Nishkam Canada Takes The First Step

Once all the infrastructure was set up for www.nishkamcanada.org, bank account, web site, credit card functionality on the web site, the Nishkam volunteers started to look for a small project where they could make an immediate impact.

This is when Nishkam India brought the case of a young man by the name of Jasdeep Singh to our notice.

Jasdeep Singh has scored 77.4% marks in the 12th class and his score in PCM (Physics, Chemistry and Maths.) is 81%. The attached mark skeet is evidence of this. With borrowed books, Jasdeep achieved a rank of 5,360 in the CET (Common Entrance Test), an exam for students seeking admission to Engineering schools in India.

Jasdeep’s father is unemployed and suffers from diabetes. His mother has been the breadwinner of the family and done so by providing private tuitions to other students. Nishkam India met young Jasdeep in person and recommended to Nishkam Canada.

An amount of C$ 600 which was received from Nishkam Canada’s donors for scholarship purposes was matched to Jasdeep. Jasdeep is a class XII graduate who has joined the Guru Teg Bahadur Institute of Technology, Rajouri Garden, New Delhi, under the minority quota.
The scholarship being advanced will go towards meeting, school fees, books and other education related expenses.

This has been of the high points of my life, to be able to play a small part in giving hope to a young, bright but needy person who has the rest of his life ahead of him. I hope to keep you update on more news on Jasdeep and other programs that Nishkam Canada pursues.

The value of a good education in todays’ hyper competitive knowledge society cannot be over emphasized. One only has to look around In India to see the illiterate live under crushing poverty every day and those that have some money but a poor education wither make do with poorly rewarding self employed careers or in the case of Punjabi youth pawn away everything they have to make it overseas, where they join the working class.

World Bank economists David Dollar and Roberta Gatti have studied the effect of girls' education on economies. The return on investment in girls' education, they find, is not lower than the return for boys and, particularly in lower-middle-income countries, is often significantly higher. Dollar and Gatti conclude that economies "that have a preference for not investing in girls pay a price for it in terms of slower growth and reduced income."

With so much research, coupled with common sense, one would think that there is a major emphasis on education for the underprivileged in the Punjabi community. Sadly that is not true. Professional and consistent efforts are few and far between. However, instead of focusing on the negative, I am pleased to offer readers an opportunity to take part in a success story.

Two US based Sikh organizations, the Sikh Human Development Foundation (www.shdf.org) and the Relief Committee of Greater New York have been doing stellar work in this regard.

The Sikh Human Development Foundation (www.shdf.org)

This US based and tax exempt organization has been ramping up its scholarship efforts in the past few years. From 2002 through to 2005, 194 children have been granted scholarships.

A total of 128 children that were awarded scholarships have already completed the courses that they were provided financial assistance for. Scholarships for students covered by the SHDF are targeted to students studying in professional courses and are for a maximum of Rs 18,000 per annum. Scholarships have been largely aimed at female students from a rural background and most of the recipients come from families that make less than Rs 50,000 a year.

Candidates are selected by administering a test that also includes an interview. Thus weightage is given both to academic and non academic factors. 55% of the scholarships have been awarded to students studying Engineering and 16% to those studying Nursing.


Relief Committee of Greater New York

The Relief Committee was very generous in its donations for the afflicted of the anti Sikh1984 violence. Since then they have kept the momentum going and channeled their energy into award of scholarships for the young and the needy too. From 2002 through to 2005, a toal of 735 scholarships were extended through Nishkam India.

A fair amount of the scholarships here have been to students in school (grade VI to X) and the scholarship money has helped children buy books, uniforms and meet other school related expenses. Preference is given to children of widows or orphans studying in government/government aided schools.

Nishkam Sikh Welfare Council, New Delhi (www.nishkam.org)

For both of these organizations in the US, Nishkam Sikh Welfare Council, New Delhi has been the partner that has provided the final missing links between noble intentions and being able to turn them into action.

Nishkam India

1. Advertises the scholarships in the Indian media
2. Collects information on all the candidates that appear in the scholarships tests
3. Administers the tests and scores the candidates
4. Interviews them
5. Reports back to the donor organization on the candidates that match the criteria provided
6. Disburses scholarships to the student or the educational institution as the case may be, once funds are received

I think it is incumbent upon us to share and spare what we can so that at the bare minimum, our gifted youth is able to rise above what the mediocre education the state schooling system in India provides. We must open doors for our young who wish to pursue careers in medicine, sciences etc. but are being held back due to lack of funds.

For any Canadian donors (or international donors that wish to donate online), please visit Nishkam Canada, (www.nishkamcanada.org) where you will be able to make an online donation for our scholarship fund. Canadian donors will be instantly emails a tax deduction receipt.

Nanak Kohli's First Project in Delhi

Nanak Kohli is not known as the Rolls Royce of Sikhs for nothing. The founder of a multinational company into everything from telecom to trading, his group is worth over $200 million. But at 73, after having spent much of his lifetime making money, the self-made billionaire is now faced with a new dilemma: "My income is increasing while my needs are diminishing. What am I to do with it since I can’t take it with me to the next world?" So Kohli is doing what he thinks is the sensible thing: "Giving it back to society."

But giving away his money can be as much hard work as making it, as Kohli discovered last year when he started looking for ways to rid himself of a small but sizeable portion of his fortune.

"I didn’t want to just donate it to some organisation or even the government," he recalls. "I wanted the money to make a difference to society." Being new to the business of social work, Kohli decided to tackle it in the same way he made his fortune: start out from scratch. A balwadi in a slum colony would be a good beginning, he felt, where he could provide a few poor children with a wholesome meal, healthy environment and some motivation to enrol into school when they were old enough.

Slow and steady, Kohli told himself, when he started out last January, setting aside Rs 67,000 a month for a teacher, helper, uniforms, mid-day meal and a part-time doctor for 30-40 children in Mehramnagar near Delhi airport. But the parents’ demand and Kohli’s empire-building instincts soon got the better of him. Within a month, there were 21 running balwadis and by last year, a chain of 50, which Kohli plans to expand to 100 this year.

Kohli’s international business skills, especially his insistence on high quality at lowest price, are paying off already. Children who spent hours roaming the sludgy streets of the basti while their parents were at work are now transformed: proudly dressed in their free "uniform"—maroon sweater and shorts or skirt, carefully polished black shoes and socks, hair well-oiled and combed, slate in hand, happy chanting nursery rhymes and alphabets that the teachers (volunteers from the slum) instil in them. But these are no ordinary creches to merely provide poor children with a hot meal. They are opening doors to a whole new future for slum children.

As peanut-seller Mohammed Akram from the Brar Square basti in Naraina points out, "Before my youngest girl Sannu joined the balwadi, I could never hope to provide her quality education. But Sannu is doing so well here that I want to enrol her in a public school no matter what it costs." Several of the graduates from Kohli’s balwadis have already joined private schools, sailing through the pre-admission tests with an ease that is giving new hope to government-run schools in the neighbourhood. "Our balwadis provide a headstart to the children so that when they join primary school they not only have an incentive not to drop off but also stay ahead of the school curriculum," explains a teacher, Komal, a high school graduate. "These children will never have to resort to tuitions like I had to."

Kohli’s creches are also giving the government-run anganwadis a run for their money. What’s more, as word about Kohli’s balwadis is beginning to spread, slum-dwellers are inviting Kohli to open shop in their neighbourhood. "We insist everyone pays a fee, even if it is only Rs 15 a month. This way, parents feel they have claims over the balwadis—they ring us up and complain if the teacher doesn’t come or the mid-day meal isn’t OK."

But for Kohli, the real payoff is when he sees the children changing before his eyes. "At first, they couldn’t even look me in the eye, they were so shy. But look at them now, they can take on anyone in the world."

Nanak Kohli can be contacted at: A10/6, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi-110057. Tel: 011- 51663016-17

Source - http://www.outlookindia.com/mad.asp?fname=Making&synopsis=&subsubsec=New+Delhi&fodname=20050221&personname=Nanak+Kohli