India Post News Service

Nanak Kohli is not known as the 'Rolls Royce of Sikhs' for nothing. He is the founder of a multinational company into everything from telecom to trading. But after having spent much of his time making money, the NRI billionaire faced a 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 did what he thought was the sensible thing: "Give it back to society."

He didn't want to just donate it to some organization or the government. "I wanted the money to make a difference to society." Kohli decided to tackle it in the same way he made his fortune: start 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 enroll into school when they were old enough.

Slow and steady, Kohli told himself, when he started out in January 2004, 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 50 running Balwadis. Kohli's international business skills, especially his insistence on high quality at lowest price, paid off.

Children who spent hours roaming the sludgy streets of the basti while their parents were at work were 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 crèches to merely provide poor children with a hot meal.

They are opening doors to a whole new future for slum children. 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 neighborhood.

"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 crèches are also giving the government-run Anganwadis a run for their money. What's more, as word about Kohli's Balwadis began to spread, slum-dwellers were 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." He has set up the Sundar Amar Sheel Charitable Trust in memory of his parents. Kohli lives with his family - wife Pammi, two sons and a daughter - in a large mansion in McLean, Virginia, US, three months of the year (the rest of the time he spends in India).

"My business is such that it does not need [me to be present there all the time] and I am able to handle things on the phone." NRI Kohli has a fleet of cars, including a custom-built Rolls Royce, which has led people to nickname him 'Mr Rolls Royce'.

"But," he says, "I am not interested in vehicles any more. In fact, I have just bought a small car and will henceforth be travelling in that whenever I visit slums." The children's enthusiasm in the Balwadis has motivated Kohli to take his mission to the next level. He intends to adopt the mid-day meal scheme in government schools in Punjab state.