Ishaan Reddy

Included in Padma Bharatis: Ordinary Indians, Extraordinary Triumphs Curated By Jay Jina

The Fruit Seller’s School: The Story of HAreKala Hajabba

Imagine for a moment that you are street vendor at a bus stop when someone stops by and asks you about the cost of your products–except that you don’t understand what they are saying.

That is where Shri Harekala Hajabba found himself in 1978 when an English-speaking tourist asked him for the price of his fruit. Hajabba was unable to answer, as he could only speak Tulu, a local language spoken in the coastal district of southern Karnataka.

‘I am not an educated person,’ he tells me in our meeting. ‘But from the moment, I realised the value and importance of education.’

Shri Hajabba’s lack of a formal education underlined a problem with schooling in many parts of the world, including India. Some small, remote villages simply did not have schools to which modest families on rural incomes could easily send their children. However, from that moment on, rather than wallowing in self-pity, Shri Hajabba decided to do something that was to help change the lives of hundreds to come.

Born in the late 1950s in Newpadupa, on the coast of Karnataka, Shri Harekala Hajabba grew up in poverty. His father worked as a fisherman, only coming home once every eight days, and his mother worked long hours as a maidservant in other people’s homes. These two largely absent adults were his role models growing up.

Fisher-folk families of the village lived in small, thatched-roof houses. Shri Hajabba’s simple family home even lacked a door. They had no mats to sleep on and Shri Hajabba made do without a change of clothes.

‘My days in the past were very difficult,’ he tells us in our interview. ‘Those first sixteen years of my life were very difficult,’ he repeats, without any sense of regret.

While there was a school in the village, Shri Hajabba’s parents simply couldn’t afford to send him there. So instead, the young boy would often go fishing in a nearby river, play with tamarind seeds and look for mangoes as a way of staying occupied.

In 1974, when Shri Hajabba was sixteen, he, along with his mother, little sister, and grandmother were forced to watch while their small house was washed away in a devastating flood. The place he had called home was gone in an instant.

With the home gone, and with few opportunities in the village, Shri Hajabba moved to Mangaluru in the hope of earning a living. In Mangaluru, the young lad took up in 1978, on that fateful day when he was approached by an English-speaking tourist.

‘I understood nothing when a man asked me in English the price of my oranges. I felt discomforted,’ Hajabba told us. ‘The man just moved away and asked some of the other vendors around me. This made me even more uncomfortable.’

The incident had left Hajabba humiliated. Arriving at the place he had made home in the city after a long day, Shri Hajabba reflected on how he might ensure no one would suffer the feeling of incompetence like he had. And so, the very next day he approached a typist and told him of his plight. In those days, typists were very much in demand, especially by common folk who needed a professional writer to make applications and appeals on their behalf to local authorities. This typist agreed to prepare an application on behalf of Shri Hajabba making an appeal to the local Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) that a school be opened in the village of Newpadupa.

Shri Hajabba believed in the justice of his application request and he was excited. But after many weeks of waiting there was no sign of any progress. He therefore visited the MLA office in person bust still failed to get any response. For weeks on end, he continued making frequent visits to enquire about his application, but each time he did he was told, ‘We shall see what can be done.’

This pattern frustrated Shri Hajabba, as he recalled, when asked by a news reporter. ‘After a few days, I understood that these people are just making me go round from one office to another. It cost me a lost of money and time. I therefore simply stopped going to my village to save time.’

Shri Hajabba decided to take matters into his own hands.

Over the next few years, he continued to sell oranges in Mangaluru, often sleeping in the bus stand and sometimes even going hungry, so as to save up money for the village school that he dreamed of. His commitment to convince the authorities remained firm as he continued to stand outside government offices for days with applications.

Many people praised him for his efforts. Others thought he was crazy. But Shri Hajabba continued. Finally, in June 2000, nearly twenty years after the tourist incident, a plot of land of around 1.33 acres was allotted to the school. It may have seemed like a success, but it was only the beginning.

While construction of the first buildings of the school got underway, Shri Hajabba contacted the management of the local madrasa, to ask if the new school could begin classes in one of their rooms. They gladly agreed, and so a class of twenty-eight students became the first to be taught there.

After years of construction, the first building was finally ready, and, in 2004, classes one through five began to be taught in the school that Shri Hajabba had dreamed of. Besides saving up money for the project, Shri Hajabba would continue contacting various people and organisations, asking if they would lend money to his school.

‘I got help from the District Commissioner Shivananda Murthy,’ he told us in our interview. ‘He even encouraged journalists to write about me. And so it was that “Kittalabuttiyalli Aralida Ashara Kanasu” (“The alphabet dream that bloomed in Kittalabutti”) — the title of these news articles — came to be so influential in getting public attention for my efforts. Others began to write about me and publish in different magazines and newspapers.’

‘In 2013, I was recognized by Karnataka state, I was able to start a high school. The school was short of teachers. In this, I got help from Veena Jayaschandan. he helped me with recruitment while Hindustan Petroleum (HP) sanctioned 18.6 lakh rupees to construct the buildings for the school.’

All the donors who have contributed to the school are listed on a plaque, but with one exception: Shri Harekala Hajabba himself is not on the list. This is the way he wants it, and explains, ‘It is all of them, not me that have achieved this,’ when asked why his name isn’t on the list.

By 2010, the school had grown and covered every year up to class ten. With increasing public interest and demand from more local families who wished to educate their children, Shri Hajabba secured more funding from donors and a second building was built and completed in June 2012.

Shri Harekala Hajabba, the simple street vendor and son of a fisherman, was finally seeing his dream becoming a reality.

In January 2020, it was announced the Shri Harekala Hajabba was to recieve his highest honour yet, being conferred Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award in India in recognition of his years of effort and dedication to bring to reality his dream of a village school.

On the occasion of his investiture by Shri Ram Nath Kovind, President of the Republic of India, before stepping forward to present himself, Shri Hajabba, humble as always, took off his shoes when receiving the award. ‘How could a poor man like me wear footwear in front of the Honourable President and all those guests and receive such a prestigious award? I removed my shoes for that reason,’ he explained.

Currently, the Hajabba School, as it is known, has 175 students in attendance, drawn from communities living in Newpadupa and surrounding villages. ‘A lot of children have been educated in our school right from primary school through to high school level,’ Shri Hajabba reflected. ‘Some of these children have gone on to become engineers, others have qualified as doctors, and some have become teachers. There are also some of our students who have gone abroad to study and many have gone on to establish careers and become householders, to live and succeed in cities.’

THe world we live in is far from perfect, and if we want things to get better, we have to be the ones who decide to make a change, to make the world better. Shri Hajabba by his years of tireless dedication has shown that one does not have to be famous or wealthy to make change. Despite his own difficulties, Shri Hajabba ahd made a difference in the lives of hundreds of children by identifying problems and being determined to find solutions.

If we want a better wold, we need more people like Shri Hajabba. The question now is can there be enough of them and who had the courage to be one like him?