A philanthropist writes about a collective effort to educate and empower poor widows in India

In India, there are some 46 million widows – that’s almost one in ten of the female population of marital age. Of those, more than 15 million live in abject poverty. Traditionally, widows – even child widows – were not allowed to remarry. When a husband dies, if there is any inheritance it is often taken by his family. Prejudice about single women makes it hard for them to find any form of employment. As a consequence, their children are unable to continue their education and instead are put to work at a very young age to help support the family. The curse of widowhood thus sets in train a cycle of deprivation, with consequences that blight communities and last for many decades.

We saw that if we could fund the education of the children of poor widows, this would not only transform the conditions of that family but also open up a better future for all its members. Thus, the first of our aid programmes began at that inauguration ceremony in Delhi, where we simultaneously launched our first scheme to support the education of one hundred children in the state of Delhi – forty-nine girls and fifty-one boys who we had already selected. We had taken the first significant step towards our target.

It was crucial not to introduce any inequality or discrimination in a programme intended to achieve the opposite, so we made certain the children were selected not on the basis of religion, social group, ethnicity or gender but purely on the basis of need. To help us achieve our objective of selecting widows and children at the beginning, when we had no local infrastructure, Dr Singhvi invited the head of the National Cadet Corps, who knew the circumstances of children in local communities. He helped select the first hundred students for our Delhi project. After that we began to build up the charity and started finding the children ourselves and with local partners in different states. I am proud to say that we have always supported children from all backgrounds.

Soon, we began meeting the mothers, who were mostly tearful. At one function we had 400 or 500 widows and 500 children, and everyone eventually started crying, they were so thankful.

The way we developed the programme from that initial scheme was partly methodical – scheduling the roll-out of schemes in all states – and partly in response to events. Conflict, natural disasters and extreme weather events – as we have seen time and again over the decades – have a disproportionate impact on the poorest of the poor who have no safety net. Their homes and livelihoods could be taken away in an instant. In the case of widows and their children, the situation is further aggravated if they are shunned by the community and prevented from supporting themselves. And when such calamities occur, the death toll creates new widows – often in large numbers.

On 29 October 1999, the strongest cyclone ever recorded in the north Indian Ocean made landfall in the state of Odisha on India’s eastern coast, killing 10,000 people – 8,000 of them in the town of Jagatsinghpur.

As the impact of the devastation became clear, we began identifying widows with dependants in the state. On 1 January 2001, we launched our scheme for a hundred children in the ancient city of Bhubaneswar.

Just a few weeks later, on 26 January, another disaster struck 1,200 miles to the west, in the state of Gujarat. The Bhuj earthquake, registering 7.7 in magnitude, destroyed 400,000 homes, injured 167,000 people and killed 20,000. Our response times were beginning to speed up. The Loomba Foundation’s Gujarat scheme, for fifty children from Bhuj and fifty from Ahmedabad and surrounding areas, was launched on 5 November 2001.

In the years that followed, our schemes continued to roll out across India – in Rajasthan and Punjab in 2002, with Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast in 2003.

When we launched our scheme in the state of Tamil Nadu on the Bay of Bengal coast in January 2004, we found a local partner, the Sriram Welfare Foundation, to match our funding, so we doubled the provision to 200 children. Later that year, however, this became one of the regions worst hit by the Boxing Day tsunami, which devastated communities in countries around the Indian Ocean. The district of Nagapattinam was the worst affected in India, with more than 6,000 deaths. We responded with an additional, extended scheme in the state for 500 girls and boys who had lost their father or both parents, drawn mainly from the fishermen’s villages in the district.

By 2005 our programme had got up to speed. Schemes were launched in Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal and Maharashtra – for a hundred children in nine schools in Mumbai and another hundred in Pune – Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura, bringing the total number of Loomba scholars by 2006 to more than 3,600, a significant improvement on our initial target of 2,900 by 2008.

All children benefitting from the programme complete their schooling and are able to start their careers on solid foundations. Some have gone on to higher education with our support, including eighteen students who completed a four-year engineering degree course at Laxmi Narayana College of Technology in Bhopal. New children take the place of those who complete their education, and to date, more than 10,000 children of poor widows have received funding for their education for at least five years, directly transforming the lives of 60,000 people in their immediate families.

We were also interested in the quality of education, in particular good sanitation and drinking water. In 2006 we entered into an agreement with the Punjab government to renovate and refurbish my old school in Dhilwan, where I had been so embarrassed to speak up in class all those years ago. It had been a magnificent building when the Maharaja of Kapurthala constructed it to celebrate his diamond jubilee in 1939, but since then it had fallen into disrepair. The 50 lakh (5 million) rupees we donated was matched by the Punjab government, which enabled the impressive façade to be restored with new additions, including a school hall and a toilet block for boys and girls. At the suggestion of the chief minister, Prakash Singh Badal, the school was renamed the Shri Jagiri Lal Loomba Government Senior Secondary School in memory of my father.

How did we manage to build our education programme?

Our vision was always greater than what we could achieve alone. We had to find sponsors and donors to match the scale of our ambition. That meant we needed visibility for the cause and for the benefits we were delivering on the ground, combined with effective fundraising.

We’d got off to a dazzling start by involving the British and Indian prime ministers. I built on that by persuading the most important elected and community leaders throughout India and from the UK to help us launch our schemes – including India’s deputy prime minister, two cabinet ministers and a former cabinet secretary, the chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, state governors of Odisha, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh – and in West Bengal, state governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. UK leaders who helped launch schemes included Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt, the British high commissioner, the chair of the British Council in India and Lord Gareth Williams.

Our aim was to challenge and disrupt long-held prejudices, customs and traditions. Our strategy was always to work with ‘the system’ and the powers that be – in government, business and the community – rather than against them, to argue for justice, appeal to their humanity and ask for their support. In the years that followed, this approach bore fruit.

Excerpted with permission from Widow Warrior: The Cause That Shaped My Life, Raj Loomba, Bloomsbury.