Citizens care: How volunteers teamed up to feed the hungry

Until a month back, Qais Khan, 32, was just another guy-next-door to most in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar. Today, 1,500 families look up to him with hopes in their eyes. And these are mostly strangers he had never met before.

Right after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown in March, Khan, a self-employed interior designer, had anticipated the humanitarian crisis that eventually spilled out onto the streets in the form of unending queues of hungry people waiting to collect food.

His first reaction was to crowdsource funds from within his locality in Shaheen Bagh. He then formed a citizen’s forum called ‘United for Humanity’.

“While we knew the problem was big, our reach was limited. So, we first reached out to the poor in our own area and identified about 800 people,” Khan says.

Within a week, word spread about their initiative and requests started to pour in from different parts of Delhi.

While they did entertain some of the requests, including from an Afghani settlement in the city, Khan and his team could not attend to many others from far off places.

And yet they doubled the size of the ration packets. In the past four weeks, they have distributed more than 4,500 ration kits to about 1,500 families, Khan claims. Each pack contained rice, channa, pulses, potato, onion and oil worth ₹700. In between, they also managed to distribute masks and sanitisers.

Volunteers/NGOs feeding across cities

As the lockdown was extended, cities across India depended on people like Khan rising to the occasion. The dependence on their altruism became indispensable as the government failed to reach out to the hundreds and thousands of poor and migrant workers stuck in cities without food and wages.

In Bangalore, Amanullah Khan, 48, a social worker and a vegetable shop owner realised the severity of the crisis within two days of the lockdown.

Khan owns a shop in Krishna Rajendra (KR) market, one of the largest wholesale markets for vegetables and fruits in Bangalore. The area is a commercial hub and with traders dealing in different commodities.

Many migrants, mostly from north India, live in the vicinity and work in the wholesale shops. Khan tells The Federal that about 6-10 people live in a 10×10 ft room and their daily meals are dependent on their daily wages.

“They are not able to go home and don’t have any work. As long as their food and shelter is taken care of, they’ll be protected. And that’s what we are trying to address,” Khan says.

Khan and his friend Asif Pasha, who sells gas stoves in KR Market, serve nearly 600 migrant workers and people stranded outside government hospitals in the city.

In Guwahati, 26-year-old Dhruv Arya started with feeding 400 people every day.

A restaurateur, Arya quickly turned his eatery into a community kitchen to feed the hungry in Guwahati.

Today, he and his team of volunteers hand out nearly 4,000 packets of food (khichdi) every day in and around Guwahati and Byrnihat along the borders in Meghalaya.

Following his uncle’s idea to feed the poor, Ayra joined hands with like-minded people and grassroots organisations to help with his plan.

“A lot of people were willing to do something. But they either didn’t have the platform, or didn’t know where to start from. So, we asked a few like-minded people to join us and volunteer so that we could increase our reach,” Arya says.

Guwahati witnessed partial lockdown a week ahead of the nationwide lockdown announced by the Prime Minister on March 24. Arya believes that many outsiders moved out in the meantime and not many migrant labourers have been stranded in Guwahati, unlike in the rest of India.

However, he says many of those they feed are urban poor in the unorganised sectors like vegetable vendors, rickshaw-pullers, shop owners and even beggars.

“These are the people who live on a hand-to-mouth budget. In Guwahati alone, there are 8,000-10,000 rickshaw-pullers. They are the most affected,” Arya says.

Mapping the poor

Khan, the interior designer in Delhi, formed a citizen’s collective with 20 volunteers from the city and went around the streets to map the poor and those in need. After assessing their needs, the team started distributing ration kits bought with the crowdsourced money. He, along with other volunteers, took turns to deliver the ration to those the government failed to reach out to.

For Richa Jairaj, another Delhi-based professional working in the development sector, her citizens’ collective formed during the riots of February further extended its work to help feed the needy.

Jairaj, along with a few PhD students and lawyers, had done a fair amount of survey in riot-hit Northeast Delhi to assess the extent of damage to properties and livelihood of the victims.

Besides helping the victims find a roof over their heads, they also helped them rebuild small businesses.

They, however, were forced to stall their work in the wake of the coronavirus and the lockdown. But the migrant workers’ plight made them realise there was no time to sit back.

Jairaj and her friends started a community kitchen to serve cooked food to migrants and those stranded in the city, with a capacity to feed 750 people daily.

“Somehow the government wanted to get rid of these people who were trying to walk back to their villages in neighbouring states. While the government sealed the borders, these migrant workers were stuck here without food,” she says.

“We managed everything through crowdsourced money.”

She and her team initially distributed 800 packets of food every day in areas like Britannia Chowk, Wazirpur and DU North Campus.

About 23 days into the lockdown, with two other community kitchens run by volunteers coming to help, together they were reaching out to 2,400 people in the city.

With the temperature soaring by the day (32-36 degrees Celsius) in the first two weeks of April, Richa says it was getting difficult for volunteers to spend long hours distributing food. So they started to move towards distribution of ration kits, instead of cooked food. Also, cooked food gets easily spoiled when the temperature is high.

In Guwahati, Arya and his team joined hands with Robin Hood Army, a zero-funds organisation that works to get surplus food from restaurants for the less fortunate. Child Friendly Guwahati (CFG), which has experience of working with the poor in urban limits, too lent a helping hand.

“They already had an idea as to where to find these people. So it became easy for us,” he says.

Even as the governments failed to address the problem of feeding the poor and migrant workers stranded all across, Arya believes it is not possible for the government to look after everything.

“If the government were to do it alone, trust me, many people would have died of hunger,” Arya says.

Professor Akhilesh Chandra Pandey of Allahabad University believes technology has a huge role to play in helping NGOs and volunteer groups connect with people and raise money through applications like Facebook and WhatsApp and payment services like Google Pay, PhonePe and PayTM.

Has the government done enough?

In the absence of NGOs/volunteer groups, the state and the market could collapse in times of crisis situations like this, says D Rajasekhar, professor and head of Centre for Decentralisation and Development at Institute of Social and Economic Change.

What happened in Mumbai (where hundreds of migrants gathered at the Bandra railway station to go home) is a case in point, he adds.

Rajasekhar hopes the government has now realised it needs to coexist with NGOs.

“They (government) had a very myopic view of the functioning of NGOs,” he adds, expressing concerns with the present government’s way of handling NGOs.

“In its first term, the NDA government hunted down NGOs and called them ‘anti-nationals’ and alleged that they promoted certain religious growth,” Rajasekhar says.

According to a reply by the Home Ministry in the Lok Sabha, registration of more than 14,800 associations has been cancelled alleging violations as per Foreign Contributions Regulations Act (FCRA), 2010. Besides these, several small NGOs have wound up operations. There is no official estimate on the number of NGO shut in recent years.

Earlier, he added, NGOs were largely dependent on foreign funds and government projects besides public contribution and CSR funds. “But now the first two have almost dried up and CSR funds reach only bigger NGOs, and not grassroots organisations that work in rural areas.”

He opines that the government should make it easier for NGOs to raise funds and work with grassroots organisations in identifying and distributing government benefits.

How long can altruism serve

Both Amanullah Khan and Arya think they can continue to feed people for another one month. But beyond that it would be difficult and some kind of assistance might help the NGOs and volunteer groups.

“We can feed people for one more month. But if it continues, it would be helpful if the government gives us rice and dal at subsidised rates, or even free if possible,” Arya says.

Most of the volunteer groups have been raising funds through crowdsourcing. “There are people who want to help but they too are staring at job loss and the slowing down of the economy,” says Jairaj.

As the lockdown was extended, things have already started to get worse, she adds.

“Funds are drying up. We are private citizens. It is the job of the government to take care of all its citizens, both rich and poor. Those in power should not become complacent just because some citizens have taken upon themselves to help these people.”

(This story is part of a series on frontline personnel in the fight against COVID-19. You can read the other stories here)