2 Indians win Magsaysay award
Two Indians – Bharat Vatwani, a psychiatrist who led the rescue of thousands of mentally ill street paupers to treat and reunite them with their families, and Sonam Wangchuk, who tutored village students to help them pass exams – are among six winners of the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay awards, regarded as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.
The other recipients named Thursday are Youk Chhang, a Cambodian genocide survivor who helped document the Khmer Rouge atrocities; Howard Dee, a Filipino who led peace talks with communist insurgents, Vo Thi Hoang Yen , a polio-stricken Vietnamese who fought discrimination against the disabled; and Maria de Lourdes Martins Cruz, an East Timorese who built care centres for the poor amid civil strife.
The awards, named after a Philippine president who died in a 1957 plane crash, are to be presented in Manila on August 31.
“All are unafraid to take on large causes. All have refused to give up despite meager resources, daunting adversity and strong opposition,” Carmencita Abella, president of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, said of the winners.
“Their approaches are all deeply anchored on a respect for human dignity and a faith in the power of collective endeavor.”
In India, where there are an estimated 400,000 street paupers with mental illness, psychiatrist Bharat Vatwani started a mission in 1988 that by now has rescued, treated and reintegrated into their families more than 7,000 of them.
Vatwani’s “healing compassion” affirmed “the human dignity of even the most ostracised in our midst,” the foundation said.
Born in Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir, Sonam Wangchuk fought discrimination against minorities at a young age to pursue an engineering course and founded a movement in 1988 that helped tutor poor village students so they could pass exams and pursued educational reforms. Wangchuk’s life story is said to be the inspiration behind the 2009 movie, Aamir Khan starrer Three Idiots.