Arvind Kejriwal

2006 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Emergent Leadership from India. As a tax officer with the Indian Revenue Service, Arvind Kejriwal understood how easily government powers over private citizens can be abused. Disturbed by the ubiquity of everyday corruption and its oppressive effects on ordinary taxpayers, he took leave from his job and organized Parivartan, a citizens' movement to help people get basic services from government departments without having to pay bribes. Starting with income tax payments, Parivartan worked to make the tax department more transparent and less capricious: using collective appeals to the authorities, filing cases, and holding non-violent protests, until the tax chief agreed to implement the movement's proposed reforms. Since then, Parivartan has settled 700 tax-related grievances on behalf of individuals; it has settled some 2,500 more with the electricity board. In Sundernagari, a poor section of New Delhi, Kejriwal led residents to do a "social audit" of sixty-eight local public-works projects, exposing malfeasance in sixty-four of the projects. Today, residents monitor projects block by block; no project may begin until the contracts' details have been made public.