MEERUT, India - India is set to reach a milestone today in the global battle against polio, recording a full year without a single case of the virus in the country that was long its epicenter and its biggest exporter.

It is a massive global public health achievement that has defied the odds and confounded the skeptics, a victory - reached with U.S. financial support and expertise - that will see India removed forever from the list of just four countries where the crippling disease remains endemic. The other three countries are Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

The feat raises the very real chance that polio, like smallpox, could one day be consigned to history, and with it the heartbreaking image of the Indian beggar, crawling on twisted, thin legs, pleading for alms.

Until 1995, India recorded between 50,000 and 150,000 cases of polio each year. In 2009, 14 years into India's campaign to eradicate polio, 741 Indian children still contracted the incurable disease, more than anywhere else in the world, and morale was sagging.

In 2010, that number had fallen to 42. In 2011, it fell to just a single case, a 2-year-old girl who fell ill Jan. 13.

Anuradha Gupta, a joint secretary in India's health ministry, said the mood was now one of hope and enthusiasm, but not smugness, given the risks the disease could still find a way back from abroad.

"We needed this kind of success to keep morale up and to enhance public confidence in the program," she said. "We do now feel it is possible, it is doable."

In 1988, when the World Health Organization launched the global campaign to eradicate polio, the virus was paralyzing 1,000 children around the world every day, nearly half of them in India. Inspired by the success of the smallpox eradication campaign a decade before, the organization aimed to eliminate polio by 2000.

It took seven years before India's government mustered the political will, resources and manpower to act. And even when India finally began its first mass vaccination campaign in 1995, the hurdles seemed almost insurmountable, especially in the desperately poor, astonishingly overcrowded plains of northern India, where illiteracy was rife, malnutrition and disease rampant, and hygiene and public sanitation inadequate.

To make matters worse, rumors spread through the massive Muslim population of the region that the polio vaccination campaign was an American conspiracy to wipe them out, by making their sons impotent and their daughters infertile.

"There are 500,000 Muslims in this area, but there is no proper drainage, no post office, no bank, no government school, no hospital where a mother can take her child," said Qari Anwar Ahmad, the head of a madrassa in a Muslim neighborhood in the city of Meerut, just 45 miles northeast of the capital New Delhi. "So people were skeptical. 'Why does the government only care about polio and not about these things?' they asked."

Vaccinators were stoned as they approached Muslim neighborhoods. "The general mindset was that the immunization campaign was aimed at ending our lineage," Ahmad said.

That was the start of a massive public education and advocacy campaign, led by UNICEF and Rotary International, that began by convincing religious and community leaders that the vaccine was safe, and the goal of a polio-free world achievable.

After word came down from some of India's leading Muslim scholars, Ahmad was finally won over to the cause, first taking the oral vaccine himself and then administering it, in front of a crowd of onlookers, to his 1-year-old son a decade ago.

Today, the mosques of Meerut broadcast to the faithful from their loudspeakers when a vaccination campaign is under way, and imams open vaccination booths.

Despite India's success, the battle is far from won. The virus is still endemic in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. In Africa, Angola, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo seemed to have won the battle against polio, only for the virus to be re-imported from abroad and person-to-person transmission to restart.

It will take another two years to declare India completely free of the virus, but even a setback now would not derail the program.

An estimated 878 million people around the world — nearly half of them employed — live on less than US$1.25 a day. Rotarians bring economic and community development to impoverished areas through projects that provide vocational training, support local entrepreneurs and community leaders, and assist with long-term recovery in places struck by natural disaster.

Hannah Warren, a former Ambassadorial Scholar, says her Rotary experience inspired her to become a social entrepreneur. She founded Jhoole, a nonprofit business that offers impoverished women in India access to training, materials, and international markets for hand-woven goods, enabling them to earn a living wage.

With help from a Rotary Foundation grant, Jhoole acquired looms, cloth, and funds to cover training costs for weaving and sewing. "There is no way I could be doing this [work] were it not for my Ambassadorial Scholarship," Warren says. "Like Jhoole's programs, Rotary scholarships are not a one-time donation; they are an investment in goodwill."

Tartan High School seniors participate in the STRIVE program after being recommended by their teachers and counselors. Students are mentored throughout the year by Rotarians and Tartan staff members. At the end of the year, students with the most improved grade-point averages are eligible for scholarships.

This year's banquet speaker was Tasha Shuh of Ellsworth, Wis., a motivational speaker who became a quadriplegic more than 10 years ago after breaking her neck in a fall through an open trap door on stage during a high school play rehearsal. Tasha addressed Century students last fall on Student Success Day.

Rotarians of the North St. Paul - Maplewood - Oakdale Rotary Club provided a steak lunch for area seniors at their annual event. This year was delayed due to the December snow storms.

Members of the North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale Rotary Club donated over 800 dictionaries to all third graders in District 622 elementary schools, including Cowern and Webster, on Feb. 11. Pictured are Rotarian John Poulson in Mary Lipps' class at Webster, and Rotarians Sonya Czerepak (principal), Randy Greenlee and Nancy Livingston in Emily Wollin's class at Cowern. Improving literacy is one of the service goals of the club.