Meeting members of the project affected families, one is struck by the number who point out that, more than what it has meant to them, the potential the Naptha-Jhakri enterprise, and its ancillary benefits, has of making their children’s lives better is what appeals to them. A mountainous terrain six to seven hours from Shimla by road is today, courtesy SJVN, home to some of the finest schooling facilities in Himachal Pradesh.

The Government Senior Secondary School in Jhakri, with its 700 pupils, used to be a small and somewhat nondescript building. After a grant of Rs 52 lakh from SJVN – a promise to the community at the time the project was conceived – the renovation of the school is unusually marked. A new hall, new blackboards and teaching aids, new foreground – this is one commitment SJVN has kept.

Even more spectactular is the Delhi Public School (Jhakri), which was a product almost entirely of SJVN’s initiative and persistence. With an impressive library, science laboratories that can be benchmarked against the best schools in the country and a happy, cheerful landscape, DPS (Jhakri) attracts pupils from even neighbouring towns such as Rampur.

It began in 1994. Tanu Bansal, now the principal of DPS (Jhakri), joined the following year. “We were 12 teachers and 200 children, from nursery to class VIII, then,” she says, “today there are 32 teachers and over 600 pupils.” There are actually 670 pupils – 60 per cent from the SJVN township and 40 per cent “outsiders”. Remarkably, 211 of the 670 come from project affected families.

The corporation subsidises the fees of the project affected families’ children. In class X , for example, pupils from the from the SJVN ambit – including those from project affected households – pay Rs 360 a month. Others pay Rs 650. SJVN put down Rs 2 crore for the initial construction of the school. Today, it provides an annual “grant-in-aid”. In the past year, this amounted to Rs 62 lakh.

The five acre DPS (Jhakri) campus is expansive and, from personal computers to spotless classrooms to an excellent auditorium, has better infrastructure than any school hitherto accessed by the community. It is also environmentally conscious. The large playground that so serves the school has made use of earth excavated while building the dam at Naptha. The muck was filled in to “make” the soil that lies at the base of the field.