NRI charity for poor, serving the elite

LONDON: A NRI charity that claims to educate the children of poor widows in India has come under severe criticism for spending more on it high-profile patrons than on the needs of the widows who they are supposed to be serving.

The Shrimati Pushpawati Loomba Memorial Trust has Cherie Blair, wife of the British prime minister as its president and the owner of Virgin Airlines Sir Richard Branson as one of its main patrons, and also boasts 44 other equally famous patrons and trustees including Prince Charles as its patron-in-chief.

The Loomba Trust was founded nine years ago by Raj Loomba, an ice cream salesman from Punjab who set up the charity in his late mother’s name, herself a widow at the age of 37. Loomba who now runs a clothing import company called Rinku plc with a turnover of £10 million, has assiduously cultivated the rich and famous to be associated with his charity — raising his own profile in the bargain —holding gala dinners around the world and trying to get the United Nations to recognise the nebulous notion of ‘International Widow’s Day’.

On 23 June, this year the Loomba Trust held a Bollywood concert in Trafalgar Square to mark Widow’s Day, flying in Sunidhi Chauhan, Karishma Shah and Shekhar Suman to regale the invited audience, addressed by Yoko Ono, the widow of Beatle John Lennon.

However, despite the dozens of gala dinners and fundraising events to which the world’s who’s who make their way, the charity’s own accounts show that just £560,000 has actually gone to Indian widows.

Since the trusts inception in 1997 it gross income stands at only £1.3 million and over half of it is held back for contingencies in corpus funds.

In a damning report in a British newspaper, Loomba is accused of using his Trust to gain access to the political and social elite in the name of Indian widows without really doing any major work for them.

The Trust claims that the fund pays for education of 3,600 children across 29 Indian states providing the ‘eligible’ with Rs 15,000 per quarter for five years. This represents an annual spending of just £252,477.

Virgin, which flies to India, collects loose change from it passengers gives all the proceeds to the Loomba Trust which in 2000 generated £95,000 in one year. An unnamed charity worker in India is quoted as saying, “He (Loomba) has a very high-profile committee but I have seen no evidence of any works on the ground. My work has never brought me into contact with any woman who has been helped”.

The paper lambasted Cherie Blair whose trips to promote the fund are paid for by the Loomba Trust for using them to take exotic and expensive holidays. It also rejected claims by eminent trustees like Lord Dholakia that “supporting the Loomba Trust is a far better bargain than supporting other charities because 99.9 per cent of the money raised goes directly to the charitable work on behalf of widows”.