Near Bangalore, FDI in poverty opens a window

“These children come from a deprived background and are not used to sleeping on beds, using toilets and wearing footwear. It’s a gradual process before they begin using these facilities. Within a month, they are well settled and since they are in a group, they learn fast,” says principal Lalitha Law.

Selected at the age of four, all of them are from near or below the poverty line—Rs 1,000 per month for a family—and most of them come from Dalit families. “Initially, most people could not understand why anyone would want to spend his own money for a quality programme,” says George, from his New Jersey home.

In fact, a hostile reception awaited George and his team when they came to see the land. “We were told that it was a cursed land and nothing would grow on it,” smiles Jude Devdas, chief operating officer of the foundation.

“Rumours were also put out by many people that we are into religious conversion and we take children away or their body parts to America,” says George. Now after seven years, people have started realising the benefits. “Now, we have hundreds of applicants each year for the 24 seats (12 boys and 12 girls),” he says. “We admit only one child per family. The idea is to help as many as possible.”

“We take normal children as we don’t have a facility to look after mentally challenged or handicapped children,” she says. Like 10-year-old Shilpa, daughter of a forest guard from Marayapura village in South Bangalore, who is one of the first students to be admitted to the school and starts her day with her fellow boarders waking up to classical music. “I went through a test where I had to differentiate between a 50 paise and a one rupee coin. Then, they asked me some questions and showed me some colours and asked me what they thought of it,” she says, in impeccable English.

Law says they have a behavioural checklist too. In spite of it, they lose 10 per cent of the children every year. “We try to acclimatise them for a year, but when it fails, we ask the parents to remove the kid. We call it breaking the bad news,” she says.

George has already invested Rs 60 crore in the foundation (http://www.tgfworld.org), which also works on five other projects, with an additional Rs 3-5 crore going for expenses each year.

“Our foundation employs nearly 300 people and serves some 25,000 people in 20 villages around Shanti Bhavan. If we can create 1,000 Shanti Bhavans, we will be able to change the face of poverty for the next generation,” says George, who will launch his book India Untouched: The Forgotten Face of Rural Poverty in July.