Kailash Satyarthi wins Nobel Peace Prize: How other winners spent their prize money

It may all still be sinking in for Bachpan Bachao Andolan founder Kailash Satyarthi who has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Butpretty soon he’ll have to decide what he’s going after the huge honour, and also what he’s going to do with the approximately Rs 3 crore he will receive as part of the award.

The Nobel Foundation awards winners 8 million Swedish kronor which as per current currency rates amounts to a little over Rs 6.76 crore. Given that he has to share it with Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai he will end up with around Rs 3 crore.

Satyarthi, like most Peace Prize winners before him ispretty likely to donate the funds to either his own organisation or another charitable foundation.

Past peace prize winners like US President Barack Obama, European Union and former Finnish president Maritti Ahtisaari donated their prize money to charities of their choice, as this report by AFP noted. Others like Grameen Bank founder Mohammed Yunus on the other hand chose to use the money for a eye hospital and making affordable food for the poor.

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However, while the Nobel Peace Prize winners are pretty restrained in their spending habits, not all winners are as circumspect in their spending of the prize, which often comes years, and sometimes decades , after the event or achievement for which they receivethe award.

Sir Paul Nurse who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2001 chose to upgrade his motorcycle to new, powerful one and also bought himself a share of a aircraft, while some like 1993 Nobel Prize winner for medicine, Richard Roberts, chose to splurge on a rather unlikely indulgence: a croquet lawn in front of his house.

Franco Modigliani, who won the Nobel Prize in 1985 for his work analyzing stock market values, used the money to upgrade his sailboat. And then there’s Gnter Blobel, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1999 and gave almost all the prize money to the city of Dresden in Germany so that it could be used to restore the city’s cathedral and build a synagogue, as this Time article notes.

However, the spending of the money scarcely matters since the prestige that accompanies the Nobel Prize often far outweighs it. As this insightful Guardian piece noted, winners of the prize become voices of authority on subjects and as Brian Schmidt, a 2011 Nobel Physics prize in 2011 noted,“Everyone takes everything I say now so seriously.”

Given how long he’s gone on the sidelines being given to the cause of child trafficking, Satyarthi is unlikely to complain if a little more attention is paid to his organisation and the subject that he hopes to tackle.