Why a school in India is named after a Leicester suburb

The hopeful, smiling faces in this school photo mean so much to Bhasker Solanki.

They are the culmination of a story that began when a natural disaster destroyed hundreds of villages 25 years ago.

At least 20,000 people lost their lives after an earthquake hit India’s Gujarat state on 26 January 2001.

Mr Solanki’s response to that disaster created opportunities for a generation of children, and a lasting bond with his old school in the UK.

Mr Solanki was a news cameraman and was deployed to Gujarat to film reports about the disaster for the BBC.

“My personal emotion doesn’t matter, the way I can help is ‘get the word out’, I’m not the saviour,” he says.

Mr Solanki had covered war, famine and natural disasters in numerous countries after growing up in Leicester.

But he says this tragedy felt personal, because his own family were originally from Gujarat.

So when he returned to Leicester, Mr Solanki approached his old secondary school at Rushey Mead, an area with a large Gujarati community.

Mr Solanki’s former English teacher and form tutor at the Rushey Mead Academy, Jean McDiarmid, agreed to help him to set up the Rushey Mead Foundation to support one of the worst affected areas.

“Rushey Mead School’s motto was always ‘be concerned’, with a little added bit ‘and do something about it’, and Bhasker knew that,” she says.

“So obviously when he asked us to get involved, we decided to put it out to the students – everybody was very concerned about that earthquake because of the Gujarati connection, and instantly students wanted to help.”

They decided to raise money to build the first ever high school in a village near Bhuj – and named it after their own building.

Rushey Mead School in Nagor opened almost 20 years ago, and is still receiving some support from donors in Leicester.

Mr Solanki says 500 pupils have now passed their exams in a community where many children used to leave the education system at an early age.

“One of the primary inspirations was my mother, [an] incredibly bright woman,” he says.

“She was from a poor family, she didn’t get the opportunity to get an education, not many girls were going out.

“Now the girls are going on to become teachers – quite a few – one girl’s become a homeopathic doctor, one girl’s become a lawyer.”

In December, Mr Solanki returned to Nagor, where children in one classroom were learning maths in front of a traditional blackboard.

In another room, girls and boys were working on modern computer equipment that was funded by the Rushey Mead Foundation.

The head teacher of the school in India, Hitesh Marwada, told the BBC that donations from Leicester are also helping families who are too poor to afford the basic school registration fee.

“It is very important in this rural area… in this area most of the children are not able to go to school,” he says.

Rushey Mead is an unusual name for a school in a Gujarati-speaking area of India, but Mr Marwada says it is making a huge difference.

“The name is different but we are working in the same way, and in the 20 years of this school we have seen the changes in the village,” he says.

Retired teacher, Mrs McDiarmid, added the foundation had given education to a generation of girls.

“We’ve built it, now we have to keep it going,” she says.

Mr Solanki says he is “extremely proud” of what they have achieved.

“The girls are becoming more independent, you’re helping somebody to sort their lives out rather than just giving them a meal.

“It would have been quite easy to build something and walk away.

“What we’ve changed is the mindset in the village,” he adds.