There are two Kovalams in India. And they could not be more different. Kovalam in Kerala is a beach paradise in a State that is statistically India’s least impoverished. Situated on India’s tropical Malabar coast, Kerala’s Kovalam is a sun, sea, rest and relaxation resort.
The other Kovalam is also on the coast, but there the similarity ends. This Kovalam has not been listed as one of the 10 paradises of the world by The National Geographic, as its namesake has. Almost 25 miles south of Chennai in Tamil Nadu, Kovalam is a village of 7,000 souls dependent on fishing for the most part to make a living. In Kovalam the average daily wage for an unskilled worker is less than £2 a day, and for a person with a craft skill, still below £3.
Sylvia from Brighton in England fell in love with the second Kovalam on her first visit there during a work-related trip some years ago. She was captivated in particular by a 10-year-old boy, Venkat. He showed her round the village and had no hesitation in asking her for the £10 he needed to pay for his school fees the following year.
Sylvia admired Venkat’s pluck, gave him the money and offered to help him more with his education. ‘I really thought I would never hear from him again’, she said. ‘In the end I put him through high school and university.’ Thanks to Sylvia, Venkat went on to study and graduate from Madras University. He made a life and career for himself as an Italian interpreter. But that is not the happy ending of this story.
At the age of 27 Venkat was killed in a road accident. Heart-broken, Sylvia decided to return to Kovalam to do something in his memory. She wasn’t quite sure what that would be. Appalled by the state of the local primary school she resolved, with support from friends, to transform the educational experience for the children of Kovalam in Tamil Nadu. At that time, 20 years ago, most of the children left school at the age of 12 and the literacy rate in the village was barely 60 per cent.
By then, Sylvia had retired from her job in Public Relations. She says that what happened next just happened because of the public’s generosity. She wouldn’t call herself a philanthropist, just someone who felt a tragic loss and who believed, as she put it, ‘to give an education is to give a way out of poverty.’
Sylvia set up The Venkat Memorial Trust with three Kovalam Trustees and three UK Trustees. It did not take them long to find other children like Venkat. Sumithra and her brother, Kali, were the first to be sponsored. Though they had survived the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the children’s father had been mending his nets on the beach when he had been hit by flying debris, dying days later. Before the tsunami hit, the palm house where they lived had already been falling apart. Holes in its roof let in snakes and the monsoon rains.
Whatever educational aspirations Sylvia and her trustees had for the children of Kovalam, they had to wait. First they had to help them simply live in the aftermath of so much death and destruction. That meant setting up the Kovalam Tsunami Appeal and using funds raised to pay for the building of 25 new fishing boats. It meant building brick houses for families like Sumithra’s. It meant restoring hope so life could go on.
How easy it would have been for Sylvia after this sudden unexpected turn of events to feel that she had honoured Venkat’s memory, that she had done enough. How much harder to sustain the seed of philanthropy started with her £10 all those years ago. Even harder, it proved, for Sylvia to walk away now from children like Sumithra and Kali. They deserved the opportunity that she gave Venkat, she concluded.
The year after the tsunami Sylvia launched the sponsorship scheme in Kovalam. By 2009 the primary school had been transformed, new buildings added. In the following year the first sponsored students were going to university, Sumithra among them. In her case the path to a more prosperous future would begin with a BSc in Computer Science in Chennai. Sylvia and the trustees’ relentless lobbying of the State government and concerted fundraising also resulted in the construction of a secondary school for Kovalam.
Within a decade of Sylvia’s intervention, the literacy rate in Kovalam had risen to 95 per cent, a secondary school for hundreds of pupils had been built, a science lab had been added and a library of no fewer than 5,000 books created. More recently in 2024, recognising the need to evolve and generate more diverse sources of income to sustain and expand the still growing educational programme, Sylvia and her fellow trustees converted an earlier building into holiday accommodation.
If only there were as many Sylvias as there are Kovalams in the world, the myth that philanthropy is the exclusive domain of the wealthy would be dispelled forever. All it takes is £10 and meeting a boy like Venkat.