Social isolation and physical distancing are important factors for stopping the spread of the virus and due to such restrictions, we’re witnessing a countrywide lack of awareness, panic-buying, lack of food and health-care facilities for labour class, migrant workers, community dwellers who are dependent on daily wage. The community members who live in remote areas have faced several constraints because of the geographical restraints that have been applied all over the country. The community members from these areas have faced multiple crisis’ amidst the lethal wave of the virus.
Through our community outreach trainers and counsellors, we were briefed about food distribution system and the challenges faced by the needy in accessing those facilities and its limitations. Our collaboration with donors led to providing our first food distribution in Katwaria Sarai through local coordination.
With the help of data collection, our crisis counsellors identified 11 families from the community of Mahipalpur, Rangpuri and Harijan Basti who were distressed due to the lack of basic supplies and were provided with dry food provisions.
Through our telephonic outreach to the coaches of our Sports for Empowering Girls Program in Gurgaon, we were informed that there is a serious lack of nutritious food for the children, especially for the girls in the area, and though the coaches have been trying their best to distribute nutritional supplements in an equal ratio there’s a larger lack of food provisions. In light of this, we collaboration with “Mera Parivaar”, an NGO based in Gurugram, and successfully started a cooked food distribution for 40 community members who were provided with cooked food packet meals, bananas, biscuits and water in Gurugram.
Our first male community member from the Sangam Vihar has been in constant contact with our crisis counsellors and making a list of families who lack amenities and cannot acquire them through government bodies because of the lack of identification cards. Babo Khan has held food distribution drives in the area of Sangam Vihar and has been training local members to apply for a Ration Card online, or use their Adhaar Cards for obtaining government mandated relief.
As individual members of this society, all of us have been doing our bit ranging from contributing to the local RWA’s, Gurudwaras, donations to the various organisations and continuing our food distribution in various areas well. While searching for organisations that we could partner in order to sustain the distribution, we partnered with Zomato’s Feeding India initiative and successfully provided 30 families with 10kg rice and 2kg pulses.
During our discussion and daily check-ins with the women participants of our Water Conservation project, we were informed about the lack of medical kits and supplies in their area. We are currently in discussion with GVNML to partner with our project and supply health-kits which includes sanitizers and masks.