N Suresh, 52, Engineer
The man who coordinated the largest citizen participation programme to manage local crises and respond to help requests in the lockdown is now busy putting together a 40,000-strong home quarantine force for Bengaluru. In March, just as the coronavirus was making its way into Karnataka, 40,000 volunteers registered as Corona Warriors under an initiative of the state's Department of Information and Public Relations, signing up to deliver medicines by relay, drive distraught mothers across districts to their children, attend to patients who could not get a hospital bed, organise dry food and provisions for migrants and be where they were needed. Upon the request of IAS officer Captain Manivannan, Suresh, an IT executive, took a sabbatical from the multinational he works for and built the communications framework for the volunteer force that treated each query as a service ticket to be tracked and closed ASAP. The group was disbanded post-lockdown, but its achievements inspired many volunteers to keep up the good work.