The man behind the one rupee school.

ISLAMABAD -- Zahid Kazmi, 44, has been focusing on two tasks; one has become his hobby and the other his mission. The hobby is to collect, donate and give books for reading, attracting more people to read books, meeting authors and maintaining regular contact with them. He has collected 35,000 books over a period of 20 years.

Among books, he is not just fond of collecting autobiographies but has the largest collection of Urdu autobiographies in Pakistan, numbering over 1,000. Also, he has 500 autobiographies of famous Pakistani personalities in English language. He not only asks people to write their biographies but also promises to publish them. 'Dozens of people have written MPhil and PhD dissertations using my collections,' he says.

The second task - his mission - is to educate the children of the most economically disadvantaged people. He feels that education these days requires school fees, uniforms, shoes, bags, stationary among other miscellaneous accessories that the low-income people can hardly afford as their prime focus is putting food on the table.

Taking up the task of educating the children of the low-income people, Kazmi set up a school in his hometown Bareela, a village surrounded by several small villages scattered on or at the foot of small but lush green mountains with a total population of more than 15,000, in Haripur four years ago.

Keeping in mind that these villages are home to low-income people, his first task was to persuade people to teach their children and he did it by taking up the responsibility of bearing all kinds of educational expenses. He succeeded in enrolling 50 children. 'These were the children whose families have not been to any educational institution for decades,' he said.

'If you really want to do it; just start teaching under a tree,' Kazmi quoted a friend as saying when he was thinking about renting a proper building for the school as a first step. 'I understood his point that education was more important than the building; I rented a room in the village and started teaching,' he said, adding that roughly 140 students were now enrolled at his school - Babul Ilm - in a five-room building with open space spreading over 1.5 kanals. The school has a total staff of nine people; six teachers, a female helper, a security guard...