Deep Joshi - Winner of Ramon Magsaysay award

One of the very few awards which i avidly look forward to is the Ramon Magsaysay award which is considered Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. They select deserving candidate who have made significant contribution to the society. Indian social activist Deep Joshi, who has done pioneering work for “development of rural communities,” was named along with five others for the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for 2009. I thought of writing a few words about Deep Joshi.


Joshi was raised in a remote village in Uttarakhand in the Himalayas, did his degree from the National Institute of Technology in Allahabad, a master's degree in engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a management degree from MIT's Sloan School. Joshi worked for Ford foundation as program officer and with his experience concluded that if only more people equipped with both knowledge and empathy decided to work in the villages, India's rural society would be transformed.

This idea led him in 1983 to form, together with some colleagues, Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN). A non-profit organization, PRADAN recruits university-educated youth from campuses across the country and grooms them to do grassroots work through a rigorous year-long apprenticeship which combines formal training and guided practice in the field. "Professionalizing" development work is PRADAN's mission by enabling poor rural families to live a life of dignity.

Living and working directly with India's poorest communities, PRADAN staff empower village groups with technical, project implementation, and networking skills that increase both their income-generating capabilities and their actual family income. Its staff, combining their professional expertise with local knowledge, also train villagers as para-veterinarians, accountants, and technicians who support their fellow-villagers in building and sustaining collective livelihood projects.

In its twin programs of training development professionals and reducing rural poverty, PRADAN has produced impressive results. PRADAN professionals, divided into 27 teams, work with over 112,900 families in 3,044 villages across seven of the poorest states in the country. A majority of the families that PRADAN works with belong to the Schedule Tribes and Schedule Castes. Over a thousand graduates have joined its apprenticeship program. More than three hundred professionals comprise its staff, most of them working in field-based teams across the country.

Why would engineers and management professionals, with degrees from universities like Harvard and MIT, choose to apply their brainpower to a small village irrigation project? Joshi desires to show that for people with the finest education, there are few intellectual challenges more worthy than addressing rural poverty. He says: "Development work is considered intellectually inferior to high science, industry, or diplomacy. We want to prove it is both a challenging and a noble choice."

Twenty six percent of India's population, or roughly thirty crore people, still live below the global poverty line. Getting all of them to lead life with dignity is going to be a massive challenge for all of us. This is where people like Deep Joshi are making a significant contribution.

Hats off to Deep Joshi, an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) post graduate for his transformative work on rural development.