Dreams that prosper in Sam Singh's Pardada Pardadi School

Photograph by Preeti Verma Lal

It is about 8 in the morning and the world is living its ordinariness. But if you look carefully you would see little apparitions in green and yellow emerging from unkempt lanes and from the streets canopied with huge trees. When they come closer you realize these girls, dressed in green salwar and dupatta teamed with a yellow kurta, are rushing to school. On their black shoes, you can see layers of dust.... In the hurried step of some you can see the enthusiasm of straddling two worlds - they finish household chores, braid their hair, pins their duppattas and walk with their head held high. Perhaps for the first time in life.

Not too many outsiders knew of this village, not too many dreams grew within its confines.

But that was five years ago. One day Anoopshahar beckoned Virender Sam Singh and he started the Pardada Pardadi School. It changed Anoopshahar.

It is about 8 in the morning, the cows are ploughing the land, dark smoke is billowing into the azure sky, men are headed to work and women slap wet cow dung cakes on the walls. The world is living its ordinariness. But if you look carefully you would see little apparitions in green and yellow emerging from unkempt lanes and from the streets canopied with huge trees.
When they come closer you realize these girls, dressed in green salwar and dupatta teamed with a yellow kurta, are rushing to school. On their black shoes, you can see layers of dust for they have walked a few kilometers or pedalled some 14 kms from their home to reach school. In the hurried step of some you can see the enthusiasm of straddling two worlds - they finish household chores, braid their hair, pins their duppattas and walk with their head held high. Perhaps for the first time in life.

At 8.30 am, 240 girls and 28 teachers gather near the front gate for the morning assembly. They sing the national anthem and a hymn and then gingerly confess the lies they have uttered and if they have forgotten to brush or have a bath. The school leaders check for dirty nails and untidy hair. Then the girls pick up their satchels and head to the classrooms. In one room, girls are bent over a framed cushion cover, embroidering a flower; in another sewing machines whirr to turn bales of cloth into duvets and quilts. In another room little girls dip the wooden blocks in paint troughs to turn out block-printed table cloths and still in another they pick up sequins to make a stunning paisley motif on black silk. In the kitchen, some 12 girls are kneading the dough, flipping rotis and making a curry. Breakfast has to be served at 11 am and they cannot run slow.

That's the vocational skills they are picking up - that's a part of their syllabi. They also have the mathematical fractions and the equations to work on, the Rapid English Reader to mug and the laws of physics to understand. And when they are done with all this they also clank on the computers gifted by the US Embassy.

Meet one of them. Name: Neeru Sharma. Age 16. As if being born a girl in a feudal village was not enough of a bane, she was also affected with polio and her life was hurtling towards disaster. The future looked so bleak that no tomorrow emerged out of the haze. She could not look you in the eyes; her sentences didn't go beyond monosyllables. Her world didn't have the luxury of pet peeves. All she needed was a dream.

Perhaps it was all ordained.

The unusual story started more than six decades when Virender Sam Singh was born in Anoopshahar. Years later armed with an engineering degree he went to the US to do his Masters and between that moment and today, Singh held several coveted posts with DuPont, pitched his tents in numerous US cities and then packed for Singapore as head of DuPont, Asia. His peregrinations and his job brought Singh to India in the late 80s and that's when he made a promise to himself: "The day my younger daughter gets a job I would quit and start a school for the underprivileged." That day didn't arrive too soon, but when it did Singh kept the promise. He quit DuPont.

"I wanted to start a school for girls but did not have a model I could emulate." This quest took him to Dharamshala where Singh saw underprivileged children being imparted lessons in academics, but the stress was on vocational skills.

That visit gave Singh his mantra. He had found the hows and the whys; fortunately, the 'where' was never blurred. Singh had a palatial, ancestral home and several hundred bighas of land in Anoopshahar. That became his some place on earth for his dreams. Before the dream unfolded, one last ritual had to be completed - the school had to be christened. Singh mulled over options until his daughter came up with an unusual name - Pardada Pardadi School. Singh remembers the first day in the village when he sat under a tree on a jute-woven cot and drew the blueprint of his dreams.

That was 2000. On a barren piece of land was laid the foundation of Pardada Pardadi School. As brick after brick was getting piled up, Singh went around the village convincing the parents about how it can change the lives of their daughters. The idea was simple - The girls would be given lessons in academics, they would also pick up skills like sewing, embroidery, block printing, zardosi, appliqué; they would be given uniform, bicycles, lunch, breakfast and for each day that attend school Rs 10 would be put into their account. So by the time a girl finishes her Class X she would have Rs 80,000 in her coffers.

The idea was simple but breaking the feudal bastion was very tedious. But some were convinced and 45 girls joined. With 69% drop-out rate, the footsteps in the school got muted, but Singh's diligence held him in good stead. He knew he was on a mission and could not hang his boots so easily. Not for himself. Not for the children whose lives he wanted to change. For Singh and his team it has been a long journey fraught with fulfillment, exhilaration and yes, weariness too. The biggest achievement has been a sharp dip in the dropout rate, from 69% in 2000 to 25% in 2005.

Today Singh looks with satisfaction at the Pardada Pardadi shop in The Plaza Mall in Gurgaon, which seems like an umbilical extension of the school in the village. The products made by the girls are sold in the store and also exported to various European and African countries. His efforts have begun to bear fruit. For most of the students there's the enthusiasm that life would not hit a dead end once they have crossed the threshold of the school. There are jobs waiting for them - they can join their alma mater as teacher and make at least Rs 2,000 a month.

You can see that joy in Neeru Sharma. Singh arranged for her surgery and now she walks with crutches, looks you into the eye and even goes beyond the monosyllables. She has also found her dream - to become an English teacher.

As for Sam Singh, he might not have found a magic wand. But he is no longer piqued at his pet peeve. He has found an answer and sees it grow every moment in the giggle of the girls, the whirr of the sewing machines and the clank on the computer keyboard in his Pardada Pardadi School.