New York: The New York City Cabbie stood in the doorway of a school on in January sweetly bidding farewell to 180 little girls in blue-and- white dress who poured into a dusty brick lane at the end of the school day.

"Namaste", Om Duffa Sharma said to them as they chorused back their own goodbyes.

For 20 years, Sharma has driven through the streets of New York City in a yellow taxi, saving his crumpled tips, never taking his wife out to eat, scrimping on new clothes for his sons, to make this act of goodness possible. He has given his village a school for girls and named it for his illiterate mother, Ram Kali.

In New York, Sharma and his wife are struggling immigrants. But in his village - a place without even a single telephone - their incomes, modest by American standards, make them philanthropists. "I'm worthless in New York," said Sharma, whose father grew sugarcane on a 10-acre plot nearby. "Here, I am everything."

The two-storey brick house which Sharma, 65, has raised is now filled with first to fifth graders laboriously scratching out their lessons in chalk.

The Sharmas can afford to educate and care for these farmers' daughters because money buys more here than in New York.

Sharma and his wife, Krishna, a nurse at Bellevue Hospital Centre, contribute the $2,500 a year it costs to run the bare-bones school. The girls sit on the floor and write on small chalkboards.

Each of the five teachers earns just $35 to $ 55 a month. To hire a local doctor to give the girls regular checkups, Sharma spent $ 500 more from the earnings of a mango orchard he planted years ago when he and his brother inherited the family plot.

Sharma is now expanding the school so that 500 girls can have high school education too. To pay for his ambitious plan, he says he and his brother have submitted affidavits promising to donate the family's 10 acres to a charitable trust set up in India.

Sharma will also give half the money from the sale of his taxi medallion, which he estimated is worth around $220,000 saying he planned to sell it when he retires in three or four years.

If he succeeds, more girls in the village will have a chance of schooling beyond the primary grades in an area where a girl's odds of learning to read and write are much lower than a boy's.

The Sharmas, who live in Woodside, Queens, are educating their own sons too these days. They have taken out $ 50,000 in loans to pay for Pramanik and Prasheel's college years at St John's University in Queens, Krishna said.

Even so, after Sharma's mother died in 1996, he felt that the time was right to take on the cost of educating some little girls he did not know in a village where he no longer lived. The doors of the Ram Kali School for Girls opened in the summer of 1997.

"You are always getting, getting, getting," Sharma said, "You have to give it back."

But getting has not always come easily to the Sharmas. After they immigrated to New York in 1974. Krishna, a registered nurse, got a New York City license and readily found work. But Sharma, who had earned a law degree in India through a correspondence course, decided not to practice after he found out he would have to go back to law school and pass the bar exam.

In those early years, he worked as cashier at Burger King, a machine operator in a wood- cutting factory and an insurance salesman, but nothing lasted long, his wife said. Then one day in 1979 he hailed a cab and the Greek man behind the wheel told him how to get a hack license. He became a taxi driver.

In his wife's eyes, her lawyer husband had fallen "from Mount Everest to the depths of the Indian Ocean," he said. Sharma, whose father was also a lawyer, said she was shocked by her husband's new line of work.

"In India, no professional person would give their daughter to a driver," she said. But Sharma loved the job. Most of all, he loved talking to his passengers about politics and the meaning of life in conversations snatched during traffic jams. He worked 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week. "If I sit at a desk in an office, I'm dead meat," he said.

Krishna said her husband's generosity was painful for her as they struggled to pay their mortgage and heating bills. And she was angry that she and their two sons saw little of him during those years when he was working such long hours.

Despite all the penny-pinching. Krishna supports and admires her husband's desire to do Good. It is she who has packed her sons' lunches to save on cafeteria food. "Many people give hospitals and schools," she said. "But those are millionaires. How many poor and middle-class people have done this?"