Dr Sandeep Pandey expects his Magsaysay award to help focus the
world’s attention on underprivileged children
Charanjit Ahuja
From the humdrum of student politics at the Institute of Technology at the Benaras Hindu University to the Berkeley University, from a doctorate in mechanical engineering to a professor’s assignment at IIT Kanpur to the brain behind nonprofit Asha, Dr Sandeep Pandey’s, this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Foundation award winner, is an eventful story.
Dr Pandey says: ‘‘The suffering of underprivileged always hurts me.” Politics is not his cup of tea and it was in ’80s during his student days at Benaras Hindu University that he found that “politics was not the way to solve complex problems of common people”.
During his stay abroad for his mechanical engineering doctorate, he along with a group of like-minded people founded Asha in 1991. The group organised a protest march from Pokhran to Sarnath to focus attention on the threat from the nuclear weapons and these tests. The Ramon Magsaysay Foundation realised his vision and work as the award citation acknowledges the “efforts to defuse tension between India and Pakistan and solve the dispute’’.
Asha, which means hope, now runs four schools for underprivileged tribal children, mostly from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The children at Todermal, Aswari, Rajatlao and Lalpur in Balia, Varanasi, Kanpur and Hardoi districts are not traditional schools, but impart vocational education in village and cottage industries. About 400 children are taking training in disciplines like bee keeping, stitching, greeting cards making, recycling of waste paper and polybags. Asha also distributes free medicines among the needy villagers.
About the award, he says that it would “play a significant role in focussing attention on my work for the underprivileged”, which was hitherto unknown and dormant.
His wife Arundhati Dhuru, herself a known social activist, who has worked with the likes of Medha Patkar in the Narmado Bachao movement, says that she met Dr Pandey during the movement in 1993 and two years later they got married. She says that it was on July 16 that she got a call asking for Sandeep’s phone for some very important confidential information. She initially thought that it was a hoax since there was no phone call during the next three weeks. Then finally the phone bell rang and the foundation sought Sandeep’s acceptance for the coveted award. The phone bell has not stopped since then.
Dr Pandey says that his wife has been a source of inspiration for him. For children at Asha schools, Sandeep bhaiya has brought happiness for all the downtrodden in the form of Magsaysay award in the Eminent Leader category.