There’s a very popular saying

Jaako raakhe saaiyan maar sake na koi
Baal na baank kar sake jo jag beri hoy!!!

The translation for the first part of the above is “the one saved by God cannot be killed by anyone!!!”

Quite literally, no matter how difficult the situation is, if it is one’s lucky day, no force or pandemic can take those blessings away from you.

When we started with these drives, there was one area we always felt would need to get covered to address the people’s basic needs, but considering its sheer size, we could never muster the courage to undertake one such drive. Finally, we decided to have a go for two reasons:

A. We could not locate any other community this time which we are generally comfortable catering to on account of its size.

B. The community I just talked about had to get catered to somehow someday (given on Google maps below).

16th May 2021: Pochunpur village, Dwarka

One day prior, I visited this place in the evening to look out for daily wage workers, constriction workers in need, the maids who have been out of job or not paid because of banned entries in societies, the car drivers/cleaners etc. After having surveyed the area and talked to few rickshaw pullers and other local people, I was informed there is a community of Bengali workers living in shanties/slum in Pochunpur. I went to this place and talked to the people here. There were few individuals like Mujeeb, Mushtaq, Siddique, Anwar who came forward to talk to me. They told me that most of them are daily wagers and living with mere/suppressed earnings or no earnings at all after the advent of Covid. There were two rows of shanties here which comprised of 37 families in one and 24 in another. I did not get the courage to look at the area by going in too far once entered through the gate.

Here’s the list of people I could note down living in these two rows in this locality:

Next morning, on 16th May 2021, I took Minal and another good samaritan, Vikas Saini (coincidently living in the our society) to the same place next day. I wanted them to also have a look at the conditions of the people, and have a validation done for my research/survey.

Both Minal and I appreciate the help extended by Vikas in this initiative who not just worked out the plan with us for execution to such large set of people, but also helped in funding the same, and carrying out the operations. He was kind enough to ensure no gathering/bunching up of people near me while I was busy distributing the supplies.

And last but not the least, the entire drive had a cost of Rs. 68625 which was funded by Sanjeev, Krishna Tayiji, Madhur, Vikas, Gajraj, us, and Khevna.

Here’s the entire story being played in form of pictures:

A warm thank you to all of you, without you, this wouldn’t have been possible. Request everyone to stay safe and stay at home. Until then, Goodbye!