New Delhi - Indian activist Sandeep Pandey and six others have won this year’s Ramon Magsaysay awards, the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the local media said on Tuesday.
Pandey won the award for helping found ‘Asha’ (Hope), a non- governmental organization (NGO) which supports education and livelihood projects for poor children, particularly Dalits (low caste Hindus).
Pandey won the award in the Emergent Leadership category, it was announced in Manila on Monday.
The Indian activist, after obtaining a post-graduate degree from University of Berkeley in California, returned to India in 1992 to study in the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur. But he later abandoned his degree to work on education instead.
Working mainly in Ballia, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Pandey and his team are now developing an alternative educational curriculum and textbooks for schools from the kindergarten level.
Other winners of the prestigious awards include a Supreme Court of the Philippines chief justice, a Pakistani nun, a doctor from Myanmar, a Nepalese journalist and a South Korean Buddhist monk, the awards committee said.