India had its first brush with a lockdown when PM Narendra Modi declared a 14-hour Janata Curfew on March 22, 2020, as the Covid case count had crossed 300. The PM also asked for citizens to applaud at 5:00 pm in appreciation for the frontline workers. However, the series of nationwide lockdowns that ensued thereafter, witnessed the rise of local citizen heroes, who couldn’t look away from the blistered heels of the migrants combing miles to get home or the marginalised in their own areas who could not step out, fearing ostracism. Here, are the stories of such individuals, from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, who, overnight, built teams, appealed for rations, arranged for transport and other essentials, way before government agencies and crowdfunding sites such as Milaap, Ketto, GiveIndia, entered the picture.
In the initial days of the lockdown, Rahul Goswami received a call from a student of his that his father was stuck in Haryana and they had nothing to eat. “When I reached her place, I was pained to see many families here were suffering from starvation,” recalls the president of NGO Lakshya Jeevan Jagriti in Karol Bagh that provides education to illiterate women.
That’s when Goswami and his small team decided to provide food and ration to slum clusters, shelter homes and other areas. They first dipped into their own pockets, before turning to families and relatives. As word spread, people came forward with money, ration, and water. “We preferred distributing cooked food over dry rations as many families did not have money to buy oil, gas to cook meals. Seeing our efforts, the women attending our literacy programme lent us their kitchen and helped us cook thousands of rotis per day,” said Goswami, adding the NGO distributed over 2.5 lakhs of cooked food and rations to the migrants, shelter homes, and slums, till the lockdown was lifted.
“During this period, our team also imparted online education to students after connecting with children, parents and ASHA workers. The NGO arranged for books, old laptops and mobile phones and created groups to provide online classes to underprivileged children. Students from Bihar, Nepal, UP who moved during the lockdown still attend our classes,” said Goswami. About 400 students are enrolled with the NGO physically and virtually. Currently, it teaches children at slums situated in Daya Basti in Zakhira, Nehru Nagar, and Jhandewalan. Moreover, the NGO continues to distribute rations to about 300 families. “Though things are back on track, people are still finding it difficult to get jobs. As schools are closed, students are not getting mid-day meals. We will keep distributing rations to the families of our students once a week, so they attend classes regularly,” promises Goswami.
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Before the lockdown, Ramu, 52, supported his family of 10, living in Shahdara’s Lalbagh slum cluster with the predictable daily income of around Rs 300 as a rickshaw-puller. Ramu belongs to the Kapadia community, a scheduled caste that traditionally relies on trading old clothes, and a considerable number of them continue to be left out of state benefits and thus a social safety net. On March 22, his income came to a halt and a few days into the lockdown, his family was left struggling for rations. A few weeks into the lockdown, an NGO helped his and 300 other families ‘adequately stock up’. And that’s when Ramu and a few community members formed a committee to identify families nearby, who suffered dwindling cash savings and rations.
Ramu listed the families left with no rations, and made videos of people struggling for meals to draw attention to the issue. While doing so, he realised that widows were severely impacted as they had been left out of state schemes. In several households, they were the sole earners and were left to the mercy of their neighbours or would go hungry. “When the lockdown began, the police came and told us that nobody could leave their homes. It made it more difficult for widows to access rations. Children were going hungry, and widows were left without any savings or pension.
How could we not share rations when they were struggling more to get meals? Everyone in our slum agreed to the decision to help out widows and women-led households, who were suffering the most.”
Ramu then spearheaded the distribution of 750 kg rice and 250 kg pulses, while ensuring the committee maintains social distancing. “We started making meals whenever extra rations reached us. We would load the food onto bikes, rickshaws and distribute to migrant workers, people stuck at Anand Vihar bus terminal, and neighbouring areas.
Doing this gave us peace thinking we could also help people,” said Ramu. Income started trickling in tepidly from October. “Sometimes, I work for a day’s wage when I can’t earn as a rickshaw puller. It is difficult to make more than `200 as a rickshaw puller now... But the lockdown has taught me no matter what the circumstances are we should always help people,” said Ramu.
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Even before Janata Curfew was declared, Dr Prasun Chatterjee, gauging the impact of Covid-19 across Europe and China, had tweeted to the PM to declare a complete lockdown. As soon as the three-week lockdown was declared on March 25, he immediately rang up the 27 age-care homes involved with his NGO Healthy Aging India (HAI) to check their plan for organising resources. Chatterjee, an Associate Professor and Geriatrician at AIIMS who started HAI in 2013, got into the profession after seeing his friend’s father succumb from tuberculosis, unable to afford timely medical aid.
HAI cooked 500kg rice, 300kg dal per day, and also 10,000 rotis for those who couldn’t eat rice. And there was extra emphasis on packing. The meals were pre-plated on sal leaf plates and bowls, slipped into paper envelopes, and stacked within the nine vehicles that the NGO had hired for distribution purposes
Before the pandemic, HAI used to provide free medical check-up, physiotherapy, and admission to AIIMS for tertiary care elderly residents. But in the lockdown, HAI restructured the NGO’s outreach overnight to focus on food instead of medical aid. “Charitable aged homes are run by the donations of the many kind-hearted who visit regularly, or on birthdays, anniversaries, etc. This would stop in the lockdown, and the thought that people could die out of hunger in the 21st century was completely unacceptable to me,” recalls Chatterjee.
“So, I made a video appeal via social media for money and dry rations to feed the elderly and the marginalised, and got a tremendous response.” From March 26 till June end, they fed one meal a day to 5,000 people without a single-day interruption, and distributed dry rations then on after two-week intervals till July end. “There was not a single case of food poisoning, because as a doctor I did not compromise on the quality.”
The food mostly comprised khicdi cooked in ghee and packed potato, cauliflower, soyabean and other sabzi, or a meal of rice, dal and sabzi, all cooked by a staff of 20 at the Bharat Sevashram Sangha, a Hindu spiritual organisation at Lajpat Nagar that readily agreed to let out their kitchen for the cause. That meant cooking 500kg rice, 300kg dal per day, and also 10,000 rotis for those who couldn’t eat rice.
And there was extra emphasis on packing. The meals were pre-plated on sal leaf plates and bowls, slipped into paper envelopes, and stacked within the nine vehicles that the NGO had hired for distribution purposes. Over those months, Chatterjee faced two major roadblocks. Although he tested negative four times, in mid-May he experienced giddiness, low BP, and found with a high antibody count, “but I had this junoon (passion) and continued going on these distribution drives, with the PPE gear, of course.”
In another instance, he was put behind bars for two hours after a district collector in Central Delhi objected to HAI feeding the marginalised in Rajpath. But Chatterjee with HAI continued to distribute food in areas such as Jama Masjid, Prem Nagar Galli no. 6 with its predominantly Muslim ragpicker community residents and the migrants he would spot enroute the distribution drives. “I only believe in one religion, humanity. I am glad that the positive side to the Covid crisis is that people have learnt to share.”
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When the Sadhu family, who own the Kashmiri restaurant Matamaal in Gurugram, looked outside their window this time last year, they knew they had to do something. “We are located right next to a national highway, and over the following days, while we were closing our restaurant operations, we saw so many migrants struggling to get back to their villages,” shares Hans Sadhu. They started by feeding a family of 15-16, who had trudged 25km to the highway, without any sustenance and aid, after which things massively scaled up. “We were lucky that a lot of our staff and family lives close to the restaurant, and they came in to help us prepare and deliver food,” says Sadhu, adding that the restaurant staff would go everywhere from villages and slums to construction sites abandoned by real estate companies, to deliver the food.
Apart from preparing meals on a daily basis, a practice they continued all the way through May, the Sadhus also reached out to friends, media and more, to collect rations. They ended up distributing 40,000+ food kits, which included 5kg rice, 5kg grains and pulses, cooking oils and other essentials.
“When people got to know what we were doing, it coalesced into this community aid, where people would help those around them. And organisations like Robin Hood Army and Civil Defence Gurugram also came through, with their volunteers selflessly distributing rations to far flung places,” says Hans.
However, Matamaal didn’t just cater to the desperate and the disenfranchised.
“We realised stray animals are also suffering. There’s this Leisure Valley Park, and when we went deep inside, we found groups of dogs starving, without water or food,” recalls Hans, adding that the restaurant ended up preparing hundreds of meals a day, to be distributed to 1,500 roaming packs and pups. “We were greatly helped by Mala Seth and her Karma Animal Foundation, which has a large property in Sohna that is home to more than 150 differently-abled dogs. She has a network of volunteers and so they picked up food from the restaurants and distributed it,” he elaborates.
(Contributed by Gayathri Mani, Ritwika Mitra, Ornella D’Souza and Shantanu David)