Citizen Compassionate

About a week ago, Ravi Mishra received a call on his mobile number. The female voice on the other side sounded agitated. Mishra, a producer and a fixer based in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, has been receiving many distress calls like this after he started distributing dry ration among the poor who were unable to sustain themselves during the Covid-19 lockdown. After the woman became coherent, she told Mishra that she was not asking for any ration except a little sugar. “She said her new-born baby was crying incessantly with hunger and she wanted to make a paste with sugar and feed him so that it calms down,” says Mishra.

Every day, Mishra loads packets of dry ration in his jeep and visits areas where the poor live in Bhopal and are currently desperate for food. So far, he has helped about 4,000 people to survive during the lockdown.

It all began when Mishra received a distress call from an old acquaintance of his, a car mechanic called Arif. Earlier, Mishra had helped him a bit with a little money as Arif found himself without work. This time, Arif called him after he witnessed a fight in a nearby grocery store. “As I reached the grocery store, I realised that people had no money and were getting very desperate,” recalls Mishra.

Mishra says he immediately took out a certain amount of money from his savings that he had kept aside to buy a superior version of the iPhone—he uses the phone professionally to shoot videos. With this money, he was able to feed 11 families.

But soon, it became clear to Mishra that this was simply not enough.

It is then that Mishra began asking friends and his social-media followers for donations. As he reached out to more families, his contact details were circulated fast. In no time, he was getting hundreds of distress calls every day.

Sometime ago, Mishra was alerted to a situation developing at the Shahpura police station in Bhopal where about 40 women from nearby slums had come out in defiance of the lockdown. “When I reached there I found out that the women and their families have had nothing to eat for two days,” he says. Last week, he received a call from a labourer who had got his number from a security guard whom Mishra had helped earlier. The labourer asked for a little food but was so embarrassed that he said little. “He said he did not want it for himself but for his two small children,” says Mishra.

Mishra also received a call from an NGO that works with rape victims. The volunteer from the NGO told Mishra that some of the victims had nothing to eat. They could not even seek the help of their families and relatives because all connections with them were severed due to stigma attached with rape.

“Initially, when I began helping out, people asked for more than basic ration like rice and flour. But now as they grow more desperate and supplies have dwindled, they are thankful for even a little,” says Mishra.

Mishra is reluctant to speak about it, but he has exhausted all his savings. “Doing this was more important; I could not have just stayed at home and done nothing,” he says.

During his work, Mishra says he also realised that the basic dignity of a human being exceeds need for food. Many families, he realised, want to go back to their villages because the meagre clothes on the bodies of their kids (especially girls) have turned into tatters and they want to clothe them.

A few days ago, a group of labourers whom he had helped earlier turned up at his home. The group, ranging from an old man to a small child, was on its way to Bareilly and took a detour just to express gratitude to Mishra. “One of them said he was a mason and if I ever wanted any work done at my place, he would do it for free,” recalls Mishra.

A few days after the lockdown, Bhaskar Bhatt stepped out of his home in Delhi’s Dwarka and saw a long queue of people outside government relief centres, waiting for a portion of cooked meal. “I realised that I cannot sit at home and do nothing,” he says. He immediately went to a local grocer and bought essential food items like rice and flour for Rs 8,000 that he withdrew from an ATM nearby. Then he called a prominent person involved in relief work and offered him this ration.

Bhatt, who works as the divisional lead with the Penguin Random House India, reached out to his friends on social media, urging them to contribute. The first appeal received a rather lukewarm response, with a minor collection of about Rs 8,000. But in two weeks, more and more people felt their involvement was necessary, resulting in higher contribution. After learning about his campaign, a bookseller donated Rs 1 lakh; it helped Bhatt buy ration in larger amounts. “Early on I figured out that more than cooked food provided by the government, people were in more dire need of dry ration,” says Bhatt.

As his mobile number got shared widely, Bhatt now gets calls from other parts of India as well. Recently, a man called him from Lucknow, asking for help. The man worked as a waiter in a hotel and was receiving no salary. Bhatt asked him to go to the nearest grocery store and buy stuff for which he made payment through Paytm from Delhi. Then one of the waiter’s colleagues, also a waiter in the same hotel, also called for help, which he received in a similar fashion. Another distress call came from Jaipur where a man who worked as a salesman in a Sari shop had not eaten for two days and was begging for help. “He had two children and asked for a little milk more than dal-chawal,” says Bhatt.

Bhatt finds it is worrying that he is now getting calls from even those who could be considered middle class and are suffering because they have lost jobs. A man from Dashrath Puri in southwest Delhi who ran a small online business found no buyers for his merchandise for weeks and had no money left to pay his house rent. “He did not want it waived off but wanted someone to speak to his landlord and convince him for extra time to pay his rent,” says Bhatt.

His mobile rings day and night, but Bhatt feels sorry he can only help a limited number of people. “I feel helpless, but at least I know some people will not go hungry for days to come” he says.

When Priyanka Singh and her four friends began relief work in Mumbai, they only wanted to extend help to a few families because they felt their resources were limited. “Our initial target was 20 families,” she says. Singh and her friends work in the film industry; she is a cinematographer and a director. But soon, as their phones kept ringing, they realised they will have to do more. It is then that they created a page on a crowdfunding site, asking people for donation.

As they began, says Singh, they had very little idea about how to go about doing relief work. To get some advice, they spoke to a few NGOs who guided them on how best they could reach out to people. Singh and one of her friends live in Goregaon. “We spoke to our local ward official who was very supportive and pointed to us areas where people were really desperate,” Singh says.

The team began putting together ration packets with rice, flour, lentils and spices. A packet costs them approximately Rs 600 which can last a family of four for roughly two weeks.

Singh is appalled at the stories she has heard from women workers she has helped. “Women came to us and said they had been paid in March for work, but employers refused to pay them for April,” she says. So far, the team has been able to help over 600 families. “I am amazed at the kind of resilience I see among the poor,” she says. “Sometimes we are distributing ration and it gets over and I look at those who have not received it, but they accept it calmly.”

What if one day they would not, she wonders.

Hana Mohsin Khan is a pilot. A few months ago, after she had landed her flight in Delhi, she got to know about the riots in Delhi’s northeast. “It disturbed me a lot and I decided to do something about it,” she says. Khan put together some relief supplies, hired a tempo and reached the riot-affected areas. With the help of her friends, Khan says she was able to rehabilitate over 40 families affected by the riots.

And then the lockdown took place. Many people she had been in touch with were hit badly again. Khan remembers a woman she had met during the riots. Her husband was a baker. They were married for 12 years and only last year they had saved enough to buy a house. Her husband ran his business from the ground floor, while the family lived on the first. As riots broke out, her house was targeted by a mob and burnt down.

Khan recalls that the woman was so distraught at the sight of the door of her fridge lying at the entrance of what was once her home. It was the family’s first fridge which they had bought only a week before their house was destroyed.

It is here that Khan and her friends began relief work.

“When I approached the woman to offer her relief, she was still very traumatic. She kept saying that they had painted their house and that she never allowed her children to scribble on its walls and now she wishes she had at least done that,” recalls Khan.

Khan has seen too much destitution: a painter who said his family had not eaten for three days; another woman who lost her one son in the riots had exhausted her ration and told Khan she could not ask for help from two other sons since they had their own families to take care of.

Apart from northeast Delhi, Khan has also been extending help to poor families who live near her apartment in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. “I saw people begging for a little help outside ration shops,” she says. At times, Khan says it slowly almost hoping no one hears it. She has cooked food at her home and then distributed it among a few workers and labourers living in a slum near her house.

“It is a long haul. Too many people need help and it will be for a long time,” she says.

Nagaland has no case of Covid-19 (except a native who is currently admitted in Guwahati, Assam), but the lockdown has affected poor families, especially those of migrant workers who stared at hunger after work stopped. Tinakali Sumi, who works as a journalist for a local English daily, and her two doctor friends got together to help. “We raised money among our families and friends to put together ration packets for the poor,” she says.

The crisis deepened from April first week onwards, which is when Sumi and her friends put money together to buy dry ration for the families unable to fend for themselves.

Sumi has now engaged with an organisation to provide cloth masks for those who cannot afford it. “There are many who have very little idea about how to safeguard themselves,” she says.

During their work, Sumi and her friends realised that it is not only daily wage workers but even others like stranded students and widows and old-age people left by their families who needed help in these desperate times.

“There are people who told us they were unable to eat for two days. I hope we can reach out to more people like them so that nobody goes hungry at least,” says Sumi.

About The Author

Rahul Pandita

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