Naurati Bai, a dalit woman sarpanch from the rural Rajasthan won a legal battle in the Supreme Court to get minimum wages for the women in her village. Wearing her traditional Rajasthani attire, Ms Bai on Thursday stood in front of a hall of fame in the national capital.
Along with an audience of eminent personalities, her family members and a group of villagers put their hands together cheering for Ms Bai’s recognition.
The fourth chapter of the hall of fame award ceremony organised by the magazine Civil Society honoured three men and two women, who are little known to the mainstream media and society but whose work has helped change the life of the communities they live with.
Renowned civil society activist Aruna Roy gave away the awards to these exceptional personalities. While honouring the awardees, Ms Roy called Ms Bai her “guru” and said that she was giving away the award to her as a “guru dakshina” to her.
One of the awardees, Sanjay Sahni, a wired hero of Ratnauli village in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district said that he had never realised that the work he did in his village actually meant a lot to be recognised by the people from outside. While admitting that he hardly knew anything about the Internet except searching on the search engine Google, he said that he used whatever little knowledge he had about it to help his villagers achieve their rights in the NREGS project.
Along with Ms Bai and Mr Sahni, the Civil Society also honoured Dr Chiranjeeb Kakoty, who worked for HIV patients in Assam to “heal their hearts and minds”, and Dr Evita Fernandez, who runs a model hospital in Hyderabad where the rich and the poor get the same treatment. The group also honoured Boya Pedda Rajanna, the barefoot vet from Ananthapur in Andhra Pradesh, who treats animals free of cost using natural medicine.