The Right Livelihood Award Foundation for 2004 has chosen Muslim scholar and reformer and peace worker Asghar Ali Engineer as well as social worker and Indian Parliamentarian Swami Agnivesh for the honorary `Right Livelihood Award'.

The awards are considered as the `alternative Nobel prizes' -- for their `strong commitment to promote values of co-existence and tolerance'. The awards were announced in Hyderabad by the Foundation's founder and chairman Jakob Von Uexkull on Monday, September 20th.

The idea of 'right livelihood' is an ancient one. It embodies the principle that each person should follow an honest occupation which fully respects other people and the natural world. It means being responsible for the consequences of our actions and taking only a fair share of the earth's resources.

In every generation, there are groups of people and individuals around the globe who valiantly uphold these principles of right livelihood. They should be the stars in our human cosmos, but their work often entails personal sacrifice, being opposed by powerful forces around them.

The Right Livelihood Award was established in 1980 to honour and support such people. It has become widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' and there are now over 100 laureates from 48 countries.

This Award exists to strengthen the positive social forces that its recipients represent and to provide the support and inspiration needed to make them a model for the future. It has been said that if the Nobel Prizes reflected world concerns of the 20th century, the Right Livelihood Award should epitomise those of the 21st.

The three recipients of the Right Livelihood cash award, totalling two million Swedish Kronor (220,000 US Dollar), are: the Russian human rights organisation `Memorial', Nicaraguan human rights activist and environmentalist Bianca Jagger and Argentinian scientist and environmentalist Raul Montenegro.

The annual Right Livelihood Awards, to be presented on December 9 in the Swedish Parliament, are given in recognition of dedicated work at community level in development, human rights, ecology, renewable energy and gender empowerment.

The award has been presented since 1980. Past recipients have included Ela Bhatt and SEWA, Rajni Kothari and Lokayan, Participatory Institute for Development Alternatives (Sri Lanka) for development of self reliant alternatives, Sahabat Alam, Mohamed Idris, Harrison Ngau, (Malaysia), Chipko Movement (India), for showing how the forests of Himalaya and the world can be saved for their struggle to save the rainforests of Sarawak, Narmada Bachao Andolan, The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad for their process of self-reliant development, among many others.

The two honorary awardees are exceptionally driven and self realized individuals who have taken steps in the face of significant personal injury and threats for the sake of human rights and peace.

Asghar Ali Engineer was born in Bohra priestly family. Asghar Ali was given training in Qur'anic tafsir (commentry), Tawil (hidden meaning of Qur'an) fiqh (jurisprudence) and hadith (Prophet's sayings). He also graduated in civil engineering from Indore (M.P.) and served for 20 years as an engineer in Bombay Municipal Corporation and then took voluntary retirement to plunge himself into the Bohra reform movement. He began to play a leading role in the reform movement from1972 when the revolt took place in Udiapur. He wrote several articles on the reform movement in the Seventies in the leading newspapers of India such as The Times of India, Indian Express, Statesman, Telegraph, The Hindu and others. He was unanimously elected as General Secretary of The Central Board of Dawoodi Bohra Community in its first conference in Udiapur in 1977 and has continued in the post ever since. He devotes a great deal of his time for the reform movement and has internationalised the reform movement through his writings and speeches.

Dr.Engineer has also done a great deal of work on communalism and communal violence in India since the first major riot in India in Jabalpur in 1961. Dr. Engineer has received several awards on his work on inter-religious understanding. He believes in showing equal respect to all religions and he considers faith in religion as most vital for a meaningful life. However, he does not believe in blindly accepting dogmas inherited from the past. He believes in re-thinking issues and re-interpreting Islam in keeping with the changed times. He is of the opinion that it is our individual obligation to aquire Islamic learning and reflect deeply rather than following any one blindly. His one of the forthcoming publications is Rethinking Issues in Islam.

Swami Agnivesh was born Vepa Shyam Rao in a Telugu-speaking family in a village that is now a part of the eastern Indian state of Orissa in around 1940. He encountered the teachings of the Arya Samaj while a student in Calcutta, joining that organization at the age of seventeen. He went on to obtain an M. A. in law and business management. After a brief stint as a lawyer he become a lecturer at St. Xavier College in Calcutta, a school which Arthur Bonner calls "exclusive." In 1968 Agnivesh resigned that position to devote himself full time to political and religious questions. Upon becoming a renouncer, in 1970 Rao became Swami Agnivesh. Around this time Agnivesh was first exposed to Swami Sampurnanand's interpretation of the contemporary political and social relevance of the Vedas and Swami Dayanand's thought, and this became the core of his life's work. On the same date that he became a renouncer, Agnivesh, along with a colleague Swami Indravesh, founded a political party called the Arya Sabha to realize their dream of a political order founded on Arya Samaj principles.

Agnivesh articulated what those principles are in a book published in 1974 called Vaidik Samajvad (or "Vedic Socialism"). There he rejects the materialism of both capitalism and communism in favor of what the constitution of the recently revived Arya Sabha calls "social spirituality." Admitting that the material needs of people must be met before they can get on with the spiritual progress that is the true goal of human life, Vaidik Samajvad proposes five basic changes in Indian society to that end. They are: (1) The means of production should be nationalized. (2) Education should be free for all and compulsory up to a certain standard. (3) Employment should be guaranteed as a universal fundamental right. (4) Legal and medical services should be available to all without cost. And (5) a pension should be provided to every elderly person who can no longer work. If all of this sounds a bit dry, then I am not conveying the full flavor of Swami Agnivesh's book. The economic arguments in Vaidik Samajvad are supported repeatedly by hair-raising descriptions of the suffering of India's poor.