be treated in a hospital. What he managed to scrape together came too late to
save her mother's life. As the eldest daughter, she had to stop schooling to help her father run their small vegetable
stall in the market. Five years later, one of her brothers contracted a chronic disease that drained the small family
savings. The school she attended started a fund drive to help the family. The aid was not enough to save her brother's
life, but the memory of that kindness stayed with her. She knew poverty and despair, but witnessed kindness as well,
simple truths that have guided the rest of her life.
Today, two decades after her father died, Chen continues to sell vegetables. What is astounding is that over these
years, just from her daily earnings as a vegetable vendor, she has personally given away over seven million Taiwanese
dollars (USD 320,000) to various charities, particularly for the care and education of children. Recipients of her
generosity include a Buddhist monastery, to help it fund a school; a non-profit Christian organization that rescues
children-at-risk and provides them with food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and education; a Red Cross Society fund
for helping families during disasters and other emergencies; the elementary school where she used to study, to build a
fully-equipped library; and an emergency relief fund that enables students to continue their studies if their parents
fall sick or are unable to work.
Romulo Davide has a doctorate and advanced training in the United States and Ireland. He is a top scientist and
hailed as the "Father of Plant Nematology" for his research on nematode pests that infest, debilitate, and destroy
agricultural crops. His discovery of nematode-trapping fungi (P. lilacinus and P. oxalicum) led to the development of
BIOCON, the first Philippine biological control product that can be used against nematode pests attacking vegetables,
banana, potato, citrus, pineapple, rice, and other crops, thus making available a practical substitute for
highly toxic and expensive chemical nematicides.
In Bangladesh, around 150 decommissioned ships - mostly from rich nations - arrive every year, to be beached and
dismantled as scrap. These ships poison coastal waters with toxic chemicals, and expose 20,000 ship-breaking workers -
many of them child laborers - to extremely dangerous working conditions. Also, in Bangladesh, wealthy private developers
are converting critical wetlands into commercial real estate through landfills, in utter disregard of the law.
In doing so, they displace settlers, damage a fragile ecosystem, and worsen the country's vulnerability to catastrophic
floods. Lawyer Syeda Rizwana Hasan has committed her life to seeing to it that all this must stop.
Born in Dhaka to a family with a tradition of public service, Hasan earned a master's degree in law and immediately
went to work for the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), a pioneer in public interest litigation.
BELA's legal activism has widened and it has taken on close to a hundred cases involving industrial pollution,
and extraction from rivers, forest rights, river pollution and encroachment, hill cutting, illegal fisheries, waste
dumping, and others.
Agronomist Yang Saing Koma is a champion of sustainable agriculture. He founded in 1997 the Cambodian Center for Study
and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC) which, today, has become the largest agricultural and rural development NGO in
Cambodia.
Ruwindrijarto has been chosen for the award in recognition of his sustained advocacy for community-based natural
resource management in Indonesia and leading campaigns to stop illegal forest expoitation.
(Source: Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation)
