Pitthoragarh, August 6
The tiny village of Garhtir in Berinag subdivision of Pitthoragarh is in celebration mode with son of the soil Deep Joshi having awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Development. The award is considered the Nobel Prize of Asia.
Joshi has been awarded for community development work done by his NGO ‘Pradan’ during the past 30 years. After Chandi Parsad Bhatt, Joshi is the second person from Uttarakhand to receive the award.
Deep is an alumnus of Motilal Nehru Engineering College, Allahabad, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Despite a close relationship with Narayana Murthy of the Infosys, he opted for community work, refusing several attractive job offers on his return from the USA 30 years ago.
“I was inspired by a doctor couple working in remote areas of Maharashtra and felt that only a qualified person could usher in change in rural India,” said Joshi over the phone from his home at Gurgaon.
Today, he works with a team of 300 professionals in more than 3,000 villages of the country.“During my childhood, all seven of us, my siblings and me, would travel 10 km from our village to the school at Berinag,” he recalled.
Said Saroj Oza, his younger sister: “He featured on the merit list in high school examination and passed the intermediate exam from Narayan Nagar in Didihat. He bagged the gold medal at Motilal Nehru Engineering College, Allahabad, and became a lecturer there.
“He was ever ready to work. He would cut grass for domestic cattle,” she said with obvious pride.
After his post-graduation and MBA from the USA, Joshi worked with the Ford Foundation in New Delhi and then formed his ‘Pradan’ which formulated pilot projects for community development in tribal areas.
Joshi worked in tribal areas of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, West Bengal, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. Asked why he chose
working for tribesmen, he said that almost the entire tribal population in India lived in abject poverty. The government had not been able to do justice to them in the past 60 years.
‘Pradan’ tried to eliminate middlemen from employment schemes for tribesmen.
Originally from Galli Mohalla of Almora, Joshi’s grandfather Ram Dutt Joshi, a patwari during the British days, settled in Berinag.
“He intends to come to the village in September to celebrate his achievement with the villagers,” said Bhagwati Parshad, his elder brother who lives in Berinag.
‘Pradan’ volunteers work among small farmers in agriculture, poultry and horticulture.
“Our model of poultry has been successful in Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh,” said Joshi.
“In Uttarakhand, the condition of soil, water and land needs to be utilised according to the needs of rural folk. Only then, can the lot of hill people can be improved and the problem of migration solved.”
