Dr Pathak awarded VIT Person of the Year

Hyderabad: The Weekend Leader – VIT 'Person of the Year' has been hosted for the past nine years to honour the social change-makers and entrepreneurs with a cause. This program is unique, for the fact that it is different from regular expert talks, industry lectures. It takes the students through the journey that the awardee and the Chief Guest have walked through. The prospects and problems, social taboos and business hurdles are discussed at length. The take-away from the programme goes beyond the bookish concepts and industry practices. It perpetuates the experience, confidence, wisdom that no book or a B-school puts on the platter.

This year the Chief Guest 'Person of the Year' was Honourable Justice N Santosh Hegde, a honest, people friendly, social empathiser. The Weekend Leader-VIT Person of the year 2018 awardee is Padma Bhushan Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder, Sulabh International. Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak promotes human rights, environmental sanitation, non-conventional sources of energy, waste management and social reforms through education

Some of the highlights of the programme include:

Justice N Santosh Hegde, former Karnataka Lokayukta, called upon the youth of the country to imbibe two basic values that our forefathers cherished – contentment and humanism – to establish peace and solidarity in the society and said that, youth in the country need to Imbibe the values of contentment and humanism for peace and solidarity in society'.

The award was presented to Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder, Sulabh International. Known for his anti-corruption drive during his tenure as Karnataka Lokayukta between 2006 and 2010 when he exposed the large scale corruption in the mining operations in Karnataka, Hegde listed the various scams in the country starting from the Jeep scam in the 1950s, which resulted in a loss of Rs 52 lakh to the exchequer, to the more recent scams of the current century and said that greed has no limit and is the cause of all corruption in the country. Citing the falling moral standards in the society, he said, "We live in a society today that respects money and power more than anything else. Consequently there is a mad race to earn as much money as possible."

In his acceptance speech after receiving The Weekend Leader – VIT Person of the Year Award, Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder, Sulabh International, shared his journey of building a national movement to restore the human rights and dignity of the manual scavengers.

Pathak said that Sulabh not only liberated the scavengers from the inhuman practice but also rehabilitated the people from the community by training the women and children in different skills.