Churu (Rajasthan): In the small Rajasthan village of Churu, Christina Mathews, a management graduate specialising in public health from Boston, gets ready for her day's work at a local anganwadi centre.
The anganwadi centres provide information to the village women in all matters and Christina is helping to design training programmes and workshops for the volunteers. The workshops centre around community health projects initiated by BCT, a local NGO.
Christina is one of a dozen non-resident Indians who are in India for a year to share their professional expertise.
For her as well as others, it is an opportunity to give a little back to the country their parents left behind.
They have come to India as part of a programme called Indicorps. The idea of Indicorps was conceived in 2000 and was the brainchild of three NRI siblings from Houston.
The idea was to set up a platform that gave qualified NRIs in the US a chance to share their time and skills in India.
Under the programme, more and more NRI professionals are shifting back to India for a year at a stretch for the last three years.
Indicorps co-founder Anand Shah says: "Basically, we work for people and NGOs in India who are doing inspiring things. We ask them if they need any assistance and if they respond, we send them our people."
Christina Mathews, an Indicorps Fellow for 2004-05, says: "My parents sacrificed a lot to get me where I am now and I want to give back some of that to my country."
Some of the volunteers have been to India before on visits to family and friends, but there are others who are making a trip to the country for the first time.
Another NRI, Kulvinder Gill, who is a physicist based in California and is headed towards a career in policy-making, is working with Kabir, an NGO in Delhi working on the Right to Information campaign.
An Indicorps Fellow for 2004-05, Kulvinder says: "We try to make a permanent contribution to academia in general. We try and assess the aspects they have worked on. We prepare write-ups and try and get them published. The idea is to disseminate information."
Between long-distance idealism and gritty reality lies a slippery ground and the question here is whether the members of Indicorps come to India to make a valuable contribution or is the gesture a vague mix of adventure, identity-crisis and patriotism?
Manish Sisodia, manager of Kabir, says: "People come to us with different social and educational backgrounds. Their different perspectives help us get better in our work."
Every batch that comes to India is a mix of people from various professions. From scientists to doctors, lawyers to engineers to management graduates — they all come here.
Some of the people who have come in the past have stayed back in India for good. Those who have returned to US remain part of the Indiacorps network — a network that is growing each year.
They say it does not matter where they are based. What counts, as they go about their lives and careers, is that they keep India in the picture.
