After two investment disappointments, the frequency of our visits to India did not decrease; however, we realized our naivety in Indian business dealings and were convinced that going back to India permanently was out of the question. Now more and more we started thinking of some kind of help to the village or villagers’ uplifment as a payback to all the help that the village and family had provided during my schooling. We would bounce around the ideas with friends here in USA but were not able to decide on any one thing.
We have been friends with Dr Jaipal Rathi and Sheela Rathi since the early 80’s and they had opened a school in Jaipal’s village Nagori in Meerut District, Uttar Pradesh. We went to that school on one of our visits to India and were impressed with the work that they had done and how it was benefiting the community. The school was educating students from a dozen or so villages and was fulfilling a dire need in that rural area. That visit to the school and the talks with Rathis' more or less convinced us that the rural school with modern education might be the way to help the village.
Then on our 2000 visit, Santosh, Shamsher Singh Godara, Yash Paul (my younger brother) and I had serious discussions about setting up the school. This was a very engaging and fruitful discussion. Shamsher and I were the idealist and were looking only at the positive side whereas Santosh and Yash Paul were the pragmatist and were defining the problems that we would encounter by engaging in such a large endeavor. Finally after a long discussion pragmatists and idealists agreed to start the school from the coming year. Yash Paul had a special request, “Bhai Saheb, I know that we will encounter lot of difficulties, heartaches and disappointments in this endeavor but I request that you won’t leave it in between as the future of so many students and teachers will be affected”. Santosh and I had agreed that we would not ask or take any financial help from anybody else and would use only our resources for this project.
Two of my brothers’ families had shifted to the farm houses and their residences in the village were lying vacant, we decided to start the school in those residences after some renovations. The unique feature of the school, that four of us had decided, was to be the admission of kids in the 4-5 year age group only and the same students will advance to upper classes as the years go by, hoping this feature would make teachers more responsible of the outcome.
We had a meeting with the village elders and elected members of panchayat to go over the decision we had made about starting a non-profit school in the village and requested panchayat to assign us five acres of panchayat land. My thinking (a naïve idealist) was that this way villagers will consider the school belonging to the village and not the property of Sukh Ram’s family. Again Yash Paul had warned me that this will create a lot of interference from the panchayat and the villagers and would add to my frustrations. However, I pursued the idea of panchayat land, which finally was scuttled by politicians at the state level. Finally, after wasting two years of our precious time in pursuing the panchayat land, we bought three acres of land on the main road which is adjacent to our 25 acres of farmland.
Rathi’s school in Nagori was being managed by Vidya Bharati, New Delhi, the educational wing of Bhartiya Janta Party and thus associated with Jan Sangh. With the help of Jaipal Rathi we contacted Vidya Bharati and they sent us two teachers to start the school. In 2001 co-educational Hindi medium school with 60 students started functioning. School was named Sukh Ram Geeta Vidyalaya and the medium of instructions was Hindi with emphasis on moral education. However, teachers started mixing politics with education which we objected to and finally we decided to break our relation with Vidya Bharati and manage the school on our own. We were getting applications of 200 plus kids for 60 seats as the school became popular and we were giving preference to girls for admission, even then we were not able to admit more than 40% girl students because of the discrimination prevalent against girls in the rural heartland of Haryana.
Construction of the school building started in 2003 and the first storey of the three storey building was completed and the classes shifted to the new building from 2004-05 session. Yash Paul took full responsibility for the construction of the first storey.
We realized that with the globalization and lots of Multinationals moving to India, command of English language is a must for students to advance in life and therefore decided to change the medium of instructions to English in place of Hindi when the classes were moved to the new building. Like any change, this was opposed initially but slowly was accepted as the right thing to do. Name of the school was changed to Sukh Ram Memorial Public School, Kalirawan. Haryana Board of Education had granted the permission up to middle school - 8th grade, which was a necessary step before affiliation to CBSE.
Completion of construction of 2nd & 3rd storey took about two and a half years and the completed structure was inaugurated in Nov. 2006.
The Trust needed the approval from Ministry of Home Affairs to receive foreign currency under Foreign Currency Regulation Act. For registration under the act Trust needs to be running at least three years and therefore in the beginning we applied and received “Prior Approval” for the Trust to receive $300,000.00 under FCRA, which was relatively an easy task. Once the Trust was in operation for three years, we applied for registration under the act, because after registration there is no more need for approvals as long as finacials are filed with the department every year. FCRA is an act with good intentions (like most of the laws) to keep an eye on the inflow of foreign currency as to its proper use, however, this act gives some government employees power to misuse it. Prevalent thinking is that anyone receiving foreign currency is a free bonanza and therefore the employees are entitled to share in the loot. We had hard time convincing them that this foreign currency was for a worthy cause and was supplied from our hard earned savings. They took about two years before we were successful in getting the registration. My frequent visits to the office in New Delhi and the insinuations of the government employees almost convinced me to give up the project, made me question our-self – why do we need all this harassment and insult at this stage of our lives and that too for a selfless cause? That “worthy cause” and persuasion of friends in USA kept us going. When we were at our wits end with the Delhi office and couldn't convince them to register the Trust, we started calling and faxing everybody and anybody connected with the foreign exchange receipt like the offices of PM, Foreign Minister, Home Minister and Overseas Indian Affairs Minister from our home in US. Time difference made us stay late at night to speak with the officials of these ministries. However, we were encouraged by the fact that most of the officers took our calls and listened. Finally, Trust was registered under FCRA and we could send the money to finish the undergoing construction of the school building and the teacher's residences.
Because of the face to face dealings with contractors, friends, family and the bureaucrats during the setting up of the school, we learned a tremendous amount about the Indian character. Though we were born, brought up and educated in India but being in the United States for most of our adult life, we had an idealistic view of the behaviour of friends, relatives, family and bureaucrats and thus had a rude awakening during this project. Now we understand a little better and are not easily shocked by the selfishness, unrepentant lies and the unexpected cheating by the familiar faces.
We are also very fortunate that slowly we have gathered a team of very dedicated, energetic and unselfish people to help us run the institution and are proud of the teaching staff who are developing the students of this rural area to face life with confidence.
Website of the school is SRMPSKalirawan.com.
We have been friends with Dr Jaipal Rathi and Sheela Rathi since the early 80’s and they had opened a school in Jaipal’s village Nagori in Meerut District, Uttar Pradesh. We went to that school on one of our visits to India and were impressed with the work that they had done and how it was benefiting the community. The school was educating students from a dozen or so villages and was fulfilling a dire need in that rural area. That visit to the school and the talks with Rathis' more or less convinced us that the rural school with modern education might be the way to help the village.
Then on our 2000 visit, Santosh, Shamsher Singh Godara, Yash Paul (my younger brother) and I had serious discussions about setting up the school. This was a very engaging and fruitful discussion. Shamsher and I were the idealist and were looking only at the positive side whereas Santosh and Yash Paul were the pragmatist and were defining the problems that we would encounter by engaging in such a large endeavor. Finally after a long discussion pragmatists and idealists agreed to start the school from the coming year. Yash Paul had a special request, “Bhai Saheb, I know that we will encounter lot of difficulties, heartaches and disappointments in this endeavor but I request that you won’t leave it in between as the future of so many students and teachers will be affected”. Santosh and I had agreed that we would not ask or take any financial help from anybody else and would use only our resources for this project.
Two of my brothers’ families had shifted to the farm houses and their residences in the village were lying vacant, we decided to start the school in those residences after some renovations. The unique feature of the school, that four of us had decided, was to be the admission of kids in the 4-5 year age group only and the same students will advance to upper classes as the years go by, hoping this feature would make teachers more responsible of the outcome.
We had a meeting with the village elders and elected members of panchayat to go over the decision we had made about starting a non-profit school in the village and requested panchayat to assign us five acres of panchayat land. My thinking (a naïve idealist) was that this way villagers will consider the school belonging to the village and not the property of Sukh Ram’s family. Again Yash Paul had warned me that this will create a lot of interference from the panchayat and the villagers and would add to my frustrations. However, I pursued the idea of panchayat land, which finally was scuttled by politicians at the state level. Finally, after wasting two years of our precious time in pursuing the panchayat land, we bought three acres of land on the main road which is adjacent to our 25 acres of farmland.
Rathi’s school in Nagori was being managed by Vidya Bharati, New Delhi, the educational wing of Bhartiya Janta Party and thus associated with Jan Sangh. With the help of Jaipal Rathi we contacted Vidya Bharati and they sent us two teachers to start the school. In 2001 co-educational Hindi medium school with 60 students started functioning. School was named Sukh Ram Geeta Vidyalaya and the medium of instructions was Hindi with emphasis on moral education. However, teachers started mixing politics with education which we objected to and finally we decided to break our relation with Vidya Bharati and manage the school on our own. We were getting applications of 200 plus kids for 60 seats as the school became popular and we were giving preference to girls for admission, even then we were not able to admit more than 40% girl students because of the discrimination prevalent against girls in the rural heartland of Haryana.
Construction of the school building started in 2003 and the first storey of the three storey building was completed and the classes shifted to the new building from 2004-05 session. Yash Paul took full responsibility for the construction of the first storey.
We realized that with the globalization and lots of Multinationals moving to India, command of English language is a must for students to advance in life and therefore decided to change the medium of instructions to English in place of Hindi when the classes were moved to the new building. Like any change, this was opposed initially but slowly was accepted as the right thing to do. Name of the school was changed to Sukh Ram Memorial Public School, Kalirawan. Haryana Board of Education had granted the permission up to middle school - 8th grade, which was a necessary step before affiliation to CBSE.
Completion of construction of 2nd & 3rd storey took about two and a half years and the completed structure was inaugurated in Nov. 2006.
The Trust needed the approval from Ministry of Home Affairs to receive foreign currency under Foreign Currency Regulation Act. For registration under the act Trust needs to be running at least three years and therefore in the beginning we applied and received “Prior Approval” for the Trust to receive $300,000.00 under FCRA, which was relatively an easy task. Once the Trust was in operation for three years, we applied for registration under the act, because after registration there is no more need for approvals as long as finacials are filed with the department every year. FCRA is an act with good intentions (like most of the laws) to keep an eye on the inflow of foreign currency as to its proper use, however, this act gives some government employees power to misuse it. Prevalent thinking is that anyone receiving foreign currency is a free bonanza and therefore the employees are entitled to share in the loot. We had hard time convincing them that this foreign currency was for a worthy cause and was supplied from our hard earned savings. They took about two years before we were successful in getting the registration. My frequent visits to the office in New Delhi and the insinuations of the government employees almost convinced me to give up the project, made me question our-self – why do we need all this harassment and insult at this stage of our lives and that too for a selfless cause? That “worthy cause” and persuasion of friends in USA kept us going. When we were at our wits end with the Delhi office and couldn't convince them to register the Trust, we started calling and faxing everybody and anybody connected with the foreign exchange receipt like the offices of PM, Foreign Minister, Home Minister and Overseas Indian Affairs Minister from our home in US. Time difference made us stay late at night to speak with the officials of these ministries. However, we were encouraged by the fact that most of the officers took our calls and listened. Finally, Trust was registered under FCRA and we could send the money to finish the undergoing construction of the school building and the teacher's residences.
Because of the face to face dealings with contractors, friends, family and the bureaucrats during the setting up of the school, we learned a tremendous amount about the Indian character. Though we were born, brought up and educated in India but being in the United States for most of our adult life, we had an idealistic view of the behaviour of friends, relatives, family and bureaucrats and thus had a rude awakening during this project. Now we understand a little better and are not easily shocked by the selfishness, unrepentant lies and the unexpected cheating by the familiar faces.
We are also very fortunate that slowly we have gathered a team of very dedicated, energetic and unselfish people to help us run the institution and are proud of the teaching staff who are developing the students of this rural area to face life with confidence.
Website of the school is SRMPSKalirawan.com.