India’s new rich lose the stingy tag


Two events in the 1960s had a deep influence on my life. When I was 17, I got an undergraduate scholarship to Harvard. I was able to go only because an anonymous American family gave money for the scholarship — I never knew the family and would never know them. When I was abroad, I felt ashamed because newspapers called India a “basket case”.

A ship from America laden with grain used to arrive at an Indian port ‘every ten minutes’ during the drought years. Soon, however, the situation changed spectacularly. Norman Borlaug, an American scientist, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, helped discover a miracle, hybrid variety of wheat, which created a ‘green revolution’ in India, making it agriculturally surplus in many crops.

What unites these two events is the great tradition of American private philanthropy. On an individual level, it made my liberal education possible. On a national scale, Rockefeller’s philanthropy led to a scientific breakthrough and brought prosperity to India. My purpose in recounting these two tales is to report that something similar is happening today in India — a quiet, philanthropic revolution is under way....Read more

 

Source web page:Times of India


Comments (0)



Please Login or Register to join groups