Companies, People, Ideas
Offshoring Aid
Megha Bahree 05.08.06

Sonal Shah and her siblings trade in the comfort of America to start a volunteer mission back in India.
Armed with a master's in economics from Duke University, Sonal Shah had a high-powered job at the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington. Her younger sister, Roopal, was a prosecutor for the U.S. government in San Diego, California and lived close enough to the beach to go surfing each day. But here they were, staying in a mud hut in a village in the Rann of Kutch, a desert region in northwest India near the Pakistan border. They trekked to the communal pump and drew water for baths, all the while on their guard against malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

This was back in 2001, when the two spent six weeks in remote corners of the subcontinent laying the groundwork for the volunteer organization that they and their brother, Anand, had just launched--Indicorps. "We wanted to find out what it would mean for a woman to live there, so we could prepare them," says Sonal, who is now 37.

Since then the three siblings--the sisters were born in India, Anand in the U.S.--have sent some 60 Indian-American women and men on stints of up to two years in Indian villages. There the volunteers, dubbed "fellows," work on projects aimed at improving the lives of the villagers, while connecting with the country of their parents and learning how development efforts actually work at the grass roots. At one village where Sonal and Roopal stayed, for example, fellows help local women make their traditional handicrafts more marketable.

Inspired by the Peace Corps, a 46-year-old U.S. program that sends American volunteers to countries in need across the globe, the siblings pooled $50,000 to start Indicorps out of their parents' home in Texas. Then Anand, who is now 28, moved to Ahmadabad, in the state of Gujarat, to run the operation on the India end. Roopal, 36, quit her job in the U.S. Attorney's office and lived in Ahmadabad for three years before returning to the U.S. late last year. Sonal has kept the day job she started in 2004 as a vice president of corporate citizenship at Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people ). But she spends weekends and evenings giving talks to spread the word about Indicorps, mentoring fellows and picking their brains on ways to improve the program.

And, of course, choosing the fellows. Indicorps receives roughly 120 applications from across the U.S., U.K. and Canada for 20 spots each year. To fund the program, the siblings raise about $100,000 a year through donations. Fellows pay for their own airfare to India. "It's not a free trip, and it's not a vacation," says Sonal.

To the contrary: Not only do fellows face huge amounts of hard work but also a certain amount of risk. "Every year at least one fellow drops out because his or her parents are too scared to let them go," says Sonal. All the fellows must check in with Anand or a staff member once a week. And they are never placed in a village that doesn't have some sort of a phone service--even if it's only a villager's personal phone line.

Sonal came well prepared for the task of dispatching young Indian-Americans into the unknown. During her seven years in the Treasury Department she spent 14 months in Bosnia and a year in Kosovo, helping their governments restructure their economies after the Balkan wars. Last year, while at Goldman, she assisted the new Liberian president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, in reforming that African country's war-devastated economy.

Still, she didn't foresee all the challenges that fellows would have in India. Because of its location the Kutch region is a hotbed of Indian and Pakistani informers and members of the Indian army and intelligence agencies. "You had to be careful who you spoke to," says Rishi Kotiya, 25, who grew up in North Carolina and worked in a village in 2004 and 2005. The locals often advised him to stay clear of certain people in the area, supposedly moles.

A fellow working in the same village a year earlier, Samina Akbari, 27, was taken to a hospital in Mumbai after contracting cerebral malaria. One staff member stayed by her bedside for ten days. She was soon back in the village, though. Today she is working at the Earth Institute at Columbia University on a project headed by professor Jeffrey Sachs, who advises UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on setting goals for reducing extreme poverty.

Another issue the fellows must deal with is political upheaval. Kalai Murugesan, 31, worked in Manchal Mandal, a cluster of villages on the outskirts of the tech city of Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh. Parts of the state have seen strife between Maoist rebels and the government for decades, on top of the usual politicking between more mainstream political factions. "I would see [one faction] march through one day and [another] the next day," she says. "It was really important to remain neutral." One day Indicorps gave her an emergency exit plan, in case she ever needed to escape. (That was the day after the bombing of a police informer's house in the next village.)

Kulvinder Gill, another fellow, faces a different obstacle--corruption. A Ph.D. in semiconductor physics from the University of California at Santa Barbara, he is working in New Delhi with a group focused on exposing corruption in the local and national governments. Some of his colleagues have been followed, threatened and attacked, he says. "The Indicorps training really helped me blend in," he notes. Sitting in a bare office in a building squeezed between storefronts and homes in a low-income neighborhood in East Delhi, where the street is just wide enough for a Kia, the 29-year-old is dressed in black pants, a woolly forest-green sweater, a gray flannel jacket, and socks and sandals. Only his gold-rimmed spectacles distinguish him from other men in the area.

The program kicks off in August in Ahmadabad with a monthlong training in language skills, cultural sensitivity and how to interact with the villagers. There's also India 101, which covers topics such as the government system, politics and the country's history. And the training includes an important lifeline: how to travel in India. To teach this, the fellows are divided into teams during their second week in the country and sent on a one-day scavenger hunt across Ahmadabad, a city of 4.5 million.

They complete such tasks as bargaining with shopkeepers, taking the train from the suburbs into the city and finding an address.

"I felt particularly self-conscious because I didn't speak Hindi," recalls Meenakshi Nankani, 27, a Maryland native. "In the beginning [of the hunt] I was sweating, trying to figure out how to communicate." By the end of the day, she says, she felt confident enough to move to her village, where she helped develop a school curriculum for the children of laborers at a sugarcane factory six hours from Mumbai.

After five years the siblings are considering bringing in new blood and taking less of a day-to-day role in Indicorps. But that won't mean Sonal, who is single, will be any less busy. She's already looking for her next project. "My dad [Ramesh Shah, a stockbroker at Morgan Stanley (nyse: MWD - news - people )] told us, 'It's fine if you don't want to get married, but you have to do something good with your life.'"..........Source: http://www.forbes.com/business/global/2006/0508/043. html