many have lost their husbands through HIV. As a result of that nobody is willing to help and this again is a similar problem to what we have in India. The children are again left to their own devices, nobody cares about them. What is really important to understand here is that in many countries in Africa the law is that once the husband dies, the younger brother or older brother in the family would marry the widow, look after her and the children and inherit the property and wealth. In fact what happens is that the man takes the property and wealth, but does not marry the woman and she is left destitute. That is the root of social injustice in these countries.
AA: Is there a similar problem in countries like India?
RL: In India it is a social problem or stigma that has come out of our culture that dates back to hundreds and thousands of years whereby a widow was supposed to go along with her husband, she was supposed to be a pure lady and not re-marry. The custom of Suttee evolved because of that idea and the British government outlawed it in 1835, but still the cultural traditions live on and I don't have to explain to you that in India a widow still finds it difficult to get married. She is ostracised because she is considered an inauspicious person, evil person. In-laws consider her a liability and think their son died because she was a bad woman for him and the parents don't want their daughter to come back to them either. If she came back it would be a hugely bad reflection on her siblings. So what does she do?
AA: Surely, widows have the right to inherit in India?
RL: Yes they do, but how many widows are educated, how many know where to seek legal advice or where to fight the case.
AA: Currently, how many widows and children do you look after?
RL: We are directly educating 3,600 children and we are also supporting their mothers. If you think about it, in reality we are supporting 3,600 households and in each household there may be five, six, seven – I don't know how many – members because every family has a grandfather or grandmother who is alive. If you take five or six and multiply that by 3,600 – that's the number who benefit from our support.
AA: Is it the children of widows that you are focusing on?
RL: We give Rs 500 per child per month as a scholarship and it's actually given to the mother and the child together. We usually look after one child, although in some families we have looked after two children. But mostly we look after one because if there are three or four children in one family, they will be getting a scholarship of two to three thousand rupees per month and they may become complacent, not using the money for education. We also have limited resources and want to ensure that at least one child in the family gets a good education and then he or she can help other siblings to go to school.
AA: So it's a cash payment that you give to each family?
RL: That's right, we make payment of 500 rupees per month per child. The way we do it is that we do not pass the payment to a third party, we do not give money to any NGO, we do not give money to any school headmaster. We, in fact, open a bank account that is joint with the mother and the child and the money is transferred either by direct debit, or banker's draft or banker's cheque. The money goes directly to the beneficiary and we often ask them to give us copies of the bank statements. Sometimes we check up here and there to make sure the money has gone in and is used for the right purposes.
AA: Until what age do you support the child and what is your geographical reach?
RL: There is no problem at all with either age or gender, we are supporting some students who are aged 21. We have representation in every Indian state and we are educating at least 100 children in each state. There are some states like Maharashtra where we have 200 children; in Tamil Nadu we have 700 children – that's basically because of the Tsunami victims. When the Tsunami struck, I happened to go to Nagapatnam where the biggest damage took place. It's a very small fishermen's village and I was told by the district collector that it took 16 minutes for 1,000 children to lose their parents. Ten thousand families were washed away, thousands of houses were washed away, over 20,000 people were killed and 1,000 children lost their fathers. We undertook to take responsibility for half of them.
AA: How do you identify the children in need? Do you have a committee that goes around, or do people write in to you?
RL: No, we have our own office in India. What we do for example is we go to a city and we identify 10 government schools because we want to make sure we do not waste too much money in the management costs. So we select 10 schools, we meet the headmaster and our own head of the country course explains what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we would like to assist children who have lost their fathers. They give us back the application and the criteria for the application is that the child has lost his or her father. It is substantiated by a death certificate and confirmation that the mother's income is less than 1500 rupees per month from all her resources – that is a dollar a day. These are the only true criteria we have. On that basis it's the poorest of the poor who get selected. We get hundreds of applications and what most people don't realise is that in India there are 35 million widows and the children are over 100 million in number and it's very upsetting that the government is not doing much about it. Therefore we make sure that the poorest of the poor get helped because again, a I said, our resources are very limited.
AA: The figure of the 3,600 is very impressive… that's two crores of rupees (about US$ 500,000) a year?
RL: It's a drop in the ocean; we would like to change the hundreds into 1,000. What we need is raising awareness and calling upon the corporates to come forward and help. One more thing I would like to tell you. Once we select a child, we guarantee he/she will get help for five years.
AA: Where does the funding come from?
RL: So far the funding has been generated in the UK. We do not use the donors' money for any admin costs, so all the admin cost comes from my own company or myself. I have been putting in almost 100,000 pounds every year. Rest of the money is raised from fund-raising events or the generosity of other people. For example my Diwali dinners are very popular in England. I started in 1999 to celebrate Diwali. In those days nobody knew what Diwali was – especially among the British people. There was never an event of the level which I organised. Princess Anne was the guest of honour in 1999. We rose from that 70,000 pounds. At the time it was an unprecedented amount and every year since then the dinner has been going from strength to strength. Last year we had our dinner at the Mansion House in London and we raised 250,000 pounds in one night. We also do Diwali dinners in America, I have done two Diwali dinners at the United Nations and we are the only people throughout the world to have celebrated at the UN.
AA: You started your work by concen-trating on India, but you have expanded to other parts of the world as well. Where are your activities extending?
RL: In South Asia we are already in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, we are hoping to start a programme in Pakistan. We already have the money for the Pakistan programme and it's only because of the political situation there that we deferred it. Across Africa we have programmes in South Africa and Kenya. We are starting two new programmes – one is in Syria and one is going to be in Colombia. We are also starting Afghanistan, Uganda and possibly Malawi.
AA: You come across as a very modest person. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you started?
RL: My background is that I was born in a village near Jalandhar in India, and I was raised and educated in Jalandhar. I grew up as a widow's son myself, so I have seen the difficulties and stigmas through which my mother suffered all her life. After studying at the DAV College in Jalandhar, I actually studied in America, which was supported by my mother. My father was a wealthy businessman, so she could do all this. This was the reason I set up a charity in her honour that focuses on the children of poor widows in India because I always thought that if my mother didn't have the resources, she couldn't have done anything. I came to the UK in 1962. Most of my family ended up here in the UK and quite frankly we came here for survival. I started working in a factory, then I started from a market stall in the north of England. From market stall I moved to high street shops, from high street shops I moved to wholesale, wholesale to imports and so on. Today my son runs most of the business. We specialise in ladies knitwear with about 350 outlets in the country.
top
|
