Which of the following individuals or organisations was a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award 2024?

Question

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Correct — D, More than one of the above. The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation named five laureates for 2024, and three of those five are sitting in front of the candidate as options (a), (b) and (c), so no single-name option can survive. The full 2024 class, whose official information kit the Foundation published on 4 September 2024, is: Miyazaki Hayao of Japan, the animator and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, cited for 'his lifelong commitment to the use of art, specifically animation, to illuminate the human condition'; Karma Phuntsho of Bhutan, a Buddhist scholar and the first Bhutanese ever honoured, cited for 'harmonizing the richness of his country's past with the diverse predicaments and prospects of its present'; the Rural Doctors Movement of Thailand, the physicians' network behind that country's push to universal health coverage, cited 'for their historic and continuing contribution to their people's health — and perhaps just as importantly, to their recognition and fulfilment as citizens with basic rights'; Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong of Vietnam, the obstetrician who spent a career documenting and seeking justice for the birth-defect victims of Agent Orange; and Farwiza Farhan of Indonesia, honoured for her defence of the Leuser Ecosystem, and the only one of the five to receive it under a named category — Emergent Leadership, the single category the Foundation still uses. Two further points make this class worth remembering rather than merely ticking. The 2024 list contains no Indian at all, which is unusual for an award India has drawn on heavily since 1958. And it is one of the few major international awards that honours organisations on equal footing with individuals, which is why the Rural Doctors Movement can appear in the same list as an animator and a monk-scholar.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) True but incomplete, which is the hardest kind of wrong option to refuse. Karma Phuntsho is genuinely a 2024 Ramon Magsaysay laureate — a Bhutanese Buddhist scholar and social worker, and the first person from Bhutan ever to receive the award, cited for reconciling his country's inherited culture with its modern predicaments and for making young Bhutanese confident in that heritage. Ticking (a) is not a factual error; it is a failure to check whether the other names are also on the list.  (b) True but incomplete. The Rural Doctors Movement of Thailand is a 2024 laureate, honoured as an organisation for decades of work extending health care to the Thai rural poor and for the political groundwork behind Thailand's universal health coverage. It is the option candidates most often reject on instinct, because they assume a personal award; in fact the Magsaysay has recognised institutions and movements alongside individuals throughout its history, so rejecting it on that reasoning is exactly the wrong move.  (c) True but incomplete, and the most dangerous of the three because it is the one name most Indian candidates will recognise. The Studio Ghibli co-founder's 2024 Magsaysay was the headline of that year's announcement and the fact that circulated in every current-affairs compilation. A candidate who recognises Miyazaki, recognises nothing else, and stops there ticks (c) with confidence and forfeits 1/3 mark under this paper's negative marking.

Concept: The Ramon Magsaysay Award, often described as Asia's Nobel Prize, was established in April 1957 by the trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of New York with the concurrence of the Philippine government, to perpetuate the example of Ramon Magsaysay — the seventh President of the Philippines, who served from 30 December 1953 until he was killed in an aircraft crash on Mount Manunggal in Cebu on 17 March 1957. The first awards were given in 1958 and are administered by the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation in Manila. It honours individuals and organisations in Asia regardless of race, creed, sex or nationality; as of 2021 recipients had come from twenty-two Asian countries. Its category structure changed decisively in 2009. For half a century the award ran in five categories — Government Service, Public Service, Community Leadership, Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, and Peace and International Understanding — all of which operated from 1958 to 2008 and were then discontinued. A sixth, Emergent Leadership, was added in 2001 and is the only named category that survives. Everything else has since been conferred without a fixed category, which is why post-2009 laureates are described only by their citation and not by a heading, and why a question about the 2024 class cannot be answered by category logic.

State PCS 2025 Q30 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q30 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer