Children from many tribal villages in Gujarat’s Chhota Udaipur district once had to swim across the raging Hiran river every day during monsoons to reach school in Utavadi village in Narmada district. Many of them carried a gohri, a 20-litre brass pot that they held on to stay afloat as they crossed the 600-metre tributary.

Their ordeal will now be over, thanks to the gift of an inflatable power boat by a New York-based Indian-American couple. Ratna Bhalla, deputy director of emergency housing at Nassau County, Long Island, was planning a family trip to Disney World in Florida when her husband Varinder Bhalla told her about a story of the children’s plight he had read in an Indian daily.

Bhalla, a mechanical engineer in the US for the past four decades, “was restless till he connected with the news reporter, who in turn put him in touch with the villagers and the school authorities to find possible solutions”, Ratna Bhalla said. The Bhallas, who founded the AWB Food Bank in 1991, a Delhi-based charity which has distributed over 10 million meals to needy children in the last 23 years, decided to go to India to work out a solution.

After toying with many ideas - like opening a school in Sajanpura and renting a bus to transport the children over a bridge 20 km away - the couple finally hit upon the idea of an inflatable motor boat. The Bhallas trained the village elders to navigate the boat they carried from New York, with safety and precautionary measures, stressing the need to wear life jackets. On the chosen auspicious morning, they launched the boat in the river with the children.