Excellencies, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Friends, Ladies & Gentlemen:

I am very happy to be here with you today to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. I feel honoured, humbled and deeply moved that you should give this prestigious award to an ordinary doctor from Pakistan.

I believe that this prize is a recognition of the power of team work, community effort and the true grit and determination of people. It is the recognition of the fact that in spite of crushing poverty, illiteracy and other problems chaining us down, the evolution of the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation from an 8-bed ward to a state-of-the-art Institution is because man craves and demands his basic right to good health.

This evolution has not been easy. SlUT had its teething problems and running it has been, and still is, a tireless daily struggle. This is because we at the SIUT, while seeing our own expansion, remember that everything around us is expanding at the same time. You cannot afford to indulge even for the shortest period of time in testing your own oars. You must continually drive the vast machine forward at its utmost speed. To lose the momentum is not merely a personal loss but also a loss for my team

Ladies and Gentlemen, today I have come to Manila as beneficiary of a trust. I say I come as a trustee for I am aware that this prize is much more than a personal honour. I am standing here mainly as a representative of my team – doctors, nurses, paramedics. The community at large has supported us generously in coin and in kind. Journalists have always supported our cause and guided us. Last but not the least I represent the patients; both the fortunate ones and the unfortunate ones. Fortunate are those who are living; unfortunate were those who are dead and died simply because of want. I dedicate my cash prize to the SIUT fund in the memory of such patients.

This award has propelled me and my colleagues at the SIUT to consolidate and expand our work being mindful of future generations. Let it never be said by them that indifference, cynicism and selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideal of humanism which the Magsaysay Award encapsulates.