India Against Corona (IAC) - 2020

Daily wage earners, slum residents and the impoverished community lost their livelihood due to the nationwide lockdown, and facing money shortage were not able to stockpile ration for the entire lockdown period. A significant portion of such workers are migrants, and are not included in the Public Distribution System (PDS), and are underserved by the government. Such scarcity is also being seen in villages where the supply chains have completely come to a stand-still with links severed from the neighboring town / city. The families of daily wage earners in the cities are quickly running out of ration, and finding it difficult to survive the lockdown. This situation is now magnified with the lockdown extended for another 15 days, until May 3, 2020. 

TYCIA, along with its network of enablers (coordinators) and volunteers under India Against Corona (IAC) initiative, are trying to identify families who are running out of ration, collating their request on ration requirement, verifying the sanctity of such requirement, mobilizing personal funds and donation, and then providing ration to the people in need. Each ration kit is worth INR600.

We are heavily leveraging technology through the website (www.indiagainstcorona.com) to crowd-source information about daily wage earners, who are in desperate need of ration. People in need / any individual can directly engage and send the request either by uploading a photograph, excel, word or pdf document, which contains the requirements of people in need on the website.

The website is being enhanced to serve dual purpose of supporting enablers to monitor and execute situations on the ground, and help the donors to directly provide support to the listed people in need.

In summary, we wish to:

• Identify beneficiaries facing acute shortage of ration – not under PDS or CSO support
• Promote an e-Platform to support enablers and volunteers to reach out to the beneficiaries.
• Provide immediate relief either by providing ration or monetary relief to enable purchase of ration

Since the inception, our team with the help of 15 enablers and 30 volunteers, has already supported 13,500 families with ration kits in 16 districts across 4 states.

Based on our contribution on the ground within such communities, we have started to receive thousands of new requests.The challenge remains where resources of our networks (personal or donations) are getting saturated and more than 2,500 requests are still pending. 

We are also observing a steep rise in urgent requests, where the remaining ration is for only 1-3 days. We are prioritizing such requests from the families due to the urgency, but we are facing an uphill task to complete such requests under constrained resources.

Hence, we are seeking funds from GiveIndia to support our operations. The funds will be used to ensure that we can provide logistics support to the enablers who are working on the ground and to enhance e-Platform where enablers and the beneficiaries can reach simultaneously.

Based on our evolving experience and the escalating situation, we foresee 30-35 more enablers joining our network and we are confident to swiftly expand our base to support 25,000 families with ~1,00,000 beneficiaries if we are able to secure funds.