The 1958 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

CITATION for Vinoba Bhave

Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
31 August 1958, Manila, Philippines

Seven years ago, seeing the force of a simple act of human generosity—one man's voluntary gift of land—in the solution of a bitter village conflict, VINOBA BHAVE dedicated himself to the propagation of a new kind of social revolution in India.

The vehicle he originated for this work, known as the Bhoodan Movement, has as its primary tangible objective "land for the landless." Its intangible implications are even more significant. Emphasizing a voluntary giving—first of land and more recently also of cash, kind, labor, intelligence, life and of whole villages—he has sought to bring his people to a fuller realization of man's nobler nature.

Many among his countrymen have responded to his abiding faith in the basic goodness of human character and the tempering effect of human conscience. In them, he has awakened a consciousness of inner strength and nurtured a social morality. Thus, in his seven years of walking to the villages of India, he has labored to create with gentle persuasion the climate for social reform wherein, by ways he has proposed, needed change could be accomplished voluntarily.

He has sought nothing for himself, least of all recognition of his achievements. Rather, his has been a life selflessly devoted to finding and conveying to his people an approach to the problem of poverty that is within the means of every man. He, in his way, as our late President Ramon Magsaysay did in his, has given himself humbly and unstintingly in service to his people.

In electing ACHARYA VINOBA BHAVE to receive the first Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes his furtherance of the cause of arousing his countrymen toward voluntary action in relieving social injustice and economic inequalities.