People

Winning duo

Inderjot & Ajit Oberoi: momentous decision

Eight years on, the re-christened Dina Institute of Hotel and Business Management has morphed into one of India’s most well-known institutes of hospitality education offering study courses in finance, human resources, sales and marketing, apart from other key operational subjects as components of its graduate and postgraduate management programmes. Moreover the institute’s 30-month diploma programme has been accredited by Middlesex University, UK and all courses are affiliated with the Educational Institute of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, USA.

According to Inderjot, the mission of the eight-year institute is to "provide professional and job-oriented technical training relevant to the hospitality and service industry on a par with global standards". Adds Ajit, "All our endeavours are directed towards one objective: to provide the value that comes from quality education and training in the fast-growth hotels and hospitality industry."

With its mission clearly defined, this Pune-based hospitality industry B-school has made impressive strides and has a slew of firsts to its credit. Among them: ISO 9001-2000 certification; Middlesex University accreditation which entitles its diploma graduates admission into the final year of Middlesex’s three-year hospitality management BA (honours) programme; its licence to offer the American Hotel and Lodging Association’s full-fledged diploma programme in international hotel management recognised in over 100 countries. In addition Dina has pioneered its own 24-month postgraduate diploma in hospitality management, recognised as the equivalent of an MBA in the subject.

"In the next five years, India will witness tremendous growth in the services sector, particularly in the hotels and hospitality industries. Therefore the demand for well-trained proactive service personnel will explode. In Dina we are preparing the ground for the growth of these high-potential industries," says Ajit.

Dina’s fast-track metamorphosis into a hospitality B-school has impressed even veteran offshore educationists. "The reputation enjoyed by Dina and its commitment to quality education and training was an important factor which prompted our decision to sign an affiliation agreement with the institute," says Ken Goulding, deputy vice chancellor of Middlesex University, which has not accredited any other hotel programme in India. Likewise, K.V. Simon, regional vice-president of the Educational Institute of American Hotel and Lodging Association has no hesitation about endorsing the institute. "This hospitality couple turned hospitality education entrepreneurs have redefined hospitality education in India," says Simon.

Michael Gonalves (Pune)

Unique conservationist

Shukla: smple counter strategy

Shukla’s campaign began in 1984, when alarmed by the rising numbers of humans killed by tigers, especially in areas around the Dudhwa Park and hoping to capitalise on his knowledge of the area, he travelled to villages to study why tigers were straying from their natural habitats. "Resentment among the locals was high and cases of tiger poisoning were on the rise. This had happened because the locals were not part of the tiger management and protection programme," he says.

Shukla’s counter strategy was simple and effective. He persuaded the furious villagers that the big cats were attacking them in the absence of natural prey and that a few simple precautions could end the man-beast conflict. Among the precautions: avoid venturing into the fields wearing colourful clothes; don’t sit on your haunches lest a tiger mistakes a human for a four-legged prey and beat a tin drum when alone. Today these precautions mounted on brightly painted hoardings in the region are doing more to save lives than other elaborate programmes.

Inevitably funds for such well-intentioned campaigns are hard to raise. "Sometimes I spend half my salary on this campaign to my wife’s dismay," he says. Government help though welcomed, has not been forthcoming despite Shukla having served as a member of the Wildlife Advisory Board, vice chairman of the Tiger Protection Committee, chairman of the Taj Protection Committee and the honorary director of projects for World Wildlife Fund’s Uttar Pradesh chapter.

Despite having covered 150 villages with his Save Men from Tiger campaign, Shukla knows his crusade to secure peaceful co-existence between humans and tigers still has a long way to go. But he’s hopeful that his unique tiger conservation experiment has a future. "My daughters are so involved with it which makes me hopeful that other young people will join it," he says. Meanwhile Shukla is determined to soldier on to ensure that those destined to live near tigers can do so fearlessly.

Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)

Pathway’s path-breaker

Prasad (right): chance incident & defining moment

An audiologist and speech pathologist who graduated from the All India Institute of Speech and Hearing in Mysore, Prasad worked in several hospitals before a chance incident involving one of his patients changed the course of his life. "I was invited to the birthday party of an autistic child under my care and when I went to her house, I found that they had no material possessions. I was shocked to learn from her parents that they had sold everything they possessed to pay my fees and ensure care for their daughter. That was a defining moment. I began to provide free treatment to everyone. Thus Pathway was born," recounts Prasad.

In 1981, Pathway was registered as a voluntary, charitable trust to provide comprehensive care and education opportunities for mentally handicapped children. Another parallel, registered trust was started in the US. With time, Prasad’s selfless service began to be recognised and funds began flowing in from the government and several philanthropic organisations.

Today Pathway, which runs two centres in Chennai, is a haven for challenged children, offering clean and spacious classrooms, quality medical care and comfortable residential facilities, free of charge. The institution has attracted the service of 29 special educators and teachers, doctors, and 53 staff members in different categories to provide a range of services — medical care, special education, speech therapy, audiology, physiotherapy and occupational therapy, dental care, neurological and paediatric services and yoga to its students. "Around 18,000 children have been helped by us and are leading dignified lives," says Prasad who credits his wife and partner Chandra Prasad for standing by him from the very beginning.

A unique feature of Pathway is the vocational and job training it offers children from age 14 upwards, enabling them to develop skills to become productive members of society. Moreover its rural vocational centre at Koothavakkam provides employment to over 50 mentally handicapped adults. Vocational training is provided in offset and screen printing, beaded jewellery, greeting cards, gift items, carpentry and wood work, gardening, desk top publishing, photocopying and television assembly. The work of these special people is perfect, creative and flawless and their products are sold in the market.

But 30 years after his conversion to the cause of the disadvantaged, Prasad has more to accomplish. On his drawing board are ambitious plans to build a college for the disabled. Meanwhile he takes great pride in the achievements of his young olympians, artists and children who have progressed to mainstream schools. "I have never regretted my career switch. I’m happy that we have been able to touch the lives of thousands of children," he says.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)

Caring cardiologist

Lal: eventful transformation

For the son of a bicycle mechanic, Dr. Purshotam Lal’s journey to the Padma Shri (1993) and Padma Bhushan (2003), the country’s highest civilian honours, following his transform-ation into one of India’s well-known cardiologists, has been long and eventful.

Born in Patoheera Singha village of Punjab’s Ferozepur district, Dr. Lal attended the local village school "often studying under street lights as the village had no electricity". After completing primary school, Lal went to high school in another hamlet (Shaina), often shoring up the family income — they were seven brothers — from his national merit scholarship of Rs.125, awarded to him after his father’s premature demise.

Inevitably young Lal was admitted into DAV College, Jalandhar in 1969 under a scholarship programme, which he followed up with an MBBS degree from Amritsar University (1975) where he ranked first in the final year exam. Soon after, Lal left for the University of Minneapolis (USA) for higher studies and later to New York where he lived for over a decade and earned a sterling reputation working for the New York Hospital. "But deep down there was always a strong yearning to return to my roots. I owed a debt to my country," recalls Lal.

After having acquired considerable experience Lal returned to India in 1989 as head interventionist cardiologist of the Apollo Hospital, Chennai. Here he introduced a slew of innovative non-invasive options to open heart surgery while mentoring other cardiologists. In 1996 he shifted base to Delhi and shortly thereafter assumed charge as director of interventional cardiology at the Metro Hospital in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.

A year later he started the first 280-bed Metro Heart Institute with a staff of 100. Today, as chairman of the Metro Group of hospitals, Lal has more than two dozen pioneering techniques to his credit, including slow rotational angiography, non-surgical left atrial bypass, acolysis, ballooon mitral valvuloplasty, gold stenting, diamond drilling and closure of heart holes without surgery.

With 3,000 plus angioplasty procedures to his credit, a 100 percent success rate, and citations like the Shiromani Vikas Award (1990), Jawaharlal Nehru International Excellence Award , 1990 Scroll of Honour of the Delhi Medical Association (2002) and many more displayed in his office, Lal has indeed travelled a long way from Patoheera Singha village. "Of course these accomplishments are satisfying," says Lal, " But working for the poor gives me the most satisfaction. If I can help one poor patient a day, I feel I have done my duty."

Clearly the good doctor’s heart is in the right place.

Neeta Lal (Delhi)

Minorities education advocate

Parveen: service mission

The telephone never stops ringing in Dr. Nuhzat Parveen’s modest but busy office on the first floor of the newly constructed COMM-IT Career Academy (affiliated to the Guru Gobind Singh IP University) of which she is the principal. This centre for information technology (IT) education was set up under the auspices of the Awadh Public Charitable Trust, promoted in 1995 by a group of academics and retired bureaucrats with the goal of providing quality and affordable education to underprivileged students.

The trust was constituted in the small village of Karja, near Gorakhpur, a backward area with a largely Muslim population. But most of Karja’s limited educational facilities — in the form of a few mission and English-medium schools — were exclusively for male students. "The trustees soon discovered that if they wanted to succeed in improving education facilities for Muslim students, they would have to work hard at improving the quality of education for women as well," recalls Parveen. Thus the COMM-IT Career Academy was born with a mission to serve both under-privileged male and female Muslim students.

In 1999 the Awadh trust shifted to Delhi and promoted a physiotherapy college named the Institute of Rehabilitation, Medicine, and Allied Sciences. In the same year, the COMM-IT Career Academy was established with the objective of providing high quality technical education to under-privileged minority community students. Currently it offers the three-year BCA (bachelor of computer applications) and the BIS (bachelor of information science) degrees. Shortly more courses, like CAD (computer aided design), BBA, and MCA (through distance learning) are proposed to be introduced.

Though Parveen, who has a Master’s in English and doctorate in educational psychology from Delhi’s highly rated Jamia Millia Islamia University is intent upon establishing a centre for IT education which will cater especially to the needs of the under-privileged, she has ensured that the other 50 percent of seats in the BCA and BIS degree programmes are for meritorious students. "The overall idea behind the reservation of seats is to ensure that lateral learning takes place, so that students interact effectively, and relate to each other in spite of their differences," she says, adding that the Awadh Trust intervenes to help poorer students, by reducing their fees and offering other forms of support for the duration of their studies at COMM-IT.

The mantra at COMM-IT is "all-round development of students". The academy also runs an active placement cell that regularly studies market conditions and industry requirements, and is continuously in touch with HR consultants to prepare students for the job market, and place them in industry for summer training. COMM-IT has successfully placed several of its BCA and BIS students in leading software companies and commercial units like HCL, Xansa, Mind, NIC, Wipro, Six Sigma Infosoft, Daksh, and V-Customer.

Currently BCA is the only study programme actively offered by the five year old academy. "We have also linked up with Microsoft and NIIT to promote our BCA and to help us with curriculum as well as faculty development. I am very keen to enroll more minority students, especially Muslim students, in our programmes," says Parveen.

Meenakshi Venkat (New Delhi)