BENGALURU: Difficult times often bring the positive side of humans to the fore. A group of residents of Begur in the city travelled all the way to Kolar amid lockdown and fed 33 families of migrant workers who were left with little food or money. Till the good Samaritans reached them with grocery kits, the workers from Jharkhand were surviving just on biscuits.
Swarna Begur Residents Welfare Association (SWAR) president Amit Kumar and four of its members -- social worker Arjun Kapse, Prof Desmond, Fullinfaw College principal Navneet and cricket coach Khader -- took the initiative and grocery items were delivered to the families in distress who were 77 km away.
Amit Kumar, who originally hails from Jharkhand, said he had called up a helpline of the central Indian state and offered to help migrants stranded in Karnataka because of the lockdown.
When the Jharkhand government received a distress call from labourers in Kolar, it gave them the contact number of Kumar. Around 10 pm on Monday, Kumar got a call from Kolar with the man on the line saying his family was desperate for food. “Send ration to my family, we don’t have money or food,” Kumar quoted the man as saying.
“I felt terrible and couldn’t even sleep thinking about them. On Tuesday, we bought about 225 kg of ration --- wheat, rice, oil, vegetables, dal and sugar -- and headed to Kolar with Arjun. Luckily we had the (curfew) pass with us. So we could go.”
On reaching the place, they found the family and also other migrants from Ranchi and other districts of Jharkhand who were all in need of ration, he said. “We found 33 families and gave kits to all of them. With these kits, they can manage for 2-3 weeks. Since the place is a village, it was not readily accessible. The families said they had no meals for two days and many were surviving on biscuits,” Kumar added.
The SWAR group was also involved in similar works earlier. It gave ration kits to 575 families in Yeshwantpur, Begur, Kalkere and other places, he said. They also started an initiative to provide breakfast to needy workers and more than 3,000 people benefited from the gesture, Kumar said.