Text and photos: Courtesy Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation

The Magsaysay Award recognizes and honours individuals and organizations in Asia regardless of race, creed, sex, or nationality, who have achieved distinction in their respective fields and have helped others generously without anticipating public recognition. The awards are given in five categories: government service; public service; community leadership; journalism, literature, and creative communication arts; peace and international understanding.

In the 2000 Magsaysay Awards Presentation Ceremonies, the Foundation announced the creation of a sixth Award category, Emergent Leadership. This new Award category was established with the support of a grant from the Ford Foundation. The Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership honors "individuals, forty years of age and below, doing outstanding work on issues of social change in their communities, but whose leadership is not yet broadly recognized outside of these communities." An Award in this category was given for the first time in 2001.

The Ramon Magsaysay Award was established by the trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) based in New York City. With the concurrence of the Philippine government, the prize was created to commemorate late president of the Philippines and to perpetuate his example of integrity in government, courageous service to the people, and pragmatic idealism within a democratic society.

Each year, the Foundation solicits award nominations from selected persons throughout Asia who are qualified by virtue of position, expertise, or experience. Nominations are carefully investigated and the awards themselves are determined following rigorous evaluation by the Foundation’s board of trustees. Presentation ceremonies are held annually in Manila on August 31st, the birth anniversary of the late president.

Since they were first presented in 1958, the Magsaysay Awards have been given to over 200 individuals and institutions.

V. Shanta

Executive Chair of Chennai’s Cancer Institute (WIA)

Cancer is on the rise in India. Especially rampant are cancers of the mouth, throat, esophagus, and lungs in men—all related to tobacco use—and cancers of the breast and cervix in women. Twenty percent of cervical cancer in the world occurs in India, where poor rural women are particularly prone to the disease. Specialized research and treatment of these cancers in India are relatively recent phenomena. Dr. V. Shanta, executive chair of Chennai’s Cancer Institute (WIA), is a pioneer in both.

V. Shanta was born to an illustrious family and raised in a world of books, ideas, and high achievement. Resisting the conventional path for women, she studied medicine at Madras Medical College and came under the spell of Muthulakshmi Reddy, a social reformer and India’s first woman medical graduate. In 1954, under Dr. Reddy’s leadership, the Women’s Indian Association Cancer Relief Fund founded the Cancer Institute (WIA) in Madras, now Chennai. Drawn to Reddy’s vision, young Dr. Shanta spurned a more lucrative post to join the Institute. She has never left.

The fledgling institute had only twelve beds and two doctors—Shanta and Dr. S. Krishnamurthi, the founding director and Reddy’s son. As the Institute’s associate director, Shanta set up India’s first comprehensive paediatric cancer clinic, conducted the country’s first major cancer survey, and developed its first programme for the early detection of cancer in rural areas. She became a passionate advocate of cancer prevention and opened a tobacco cessation clinic. And she conducted India’s first successful trials of combination therapy, leading to a dramatic breakthrough in the control and cure of oral cancer.

Simultaneously, Shanta conducted groundbreaking research on oral, cervical, and breast cancer and paediatric leukemia, publishing the results in international journals and establishing the Institute as India’s first Regional Cancer Research and Treatment Center in 1975. In 1984, the Institute added a postgraduate college where Shanta proceeded to train cancer specialists, more than 150 of whom now practice throughout the subcontinent.

As director since 1980, Shanta strove to make the Institute a world-class research centre with institutional partners in Europe, North America, and Japan and state-of-the-art laboratory and imaging equipment. She worked tirelessly to raise donations, grants, and government subsidies and trained hundreds of village-health nurses to screen rural women for cervical abnormalities. In 2000, she opened India’s first hereditary cancer clinic.

Today, the Cancer Institute (WIA) comprises a 428-bed hospital and research center plus the Dr. Muthulakshmi College of Oncologic Sciences, with advanced specialties in medical, surgical, and radiation oncology. In an era when specialized medical care in India has become highly commercialized, Dr. Shanta strives to ensure that the Institute remains true to its ethos, "Service to all." Its services are free or subsidized for some 60 percent of its 100,000 annual patients; travel allowances make regular treatments accessible to the poor. And through a volunteer programme called Sanctuary, the Institute provides hope-giving emotional support and counselling to patients and their families and to cancer-afflicted children. There are thousands who might say, as leukemia victim Delli Rao, a wageworker, has said, "I owe my life to Dr. Shanta."

Seventy-eight-year-old Shanta still sees patients, still performs surgery, and is still on call twenty-four hours a day. It disturbs her that it is so hard to raise funds for the Institute when, she says, "we seem to have enough money to construct pilgrim shelters and temples in almost every street of the city." Even so, she cautions young people against cynicism. Perhaps reflecting on her own life, she tells them: "Learn to accept that you are good and that from you a lot of good can happen."

The 2005 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts

Matiur Rahman

In Bangladesh, some three hundred people each year lose their natural-born faces in acid attacks. Most of them are young women who have offended their attackers by denying them sex or marriage or suitable dowries. But others are maimed in family feuds or land disputes or local rivalries. This hideous crime is new to Bangladesh and has grown alarmingly in the past decade. As editor of Bangladesh’s largest-circulation Bangla-language newspaper, Matiur Rahman has stirred the nation to respond.

Rahman was born in 1944 and grew up in the era of decolonization and fervent nationalism that gave birth to East Pakistan and then Bangladesh. He became a Marxist and for twenty-one years edited Dhaka’s socialist weekly Ekota. When communism’s failures gave him second thoughts, he withdrew from leftist politics to concentrate on journalism. In 1998 he founded Prothom Alo, or First Light, a daily newspaper. Rahman established Prothom Alo’s credibility by exposing the missteps of both the government and its foes and by aggressively covering corruption, terrorism, and human rights violations. The newspaper’s constructive advocacy and Rahman’s own unsparing editorials attracted legions of readers. Today it reaches two million of them.

Prothom Alo covered the alarming rise of acid throwing in Bangladesh. But in 2000 a heartrending case involving a fifteen-year-old girl riveted Rahman’s attention. He determined to harness the resources of his newspaper to fight the scourge.

In prominent daily appeals, Rahman declared war on acid throwers and called upon his readers to contribute to the Prothom Alo Aid Fund for acid victims. With scarred women at his side, he solicited donations at rallies and press conferences and called upon celebrities and volunteers to carry the appeal throughout the country. People from all walks of life and even Bangladeshis abroad became donors. Rahman acknowledged each small gift in the newspaper and steered help directly to the victims: money for burn treatments, plastic surgery, legal fees, and living expenses plus new dwellings for some and income-generating assets such as milking cows, sewing machines, cultivable lands, and shops for others. At the same time, Prothom Alo pressured the government to strengthen laws against acid attacks and the reckless sale of dangerous chemicals.

The response to Rahman’s appeal reassured him that "the society is not sleeping." By June 2005, some 8.2 million taka had been dispersed to over one hundred victims. Moreover, in 2002 the country’s Acid Crimes Prevention Act and Acid Control Act stiffened penalties for acid throwers and tightened licensing requirements for acid sales.

Rahman has been described as "the navigator of positive social and cultural change" in Bangladesh. He has used his authority as editor of Prothom Alo not only to fight the crime of acid throwing but also to raise public consciousness about HIV/AIDS and drug abuse and to reveal the role of certain Muslim extremists in fomenting militancy and violence. His provocative independence comes at a price. He is regularly harassed and threatened and the government has withdrawn advertising from his newspaper and taken him to court in reprisal for Prothom Alo’s critical reporting.

Despite these pressures, Rahman aspires to no other vocation. Readers look to Prothom Alo as "a hope against hope," he says. "I work to use it for the cause of the people."

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