Rotary members hear of restaurant owner’s school for girls in his home village in India

May 8 2008

HAMILTON Rotary enjoyed a talk by club member Nirmal Singh at their meeting last Tuesday.

Nirmal is the owner of the Bombay Cottage restaurant in Hamilton. He came to this country in the late 1950s and arrived in Glasgow in 1960, initially to further his education.

Nirmal comes from a small village in India, 60 miles from its border with Pakistan. When he lived there it was a poor village, with no roads or electricity. He was happy to report that while the village is still very poor, there are now roads and many of the houses have electricity.

However, old habits die hard. An aspect of Indian education in remote parts of the country that disappoints Nirmal is the failure of the system to educate girls. To correct this, he has undertaken to build a school for girls on land allocated to him by his family.

In a short film, Nirmal showed the building at every stage of construction. Amazingly, it is being built without reference to planning and building controls, architects or engineers.

Nirmal has also given work to local men, women and children in a very poor area of his home country.

The film demonstrated the old-fashioned skills that continue to be used by builders in that part of India.

The building is now an impressive, aesthetically pleasing two-storey edifice.

One section of the film showed women and children efficiently making bricks from local clay, then storing them before firing them. Workers on the site receive approximately £1 a day for their labours.

It is intended that the school will have another floor, constructed mainly of glass. While there is still no final completion date, Nirmal has already planned for the administration of the school and the employment of teachers.