The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared coronavirus disease a pandemic. Originating from Wuhan in China, it has traversed almost the entire globe, and claimed more than 41,000 lives, while over 8 lakh people are infected already. That’s largely the urban population.
In India, despite all the preparedness and war-like promptness to safeguard against the pandemic, several lives have been lost, and hundreds of individuals have tested positive.
The novel corona virus has forced the government to seal the nation’s borders completely for 42 days, shutting businesses temporarily in an already slowing economy. But that has mainly hurt daily wage earners, contractual labourers and self-employed workers, among others, in the informal economy in rural and urban areas, pushing them out of jobs amid the nation’s high unemployment rate. There are high concerns for low-paid and low skilled informal workers in low and middle income countries, where the industries and services have high proportion of such informal workers, who account for 61% of the global workforce or 2 billion people and they lack any social protection. This sudden loss of livelihood would be horrifying for them. If we assume half of those who have lost their jobs are main or single earning family member of an average of 5-member family size (as per census 2011) households, around one-third (60 million households or 300 million people) of India’s people or households, could be facing a severe livelihood crisis and around 227 million households are in despair.
In this context, Kolkata’s 10-year old little girl AMAIRA GARG, daughter of our Directors Mr. Nishant Garg and Mrs. Richa Mohan Garg is running a crowdfunding campaign to help raise funds to help daily wage labourers and their families across KOLKATA during this COVID-19 lockdown. These labourers are without any jobs and their families are going hungry.
Just INR 1500 will fund an emergency 21-day food/ration pack, which will be provided to each of these families. This campaign aims to raise INR 60000 or more to help 40 families (each family would have approx 4 people, so the campaign targets to elevate the lives of 160 people) or more. This is being done by the NGO Responsenet.
You can support this campaign by clicking on the link above and donate with a Credit/Debit card, Paytm, UPI, Net-banking, etc. Foreign funding is allowed too. This campaign has 80G tax benefits. You will also get feedback on how funds were used.
Let’s come together and help those in need during these difficult times.
