For Indian expatriates, a turning homeward

The goal: building school for orphans

Next Generation Foundation adviser Lori Berkey listens as executive director Vidya Vasudevan discusses the group's plans. (Photos by Ellen Harasimowicz for The Boston Globe)

Some foreign-born residents of Boston's suburbs send their hard-earned paychecks home. Others earn a degree, sample American life, and move on.

The Indian expatriates who make up the Next Generation Foundation do both. Taking cues from American values of charity and equality that they say they have observed in the United States, members of the group have banded together to build a school in India, one they say will help orphans overcome caste prejudices and other hurdles to economic advancement.

The Shrewsbury-based nonprofit organization, formed in 2001, rises out of the community of Indians settling in Greater Boston, where top colleges, high-technology jobs, and good schools have attracted residents of the world's largest democracy since the 1990s. Now that they have established themselves here, foundation members said, they've turned to thinking about how they might help their homeland.

"When we come to this country, we admire the opportunities we have here," said Peo Nathan, president of the foundation and a software engineer who arrived in the US in 1991 to attend UMass-Lowell. "A common topic around the water cooler for us is how to give back."

Setting up a boarding school for 500 orphans in the roughly 200-mile stretch between Mumbai, as Bombay is now known, and Goa, on India's western coastline, might seem like an enormous undertaking for a group that has only about 60 members. A similar facility here might cost millions. But Nathan says the price tag for the project is around $375,000. The foundation has secured a 2-acre property and raised about $40,000 toward the facility, he said.

Meeting recently in Nathan's Shrewsbury home, the foundation's officers said that orphans in India represent a unique opportunity. Many Indian children are assigned to schools based on caste, a strict social-economic hierarchy based on traditional Hindu beliefs. If an orphan has no information about his or her caste, officials don't know where to put them.

As a result, foundation officers said, Indian orphans are often consigned to a limbo in which they receive basic schooling but aren't channeled into specific fields, as are children whose caste is known. The planned school, called the National Integrity and Responsibility Complex, aims to identify bright orphans and give them 10 years of room and board and a liberal-arts education.

"What we're trying to do is help them reach their potential," said Pramit Makoday, a software engineer living in Westborough and the foundation's secretary. "It will break down a lot of social barriers."

The group said Americans' charitable giving and sense of equality played an important role in their decision to create the foundation.

Charity exists in India, but it almost always is focused on one's religious and ethnic group. Sikhs from Punjab give to Sikhs in Punjab, for example, and Hindus give to Hindus, they said. That attitude reinforces the barriers the foundation is seeking to overcome.

In the United States, on the other hand, they said, numerous organizations exist to support people in need, regardless of their background.

Those organizations reflect a deep-seated spirit of civil society and philanthropy, especially in places with older, well-endowed institutions - like Massachusetts. "The culture of caring for others is part of this culture," Nathan said.

That spirit is also a reflection of Americans' sense of equality, foundation officers said. Americans cherish their diversity, but view themselves as one people.

Indian citizens identify with their enormous country, but locally they are given to reinforcing their caste, religious, and ethnic divisions, the foundation members said.

"In Indian culture, you have acceptance," Nathan said. "You accept what has happened to you. That keeps India from having social change."

Many of the members of the foundation are not US citizens but, like Nathan, hold green cards as permanent residents, and foresee returning to India one day, even if their children were born in America.

Expanding fund-raising is the group's goal in the new year, said Vidya Vasudevan, the foundation's executive director and president of a Westborough-based information technology company, SolveIT. While the school is the foundation's largest project, the group maintains other programs, including sponsoring the education of about 200 orphans, at a rate of about $100 a year, to keep them studying rather than working as child laborers.

Vasudevan said she hopes to soon work full time for the foundation to boost its revenues. "Supporting those 200 kids is not a challenge as such," she said. "To grow really big is the challenge we are facing."

The group's natural base of support, Indian immigrants, expatriates, and Indian-Americans, is growing. In Massachusetts, according to US Census Bureau figures, the community of those who identify themselves as Indian grew from 44,000 in 2000 to 61,000 in 2006.

Sunil Lala, a Shrewsbury resident and US citizen who emigrated from India in 1990, said he had never heard of the Next Generation Foundation, but added that it was a natural and healthy development among Indians setting down roots in the area.

A former online columnist for The Hindustan Times, one of India's leading newspapers, Lala said the Indian community's wealth is growing, but many are skeptical of how India-based charities might use their donations. Homegrown charities are the natural next step, he said.

"How do you trust these charities and how do you make sure the money is going where it belongs?" Lala said.

"There is a larger degree of confidence in charities based in the US and run by Indians."