Building School in India Caps International Career

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When President Bush traveled from the U.S. to India this week, he was tracing the path of countless Indians. Most went in the opposite direction, seeking better lives in the United States. And now some are going home again. They're taking the wealth or education they gained in America and trying to improve the country where they were born. Taken together, their journeys could mean as much as any leadership summit.

Mandy Cunningham reports on one man who went from the boardroom to rural India.

MANDY CUNNINGHAM reporting:

Sam Singh lived the American dream. He climbed the corporate ladder and became a senior executive with the multinational DuPont Corporation. He traveled first class, stayed in the smartest hotels and rubbed shoulders with world leaders.

SAM SINGH (Former DuPont Executive): Life was really good, life was excellent for me. But there comes a time in life when you (unintelligible) something more than having fun and that is what you are going to leave behind.

CUNNINGHAM: What Sam wanted to leave to posterity was a school for girls in his ancestral home in Northern India. At the age of 60, he left his family in Washington, D.C., drew out a half a million dollars from his bank account and set of for Rural Uttar Pradesh, where his family were once feudal lords.

(Soundbite of children signing)

CUNNINGHAM: Five years later, Sam has built his school. It stands amid sugar cane fields on his family's estate, close to the banks of the Ganges. But despite this fertile land, this is one of the poorest parts of India. Unemployment is high, literacy rates low. Sam says the benefits of India's boom have yet to reach these parts.

Mr. SINGH: Eighty percent of India lives in rural India, and rural India, you look around yourself what their poverty level is. You don't need any rocket science to just look at the family, and you say, My God, how they are they surviving?

CUNNINGHAM: And according to Sam, it's women who bear the worst of the hardships.

Mr. SINGH: Wherever you have macho man, abuse of female becomes almost automatic. You will be mistreated as a daughter, you will be mistreated as a mother, you will be mistreated as a wife. Whatever role you have, you will be mistreated.

CUNNINGHAM: In addition to doing academic work, the girls at Pardada Pardadi School learn crafts which will eventually give them financial independence. The product the girls make are sold and the money is plowed back into the school. Sam says that if things run on schedule, within a couple of years sales should cover the school's entire running costs.

Sam Singh's philosophy is straightforward. If you educate the mother, you educate the family. And the message is slowly getting through. Fifteen-year-old Lakshmi Geary(ph) is one of the students.

Ms. LAKSHMI GEARY (Student, Pardada Pardadi School): (Through translator) I would have got married by now, but I've made up my mind that I want to study and to support myself and stand on my own feet. And until I get a job, I don't want to get married.

CUNNINGHAM: But in this area, it's long been considered to be a waste of time to educate girls. And you don't change centuries of tradition overnight.

Lakshmi's parents still come under pressure from friends and neighbors to take her out of school.

Ms. GEARY: (through translator) They don't say anything to me but they keep telling my parents that she's growing older. And why does she go to school? You should get her married.

CUNNINGHAM: Sam didn't expect to be universally welcomed when he began his project. But there was some problems for which even his 35 years in tough-talking board rooms did not prepare him.

Mr. SINGH: Anybody who is perceived being financially well-to-do is a target for kidnapping. My car was attacked, but fortunately my driver kept his senses and somehow he got out and I escaped.

CUNNINGHAM: Despite all this he says he has no regrets.

Mr. SINGH: I saw only that girls need to be taken care and I am going to take care, and the process if something happens, something happens. I've lived a good life.

CUNNINGHAM: Currently Sam has 260 students in his school. By the fall he expects that number to increase to 700. But he says he has much more to do. Eventually, he hopes to build schools for 10,000 girls on the land that he owns.

For NPR News, this is Mandy Cunningham in New Delhi.

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