FIFTEEN percent every month. That’s how much Dr. Jaipal Rathi sets aside from his salary for the charitable work in India, especially the development of Nagauri village in Meerut district in north India. And rightly so, for Rathi, who was recently in India to oversee the construction of a hospital, grew up in this village in abject poverty, walking barefoot in the scorching heat to go to school.

Today, he is the Manager, Advanced Engineering Group, at the New Jersey-based Raypheon Engineering & Co, which deals in construction of nuclear plants, safety issues and their analysis.

He established the Saraswati Shiksha Mandir, a co-ed primary education school in 1989, and is now all set to build a hospital in his village. And thanks to his efforts at raising funds for his trust, Sriram Gram Vikas Samiti, the school has now gone up to the Class X level, with 450 students coming from 15 neighboring villages. Today, Rathi is the pride of his village, not to mention his parents, Dhoom Singh and mother Balwati Devi.

“During all those years in the US, I never forgot my roots,” says Dr. Rathi. “I grew up in the kind of poverty where I didn’t even have shoes to wear, so I am aware of the hardships which the people of my village have to face. The idea of setting up a school happened when one of the elderly women asked me to set up a school for the girls in this village. I immediately started giving it a shape and look where it is today.”

The road to his dreams, though, hasn’t been easy, either now or then. Rathi completed his engineering from Allahabad relying entirely on scholarships, and even when he went abroad, he had to borrow Rs 20,000 from his sister and friends. “My parents were very poor and I didn’t want to burden them,” he recalls.

Remembering his childhood, Rathi says the most enduring image of poverty that has stayed with him is of one Janamastami eve, when he was barely seven. “Since it was a festival, my mother had made mewa (an Indian sweet dish) but my father had failed to arrange for the money to buy sugar. I, along with my three brothers and sister, had to make do with sugarless mewa.”

Thanks to his dedication, Rathi doesn’t hesitate to ask others for contributions, even if it is as little as a dollar. “But my wife, Sheela, doesn’t always understand my efforts,” smiles Rathi. “She comes from a wealthy family of Modinagar and has never seen the poverty that I have actually lived in.”

But that was the least of his worries when he decided to set up the school. “The villagers were not very accommodating due to their groupism and politics. They just refused to give any land for the school, and I had to persuade my father to sell three acres of his land.”