People
Sikh-Canadian Donates $5 Million to Alma Mater:
Sardul Singh Gill
by R. PAUL DHILLON
An Sikh-Canadian businessman from Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) has made one of the largest donations to the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business.
Victoria businessman Sardul Singh Gill gave the school a cool $5-million to establish a permanent endowment that will disburse funds for scholarships and financial awards, international projects, teaching and research.
The university will recognise the gift by naming its graduate business program the Sardul Singh Gill Graduate School.
“Mr. Gill’s generous donation will do a great deal to strengthen graduate level business education and allow us to reward outstanding academic achievement and foster excellence in teaching,” says University of Victoria ("UVic") President David Turpin.
“This magnificent gift will benefit generations of business students and advance our teaching and research programs,” says Dr. Ali Dastmalchian, Dean of the Gustavson School of Business. “We are delighted to honour Mr. Gill in this way; he is a person who exemplifies the values of hard work and integrity.”
Sardul Singh attended UVic’s predecessor Victoria College (Class of ’53) and is the President and Secretary of Gill-AM Investments Ltd, a Victoria-based real-estate holding company. He was born in Victoria in 1931, the son of Sikh immigrants from Punjab. He graduated from Victoria High School and attended Victoria College before completing his commerce degree at the University of British Columbia ("UBC").
“I made this gift to honour my parents. My father immigrated to Canada from the Punjab in 1906,” says Sardul Singh. “He laboured all his life and encouraged me to pursue my education at a time when there were significant barriers to people of Indian descent in this country.”
His father, Bhan Singh Gill, came to Canada with a fifth grade education and had to settle for labour jobs in Vancouver Island sawmills. His wife, Hardial Kaur, came to Canada in 1926.
“My father could not get a job for nine, 10 cents an hour,” Sardul Singhrecalls. Bhan Singh toiled in saw mills up and down Vancouver Island; his son worked in those same mills as a young man supporting himself through college and university.
“As a result, I never had much of a social life,” Sardul relates, “but I knew the value of hard work from a very young age.”
In 1953 he was admitted to the Commerce program at UBC and after graduation, completed his CGA. Over the years, he worked diligently to build up a considerable portfolio of real-estate holdings.
“I owe the fact that I got this far to my parents,” he says. “My parents were staunch believers in education, and now I want to honour them, and the value they placed on higher education by giving something back to the institution that gave me a start in life.”
The naming of the Sardul Singh Gill Graduate School at UVic represents the first time in Canada that such an institution has been named after a Sikh-Canadian philanthropist.
This gift has other historic benchmarks: it is the largest gift ever from an alumnus to the university and may be the largest gift to a Canadian university by a person from the subcontinent. It is the largest gift ever to a graduate program at the University of Victoria.
“My greatest hope,” says Sardul Singh, “is that this gift inspires others to give back to their own communities - perhaps just as my father and mother inspired me.”
[Courtesy: Link]
October 12, 2011
Conversation about this article
1: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), October 12, 2011, 11:46 AM.
Vund chhakna, the third Sikh tenet, is displayed here in spectacular style.
2: Peejay Singh (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada), October 12, 2011, 1:55 PM.
Bravo ... this gift exemplifies the Sikh values of hard work and sharing.
3: Harbans Lal (Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.), October 13, 2011, 12:05 AM.
Sardul Singh Gill has earned our appreciation as he has glorified Sikhi through exhibiting an important tenet and teaching of Sikhi/ To acknowledge God-given prosperity with gratitude and then, to share with the needy, irrespective of their race, gender, looks or beliefs, is real Sikhi. The world will know Sikhi through what we do and not by what we claim that we are meant to do. Thank you, sikhchic.com, for bringing to our attention such examples of Sikhi practices.
4: Sukhvinder Singh Riat (Gurgaon, India), October 19, 2011, 2:44 AM.
This is an example of "kirat karo atte wund chhako", two of the primary principles of Sikhi. People like Sardul Singh are serving Sikhi through such actions.