Back home to Bihar
state, the lack of which forced them to migrate. Thus, most of their money, says Ramaiah, goes towards improving education in their villages or towns.
Betting on education
Das, for instance, is setting up an engineering college, two schools and a hospital in Mirdaul, Forbesganj. The foundation stone for his Rs 110-crore engineering college, Moti Babu Institute of Technology, was laid last year on a 14-acre land he bought from the government for Rs 60 crore (30 per cent self-funded, the rest is financed by banks). Work on the college will begin in April this year and is expected to end by 2011. His Isoft has tied up with TAFE (Training and Further Education), South Australia, for exchange programmes and faculty visits, and with Outreach Consultancy, an Australian project management firm, to oversee construction of an R&D Centre.
The college will have two schools in its vicinity: one will come up on four acres and will be a kilometre away from the college. This is to encourage qualified teachers for the engineering college to relocate to the village; their wards can study at this school. The other, spread across 25 acres, will be a residential school for children of the villagers.
Chandrakant Singh, a researcher at General Motors in Bangalore, has set up a primary school, Chaitanya Gurukul Public School, on 13 acres at Chamanpura, his village in Gopalganj district. Construction on the residential school began in 2009 and its first session took off last year with 500 students.
Omer Hejazeen, an
