It is a tradition exemplified by Gandhi himself. After years of sojourning abroad, an educated Indian returns home and, forgoing a comfortable career, applies himself to the great social questions. Mohandas K. Gandhi was a lawyer by training. These days, Indian sojourners abroad are more likely to be learning computer science and engineering and preparing to join India?s high-tech economy, or North America's. SANDEEP PANDEY was such a person yet he has chosen Gandhi's path.
Born to India's middle classes, PANDEY studied at Benares Hindu University before attending graduate school in the United States. While pursuing a Ph.D. in control theory at the University of California-Berkeley, he joined V.J.P. Srivastavoy and Deepak Gupta to form Asha (Hope), to support education for poor children in India by tapping the resources of Indians abroad. The enterprising founders raised ten thousand dollars in one year, an auspicious beginning for an organization that now claims thirty six North-American chapters and has disbursed nearly one million dollars for programs in India. After launching Asha, PANDEY himself returned to India, doctorate in hand. He taught briefly at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology and, in 1992, left the institute to devote himself full-time to Asha's larger purpose: to bring about socioeconomic change in India through education.
In the Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh, PANDEY confronted the impoverished world of low-caste families and dalits, or untouchables. In this world, few children went to school at all; even those who did, grew up to swell India's vast unemployment rolls. With local volunteers in the villages of Reoti and Bhainsaha, PANDEY has created schools that instill self-reliance and values for a just society. Asha's teachers take no pay. Instead, they support themselves with sidelines such as making candles and greeting cards from handmade paper. Students, too, learn useful arts and crafts. Older youths participate in community improvement as volunteers and health aides. They are part of what PANDEY calls "the first grassroots volunteer base of Asha in India."
A fuller expression of PANDEY's vision is the Asha ashram in the dalit village of Lalpur, outside Lucknow. There students live and study among traditional artisans and engage in bee-keeping, vegetable gardening, and cottage industries. They follow a special Asha curriculum and fill the air with songs and stories that convey the school's philosophy. The ashram also serves as a retreat center for Asha workshops and provides simple health services for the community. It is introducing new technologies and livelihood projects. To break down caste barriers, the ashram community conspicuously violates upper-caste taboos against dalits and publicizes anti-dalit crimes and abuses such as bribe taking by local officials.
As these projects matured, PANDEY built Asha's network in India to twelve chapters and linked its grassroots endeavors to the larger task, as he puts it, of "shaping the socio-economic-political future of the country." He denounced a government plan to favor Hinduism in state schools and called for an end to "the politics of revenge" that drives his country's communal violence. Warning against militarist nationalism, in 1999 he organized and led a 400-kilometer Global Peace March to protest India?s nuclear arms program. These days he vocally supports reconciliation between Indians and Pakistanis. "The voice of peace has to be louder," he says.
Thirty-seven-year-old PANDEY shares his busy activist life with his wife Arundhati and their two children. He is soft-spoken but passionate, as he motivates Asha's volunteers and young people and shepherds a multitude of projects. How does a one-time aspiring engineer manage such a life? "I believe in the Gandhian thinking," he says, "that once the path is chalked out, the means will follow."
In electing SANDEEP PANDEY to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes the empowering example of his commitment to the transformation of India's marginalized poor.
