Two women serve food to the homeless people during lockdown in Vijayawada.
NEW DELHI: From Delhi to Bengaluru, Mumbai to Hyderabad, starvation is as much a threat as Covid-19 for daily wagers, many of them migrants. Concerned over their plight, a group of activists, NGOs and citizens are raising funds and distributing cooked food, utility packets, even providing cash, during the lockdown.
In Hyderabad, lawyer-turned-businessman Shaaz Mehmood has raised funds to provide ration for 5,000 such families. The 31-year-old, who runs a restaurant chain, has decided to help out after a Facebook exchange with a friend.
“We knew that the situation would only get worse as the lockdown is not going to end anytime soon. So we hurriedly put out a poster on our social media handles. The response has been overwhelming,” he told TOI.
In just 24 hours, he and his friends, Tanya Reddy and Deepti Kat, raised over Rs 25 lakh. They prepared packets of food and other utility items for the families. Among the donors were tennis player Sania Mirza, actor Abhishek Bachchan and filmmaker Farah Khan.
The trio, in as