Professor Santosh Desai gets a donation on a train in Mumbai. (Fotocorp)

Mumbai, Oct. 9: When the good professor took to begging on Mumbai’s local trains, his family, friends and even colleagues at the charitable trust he runs were aghast.

“But I believe that no route is small if the cause is an honourable one — and I wanted to raise funds to build a rural school. The response has been overwhelming,” says professor Sandeep Desai.

Six months after he started off, Desai, 50, is an icon of sorts on the city’s commuter rail network. Daily passengers seek him out to drop their tiny contributions into his donation box as he waits at Goregaon station to board the 11.30am slow. He makes about 7-8 trips between Goregaon and the Churchgate terminus till 5.30pm, collecting money.

“I do not work in the rush hours, because I have found that people are wary of opening their wallets and taking out money during this time for fear of pickpockets. Besides, they absorb what I have to say better and respond more warmly when they are relaxed and the trains are not overcrowded,” says Desai.

A trained marine engineer from the Marine Engineering College, Calcutta, Desai is also a qualified MBA and used to teach at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management in Mumbai.

“When I started off, many perceived me as a con man. My fellow trustee and college friend Noorul Islam would accompany me those days and stay incognito in the crowd to pick up feedback. It was difficult to seek donations from strangers and I just froze on the first-day first trip,” he remembers.

On Thursday, Desai is treated like an old friend by commuters, with many asking him about the progress of the school he is collecting donations for. Many of them have become regular donors —pushing in notes of ten, twenty and even five rupees into the small plastic box Desai holds out.

Some of the donors are poor; some are well off. Some have even visited a school for poor children he already runs in the Iraniwadi slum of Goregaon. The school was set up with money that Desai and his friend Islam, both bachelors, raised by giving lectures on management and creativity across India.

“We had approached many top companies for money but none came forward. So we decided to raise the money through the lecture circuit we were already part of,” says Desai.

Islam, an alumnus of Calcutta’s Hotel Management Institute, is an advertising professional and has served several times as chairman of the training & professional development committee of the Advertising Agencies Association of India.

After running the Goregaon school successfully for half a decade, the two realised that if they wanted to replicate the success and make it sustainable, they needed public participation.

“The school I am raising money for now is under construction in the backward village of Zadgaon in Ratnagiri. We have a small network of volunteers we call vidya sevaks. They help procure the land with participation of local people, oversee the work and teach at the schools. You will be surprised that my drive on the trains has not just raised money, people have volunteered to be vidya sevaks as well,” he says.

Desai started off with a daily collection of Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 which later went up to Rs 3,000-4,000. But things changed dramatically last month.

“I was on my way to the station in the morning when suddenly I got a call from a person who claimed to represent Bollywood star Salman Khan. He said Salman had come to know about my drive from someone and was keen to contribute. I thought of it as a prank call,” remembers Desai.

A couple of hours later, as he was going from compartment to compartment collecting money, the same person called and said Salman wanted to talk to him. As Desai waited, Salman’s unmistakable voice rang on the other end.

“Kamal kartey ho professor saab aap — aap to duniya palat rahe ho,” Salman told him.

“He said he wanted to contribute. He wanted to know how much I had collected so far. I said Rs 4 lakh. He said he would contribute the same amount,” Desai said.

Before he hung up, Desai had a small request for Salman.

“I told him I was on the train and it would be nice if I could put him on the phone’s loudspeaker and he could tell the commuters I was not a fraud. Some nasty comments still come my way,” Desai said.

Salman agreed and spoke in his inimitable style to the commuters, which made the crowd go crazy. “Since that day, I have been collecting about Rs 8,000-9,000 a day and one Saturday, I collected Rs 14,000,” said the professor.

Salman has put in Rs 4 lakh in Desai’s trust account with the promise of contributing Rs 20 lakh annually to help him build one rural school in any part of India every year.

“We have now announced that if any village can come up with at least five vidya sevaks and arrange for land, we will help them build a school that is properly run,” Desai said.

Desai and Islam plan to bring the drive to Calcutta. “We have an emotional link with the city as Noorul is from Bengal and we both studied in Calcutta. We are in the process of finding a backward village where we can have vidya sevaks to see through the work and run it with commitment,” Desai said.

He will be on Calcutta’s local trains soon, he promises, and is confident that “the city with the most generous heart will not disappoint” him.