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In 2018 Gandhi Peace Prize award went to which Japanese national for his role in leprosy eradication?

On January 16, the government of India announced that the International Gandhi Peace Prize for 2018 would go to Nippon Foundation Chairman Sasakawa Y?hei, for his efforts toward eradicating Hansen’s disease (leprosy) in India and elsewhere around the world. Mr. Sasakawa has been working for elimination of leprosy for more than 40 years. In India, which is the world’s most leprosy-afflicted country, he frequently visits the colonies of leprosy patients and recovered people who have been suffering from severe discrimination, and extends support to improve their lives and retain their dignity.

Presenting the award, President Kovind recognized Mr. Sasakawa’s work, commenting, “He has been instrumental in helping us win crucial battles in the war against leprosy – to prevent and eradicate the disease, and to end stigma and discrimination,” and adding “On behalf of India, I must appreciate the services of Mr Sasakawa and his Foundation.”

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Sasakawa expressed his thanks for the prestigious award, noting, “I do not receive it alone. I receive it together with all who have worked with me over the years. This award will certainly give us renewed encouragement from Mahatma Gandhi.” He also called for continued cooperation going forward, adding “Together, we can realize a world where no one needs to suffer from leprosy nor its associated stigma and discrimination.” He also commented that he intends to donate the monetary award to leprosy elimination efforts.

 

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In 2000, which community development bank from Bangladesh won the Gandhi Peace Prize award?

The award was jointly given in 2000 to Nelson Mandela and Grameen Bank of Bangladesh.

Grameen Bank (GB) has reversed conventional banking practice by removing the need for collateral and created a banking system based on mutual trust, accountability, participation and creativity. GB provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh, without any collateral. At GB, credit is a cost effective weapon to fight poverty and it serves as a catalyst in the overall development of socio-economic conditions of the poor who have been kept outside the banking orbit on the ground that they are poor and hence not bankable.

Grameen Bank’s positive impact on its poor and formerly poor borrowers has been documented in many independent studies carried out by external agencies including the World Bank, the International Food Research Policy Institute (IFPRI) and the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS).

Muhammad Yunus, the bank’s founder, earned a doctorate in economics from Vanderbilt University in the United States. He was inspired during the terrible Bangladesh famine of 1974 to make a small loan of US$27.00 to a group of 42 families so that they could create small items for sale without the burdens of predatory lending. Yunus believed that making such loans available to a wide population would have a positive impact on the rampant rural poverty in Bangladesh.

The Grameen Bank believes that the best way for participants to learn about how the bank works, is through first hand exposure and observations at the field level. Through these experiences, participants are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the effectiveness of Grameen Bank’s work and the impact it has on the poorest of the poor.

 

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In 2016, which is one of the two recipients of the Gandhi Peace Prize award was a non-government organization, working, among others, on access to sanitation?

For 2016 jointly to AkshayaPatra Foundation for its contribution in providing mid-day meals to millions of children across India and Sulabh International for its contribution in improving the condition of sanitation in India and emancipation of manual scavengers.

Sulabh International is an India-based social service organization that works to promote human rights, environmental sanitation, non-conventional sources of energy, waste management and social reforms through education. The organization counts 50,000 volunteers. Sulabh International is the largest nonprofit organization in India.

Sulabh was founded by Bindeshwar Pathak from Bihar State in 1970 .And have 50,000 volunteers Innovations include a scavenging-free two-pit pourflush toilet (Sulabh Shauchalaya); safe and hygienic on-site human waste disposal technology; a new concept of maintenance and construction of pay-&-use public toilets, popularly known as Sulabh Complexes with bath, laundry and urinal facilities being used by about ten million people every day and generates bio-gas and biofertilizer produced from excreta-based plants, low maintenance waste water treatment plants of medium capacity for institutions and industries. Other work includes setting up English-medium public school in New Delhi and also a network of centres all over the country to train boys and girls from poor families, specially scavengers, so that they can compete in open job market.

 

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In which year did Indian Space Research Organisation receive the Gandhi Peace Prize award?

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has been selected for the Gandhi Peace Prize for 2014 for its contribution to the country’s development through space technology and satellite-based services.

The award, comprising Rs.one crore and a citation, was decided after the jury for the prize met under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday.

Chief Justice of India H.L. Dattu, Leader of the single largest Opposition Party in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge, senior Member of Parliament L.K. Advani and Gopalkrishna Gandhi are other members of the jury.

The Gandhi Peace Prize for social, economic and political transformation through non-violence was instituted in 1995.

 

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What is the name of the pioneer of the Chipko movement who received the Gandhi Peace Prize award in 2013?

Chandi Prasad Bhatt (born 1934) is an Indian Gandhian environmentalist and social activist, who founded Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh (DGSS) in Gopeshwar in 1964, which later became a mother-organization to the Chipko Movement, in which he was one of the pioneers, and for which he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1982, followed by the Padma Bhushan in 2005. Today he is known for his work on subaltern social ecology, and considered one of India’s first modern environmentalist. In 2013, he was the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Prize.

This is an annual award given to individuals and institutions for their outstanding contributions towards social, economic and political transformation through non-violence, and other Gandhian methods, for amelioration of human sufferings particularly of the less privileged sections of the society, contributing social justice and harmony.

A decision of a group of peasants in a remote Himalayan village (Reni village of Chamoli, Uttrakhand) to stop a group of loggers from felling a patch of trees has been termed as Chipko Movement. The name was dubbed as the protesters hugged trees to protect them from being felled. This landmark struggle to protect trees started on 27 March 1973 and can be considered as the modern Indian environmental movement.

 

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In 2002, which educational trust founded by K.M. Munshi received the award?

Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, established with the blessings of Mahatma Gandhi, has bagged the coveted Gandhi Peace Prize for 2002.
A five-member jury headed by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has chosen Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan for its “significant contribution towards spreading peace and and harmony among all religions and communities on the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi as also integration of best of ancient and modern values”.
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan is an Indian educational trust. It was founded on 7 November 1938 by Dr. K. M. Munshi, with the support of Mahatma Gandhi. The trust programmes through its 119 centres in India, 7 centres abroad and 367 constituent institutions, cover “all aspects of life from the cradle to the grave and beyond – it fills a growing vacuum in modern life”, as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru observed when he first visited the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in 1950.

The trust operates a number of primary and secondary institutes in India and abroad. It organizes and runs 100 private schools in India.[4] The schools are known as Bharatiya Vidya Mandir, Bhavan’s Vidya Mandir, or Bhavan’s Vidyalaya.

The Bhavan significantly grew as a cultural organization and became a global foundation under the leadership of Sundaram Ramakrishnan who took over as the director after the death of Munshi in 1971. The first foreign centre was opened in London in 1972.

 

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The inaugural Gandhi Peace Prize award was presented to which anti-colonial activist and former President of Tanzania?

Julius Kambarage Nyerere was a Tanzanian anti-colonial activist, politician, and political theorist. He governed Tanganyika as Prime Minister from 1961 to 1962 and then as President from 1963 to 1964, after which he led its successor state, Tanzania, as President from 1964 to 1985. A founding member of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) party—which in 1977 became the Chama Cha Mapinduzi party—he chaired it until 1990. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he promoted a political philosophy known as Ujamaa.

A committed pan-Africanist, Nyerere provided a home for a number of African liberation movements including the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress (PAC) of South Africa, Frelimo when seeking to overthrow Portuguese rule in Mozambique, Zanla (and Robert Mugabe) in their struggle to unseat the white regime in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He also opposed the brutal regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. Following a border invasion by Amin in 1978, a 20,000-strong Tanzanian army along with rebel groups, invaded Uganda. It took the capital, Kampala, in 1979, restoring Uganda’s first President, Milton Obote, to power. The battle against Amin was expensive and placed a strain on government finances. There was considerable criticism within Tanzania that he had both overlooked domestic issues and had not paid proper attention to internal human rights abuses. Tanzania was a one party state — and while there was a strong democratic element in organization and a concern for consensus, this did not stop Nyerere using the Preventive Detention Act to imprison opponents. In part this may have been justified by the need to contain divisiveness, but there does appear to have been a disjuncture between his commitment to human rights on the world stage, and his actions at home.

 

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Why did Jean Paul Sartre and Boris Pasternak refuse the Nobel Prize?

Sartre postulated that past awarded winners did not represent equally all ideologies and nations, and was concerned that his work would be unjustly and undesirably misinterpreted by rightist circles who would criticize “certain past errors.”  Sartre, himself, disagreed with particular laureates of past awards, including, interestingly enough, Boris Pasternak who also refused the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957, though for different reasons.  

But the refusal was not a theatrical or “impulsive gesture,” Sartre wrote in a statement to the Swedish press, which was later published in Le Monde. It was consistent with his longstanding principles. “I have always declined official honors,” he said, and referred to his rejection of the Legion of Honor in 1945 for similar reasons. 

There was another reason as well, an “objective” one, Sartre wrote. In serving the cause of socialism, he hoped to bring about “the peaceful coexistence of the two cultures, that of the East and the West.” (He refers not only to Asia as “the East,” but also to “the Eastern bloc.”)

Boris Pasternak, the Russian author, said to-day that he had “voluntarily” changed his mind about accepting the Nobel Prize and had done so without having consulted even his friends. He told me at his villa ten miles outside Moscow that he had thought over the reaction to the award and decided fully on his own to renounce it.

This morning he wrote in pencil a brief telegram of explanation to the Swedish Academy, carried it himself to the local post office, and so informed the world. The telegram read:

“Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure. – Pasternak.”

 

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Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020?

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 was awarded to Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Born in New York City in 1943, Glück grew up on Long Island and from an early age was drawn to reading and writing poetry. Her parents read her classical mythology as bedtime stories, and she was transfixed by the tales of Greek gods and heroes — themes she would later explore in her work. She wrote some of her earliest verses when she was 5, and set her mind to becoming a poet when she was in her early teens. She struggled with anorexia as a teenager, a disease she later attributed to her obsession with purity and achieving control, and almost starved herself to death before eventually recovering through therapy.

She began taking poetry workshops around that time, and attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University, where she studied with the poet Stanley Kunitz. She supported herself by working as a secretary so that she could write on the side. In 1968, she published her first collection, “Firstborn.” While her debut was well received by critics, she wrestled with writers’ block afterward and took a teaching position at Goddard College in Vermont. Working with students inspired her to start writing again, and she went on to publish a dozen volumes of poetry.

Glück’s verses often reflect her preoccupation with dark themes — isolation, betrayal, fractured family and marital relationships, death. But her spare, distilled language, and her frequent recourse to familiar mythological figures, gives her poetry a universal and timeless feel, said the critic and writer Daniel Mendelsohn, the editor at large for The New York Review of Books.

 

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Who was the youngest to win the Literature prize?

To date, the youngest Literature Laureate is Rudyard Kipling, best known for The Jungle Book, who was 41 years old when he was awarded the Literature Prize in 1907.

Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and scholar who had considerable influence on his son’s work, became curator of the Lahore Museum, and is described presiding over this “wonder house” in the first chapter of Kim, Rudyard’s most famous novel. His mother was Alice Macdonald, two of whose sisters married the highly successful 19th-century painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, while a third married Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of Stanley Baldwin, later prime minister. These connections were of lifelong importance to Kipling.

Kipling returned to India in 1882 and worked for seven years as a journalist. His parents, although not officially important, belonged to the highest Anglo-Indian society, and Rudyard thus had opportunities for exploring the whole range of that life. All the while he had remained keenly observant of the thronging spectacle of native India, which had engaged his interest and affection from earliest childhood. He was quickly filling the journals he worked for with prose sketches and light verse.

In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Englishman to be so honoured. In South Africa, where he spent much time, he was given a house by Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and South African statesman. This association fostered Kipling’s imperialist persuasions, which were to grow stronger with the years. 

 

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