opens its heart and hearth

IT professionals use soft kills for hard task

More on Covid-19

Out-of-work cooks rustle up meals for jobless

(With reports from Anuja Jaiswal & Arvind Chauhan, Prashant Jha, Uttara Verma, and Sandeep Rai)

Every day till April 14, shoe exporters in Agra will hand out 5,000 food packets to those who have lost their livelihoods because of the Covid-19 lockdown. “Many people spoke about it, the need to do something for those who have been left to fend for themselves. They are walking home, hungry, sometimes hundreds of km, without money. So we thought this is the least we could do,” said Puran Davar, a shoe exporter. The local administration and cops have pitched in. “Police officers are helping us distribute the food in slums and on highways, ensuring that social distancing norms are followed. The food is prepared in an automated kit chen following all hygiene norms,” Davar added.Realising that those forming backbone of the local economy are out of work, money and choices, a group of people in Nainital have vowed to do something about it. “We got in touch with grocery shop owners and asked them to put together essentials – rice, flour, pulses, milk powder, oil – in packs. Then we decided to make lists of families who need help,” said Rushir Sah, a restaurant owner.Nainital MLA Sanjeev Arya and municipal members spread out and spoke to people across the city about those in need. They identified 1,000 such families. “Some of them are from UP, some from Bihar West Bengal . There are many daily wagers from Nepal too. They have no food, no money and no way of getting home. We had to help them,” Rushir Sah, a restaurant owner said. Schools joined in. And the town’s hotel association. Till now, the initiative has received Rs 1.5 lakh in donations. “We need Rs 4 lakh for the first batch of essential items packs,” Sah said. The deliveries will begin in a day or two.Kishore Kumar Mamidi, a software engineer in Hyderabad, steps out at 6am, going street to street, trying to convince people to maintain “social distance”. The problem areas, he said, are ATM and medical shops. As the Covid-19 outbreak unfolded, Cyberabad Police started engaging volunteers. Kishore volunteers between 6am and 1pm. “When I get back I don’t go anywhere near a family member without a mask. Must practise what I preach,” the 30-year-old said. Another software professional Hareesh Jayini has been manning the checkpost at Usha Mullapadi junction. “We are checking permits to ensure no one is on the roads without a valid reason,” he said.Mohd Shakeel had not been getting any work for a few weeks. “Cooks like us, who work independently, have been out of work,” he said. But when he thought of the thousands of homeless on the streets of Meerut, he knew what he had to do. So he and six other cooks started a delivery van, distributing food to some 250 people a day. “Our one condition is that people must observe social distancing,” said one team member.