Two Indians, one human rights activist Bezwada Wilson and other Indian classical musician Thodur Madabusi Krishna (T M Krishna) have been selcted for the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for 2016.
Bezwada Wilson , who was born to a dalit family in Karnataka, has been lauded for his efforts towards “asserting the inalienable right to a life of human dignity .” The Chennai-born Carnatic musician TM Krishna has been awarded for ” ensuring social inclusiveness in culture.”
The Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s premier prize and highest honor, celebrates greatness of spirit and transformative leadership in Asia. In the past five decades, the award has been bestowed on over three hundred outstanding men, women and organizations whose selfless service has offered their societies, Asia, and the world successful solutions to some of the most intractable problems of human development.
BEZWADA WILSON
Bezwada Wilson 50,has spent 32 years on his crusade, leading not only with a sense of moral outrage but also with remarkable skills in mass organizing, and working within India’s complex legal system. SKA has grown into a network of 7,000 members in 500 districts across the country. Of the estimated 600,000 scavengers in India, SKA has liberated around 300,000. While Bezwada has placed at the core of his work the dalits’ self-emancipation, he stresses that manual scavenging is not a sectarian problem: “You are addressing all members of society, because no human being should be subjected to this inhuman practice.” Society itself has to be transformed.
In electing Bezwada Wilson to receive the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his moral energy and prodigious skill in leading a grassroots movement to eradicate the degrading servitude of manual scavenging in India, reclaiming for the dalits the human dignity that is their natural birthright.
T M Krishna, the musician
In selecting Thodur Madabusi Krishna to receive the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his forceful commitment as artist and advocate to art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions, breaking barriers of caste and class to unleash what music has to offer not just for some but for all.