Anoothi Vishal meets Fortis mentor Harpal Singh to find out about his campaign that unites religion with the girl child.
A well-thumbed coffee-table book may be a contradiction of sorts but The Great National Parks of the World that lies prominently on a table in Harpal Singh’s home is just that. In the garden outside is a great banyan; its roots spreading deep, holding firm despite their urban surroundings where patches of green and trees ringed by age are rare. “When I was abroad and rented out this house”, says Singh, former chairman of Ranbaxy and Fortis and chairman of the CII northern region, “my only condition was that nothing should damage the tree… the tenants could do anything else with the house.”
It doesn’t take long to figure out Singh’s environment-friendliness. And other spaces have benefitted from it: If you have strolled in the galiara around the Golden Temple in what is one of the few gardens in Amritsar, it is partly due to Singh. Stuck by the dump the space had become, he set about transforming it with the zeal of an influential corporati. That was some years ago. Today, he points out happily, it is a pleasure to walk there with one’s grandchildren.
More recently, the Golden Temple became the site for some more activism. Singh launched a unique social campaign, Nanhi Chhaan, from the premises a few months ago. A nationwide awareness-building campaign against female foeticide, it is an attempt, Singh says, to honour and respect the women in any household; daughters and daughters-in-law.
While other such efforts have been made by disparate bodies and continue to be, the difference lies in the scale on which Nanhi Chhaan has been envisoned, roping in state governments, the corporate sector, India’s elite schools, even banks like the Punjab National Bank (that opens an account for every registered newborn girl in Punjab) not to mention the country’s religious leadership.
“I find it strange when people remark about my belief in women’s rights,” says Singh. “In fact, it would be strange for me to think otherwise, growing up in a family where all the women were achievers,” he adds. Singh cites the example of his aunt, “a double MA in 1945 and a strong force in the family”, and “all my sisters” — cousins — “who are more educated than I am”, as being influential figures in his childhood where he, he admits, enjoyed the privileges of being the only son. “Not just in one family but in three since ours was a joint-family set up.” When Singh went to college in the US in the 1970s, bang in the midst of the feminist movement there, he says he had no problems coming to terms with that brave new world.
In fact, he cites another example as proof of his feminist leanings even back then: Standing for the post of president of the student’s body in his college (“the party I floated, by the way, was called People’s Party, well before Zulfikar Ali Bhutto thought of the name...”), Singh stepped down in favour of a woman president, in deference to her gender. “Eventually, here I was, a turbaned fellow as vice president and she was a black, Ethiopian woman”— in a school not known for its liberal politics.
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But back to Nanhi Chhaan. From its sacred beginning, the campaign has travelled to most gurudwaras in Punjab, to the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Delhi, and, most recently, to the Govind Devji temple in Jaipur. Singh informs me of plans to take it to Ajmer next, to the dargah of the Sufi saint Salim Chishti, thus bringing within its ambit all the major religions and religious places, in a strategy that Singh hopes will establish a connect with the masses.
Nani Chhaan, for those who haven’t heard of it (though Singh contends that it is now impossible to be at a social gathering in Punjab and find people who haven’t), brings together ideas about religion, environment and gender in a unique way. The link between religion and the cause is vital, according to Singh. Every devotee who comes to a place of worship gets to take home a sapling — as prasad — for every girl or woman in the household. The idea? That as the sapling grows, nourished by the family, it becomes a symbolic reminder of the community’s commitment to the girl child. Interestingly, Singh sees religion as a way to build an emotional connect with the masses. “Before we started,” he says, “we called a meeting of all the leaders of religious faiths.” And after the initial hesitation “we found that all faiths said the same thing”.
In its next stage, Nanhi Chhaan will attempt some real-time action too. Singh wants to make maternity centres and hospitals more accountable vis-a-vis sex determination, not by bbringing down the might of the law on offenders —for he agrees that it is very difficult to book them — but through another idea that he tried out at Fortis first, the hospital chain.
A couple of years ago, “We found doctors prescribing unnecessary and expensive tests that cost the system a lot of money. But how do you tell a doctor not to do that since it may risk a life?” So Singh hit upon a plan. Data was collected and the average cost per surgeon made available to all the doctors. It worked brilliantly. “Nothing else needed to be done, no one was humiliated... no friction... that’s the power of data.”
Singh says he is working towards a system where maternity centres will be told to display a list of the last 100 or so births with the sex of the children born. “If the ratio is off the average, we know (and the hospital knows others know) that something is wrong. You don’t need extra force, or punishments, to get compliance,” he adds.
At the family farm in Ganganagar where Singh celebrated his “family birthday” last December (every year, family members, numbering between 30 and 50, gather on a convenient date for a “family birthday”), it may be possible to find a Nanhi Chhaan sapling. But not merely because of Singh’s presence. Instead, it may be for his youngest granddaughter, a little over a year old. “I, the eldest, and she, the youngest in the family, would wake up before anyone else and go sit by the lake, watching the sun rise and the crows fly into the nearby town,” he talks of the holiday. It’s the picture of an idealistic universe. Hopefully, the sapling will help preserve it.