From selling oranges at a bus stand to building a school for his village: The inspiring story of Harekala Hajabba

At a bus stand in Mangaluru, a man with a basket of oranges once found himself facing a simple question he could not answer. Foreign tourists asked the price. He knew the fruit in his hands, but not the language in which the question arrived. The moment stung hard enough to stay. It also changed the direction of his life. More than three decades later, that same orange seller, Harekala Hajabba, would be recognised by the Government of India with the Padma Shri for social work after building a school for children in his village from his own savings. Scroll down to know more...Hajabba had no formal schooling of his own, and that absence shaped the scale of his anger and his ambition at the same time. Reports on his life say the embarrassment of not being able to speak with the tourists, combined with the reality that his village lacked a school, pushed him toward a single stubborn idea: the children after him should not grow up cut off from education the way he had been. The exact memory has been retold slightly differently across reports, but the core has remained consistent: a small humiliation at a fruit stall became the beginning of a public mission.In 2000, Hajabba began turning that resolve into something tangible, putting his savings into a school in Newpadapu, in the Harekala area of Dakshina Kannada. What started as a modest effort grew through persistence, loans, land purchases and help from others who came to believe in the cause. By the time national attention reached him, reports were describing a government school that had educated more than 2,000 children over the years. It was not built in one grand gesture. It was built in small, repeated acts of sacrifice, the kind that rarely make noise while they are happening. Part of Hajabba’s power lies in how ordinary his life still looks from the outside. He was not a policy expert, a politician or a wealthy donor. He was a fruit seller who kept working while the school slowly took shape around him. That contrast made the story travel. In 2020, the official Padma Awards notification listed Shri Harekala Hajabba under Social Work for Karnataka, and the award was later conferred in November 2021. Coverage from that time described the moment he was informed of the honour while standing in a ration-shop line, a detail that only deepened the sense that this was a man who had never stopped living simply even after his work became nationally known. The part of this story that matters most is that it did not end with the medal. In December 2024, reports said Hajabba’s school had been permitted to start bilingual-medium classes and had received 13 admissions, even as additional classrooms were still being built. By early 2025, another report said the long-pending dream of a dedicated pre-university college building in Harekala was still unresolved, with classes operating in limited space and the building proposal awaiting funds. In other words, the story is still being written, and Hajabba is still inside it.Even after the first classrooms began taking shape, Hajabba did not step away from the struggle or the stall. He kept selling oranges, kept saving what little he could and kept returning to the same unfinished idea: that children in his village deserved more than a single building. Over the years, his work grew beyond symbolism and into something practical, shaping a space where education could reach families who had long lived on the margins of it.The deeper lesson in Harekala Hajabba’s journey is not just that one person can change one village. It is that dignity often begins where resentment is turned into responsibility. He did not use humiliation as an excuse to withdraw from the world; he used it as evidence that the world had to be widened for the next child. That is why his story still resonates so sharply. It speaks to the quiet power of education, the moral force of persistence and the strange way in which the smallest act of refusal, refusing to accept that a village must stay deprived, can grow into something generations live inside.