By IANS
New Delhi : Kiran Bedi, India’s first woman Indian Police Service (IPS) officer who took premature retirement recently, has been given the Annemarie-Madison prize for initiating reforms at Delhi’s Tihar jail, which is one of Asia’s largest jails.
Bedi was presented the award by an international health organisation – KIS Board of Trustees and Curatorship for Immunodeficiency – in Munich Friday, a press statement said here Saturday.
The prize, named after Annemarie-Madison, is awarded to persons and organizations that function especially as role models for the improvement of patient care as also the representation of patients’ rights and research.
The release said as the inspector general of prisons in the early 1990s, Bedi initiated reforms that included detoxification programmes, healthier food, improved sanitary conditions, lessons in reading and writing and even made learning of foreign languages for prisoners possible.
She has also won prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award – known as the Asian Nobel Prize – in 1994, the Joseph Bueys Prize in 1997 and the “Pride of India” commendation in 1999.