Dr. Gurdev Singh Gill’s activism improved lives
Visit to his ancestral village sparked a campaign that transformed public health
One evening in 1999, Dr. Gurdev Singh Gill was in Kharoudi, India. The New Westminster physician was on a visit to his ancestral village in Punjab, which he had left 50 years earlier as an 18-year-old.
He was sitting outside with an old friend. But he couldn’t enjoy the visit — the smell of raw sewage in the street was unbearable.
So Gill decided to do something. During the next two years, he raised $150,000 to transform Kharoudi. The funds were spent on several initiatives, including installing a septic system, running water and a treatment plant. The measures greatly improved the public health of the villagers.
“Amazingly, incidents of mosquitoes and flies went down 80 per cent overnight,” Gill told The Vancouver Sun’s Kim Bolan in 2005.
Childhood sicknesses dropped dramatically.
Encouraged by the results, Gill persuaded more Indo-Canadians to get involved. They undertook a second project in the village of Barhamour with a matching grant from also the Punjab state government. Under the auspices of the Indo-Canadian Friendship Society of B.C., three more villages were modernized and improved.
The first project in Kharoudi achieved such renown in India that A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the country’s president, along with other dignitaries, visited the Punjabi village.
Since then, similar improvement projects have been carried out in 16 communities, at a cost of about $3 million. Village residents have experienced a big drop in cases of gastroenteritis, which is responsible for as many as 400,000 deaths a year in India.
Gill made the administration as transparent and public as possible. Since retiring from his medical practice, he spends about six months a year overseeing the friendship society’s projects in India.
Gill left India and arrived in Vancouver in 1949. Five years later, he became a Canadian citizen.
At the University of B.C. where he was a medical student, Gill co-founded the East Indian Welfare Association, according to Alumni UBC.
Gill was the first Indo-Canadian to graduate in medicine from UBC and the first to practise medicine in the country. In 1990, he was the first Indo-Canadian to receive the Order of B.C.
Gill was a community activist who was part of delegations to Ottawa in the 1950s to convince the federal government to make immigration more equitable.
He was involved with the Khalsa Diwan Society, the legendary Sikh society described as the largest and most significant outside of South Asia. At the time, the society was in financial crisis. But with the help of professionals such as Gill, they raised enough money to build the Ross Street Gurdwara in East Vancouver in 1970. Within three years, they paid for the cost of the land.
“Everyone was so enthused,” Gill said in 2006 about building the Ross Street Gurdwara. “We had great teamwork back then.”