SURAKSHA- Helping the Distress People of Sundarbans

To provide food to the people of Sundarbans like domestic helpers, daily labourers or small vendors who are back in villages due to lockdown. They are now jobless and homeless. They don’t have money to buy ration, the roads to their hometown is not even easily approachable. Continuous rainfall has led to worsen the situation. MUKTI is distributing food to near about 3500 families of the intervened areas with its own capacity and limited funds. But near about 5,000 families of intervened areas are directly attached to MUKTI who are not receiving any help under this worldwide pandemic. With the help of Give India we want to raise funds for 2000 families who need instant help.

MUKTI performed a ground level Door to Door survey and identified 20% of people of Sundarbans who needs immediate support and started distributing masks and food item support like rice, pulses, potatoes, onions, biscuits.

As, the cases in West Bengal are increasing day by day which is affecting the life of domestic helpers, daily labourers or small vendors to the max. MUKTI is targeting to raise funds for 2000 families with the help of Give India campaign, as for organization every member is like a family and no should sleep hungry.

MUKTI is not only providing food to the most affected families but also going to address the food problem of the affected families of intervened areas in long run by engaging them in our new program MUKTI Community Kitchen in which we are creating Mukti Community Shop (MCS) on wheels - a community business concept.

Till date total beneficiaries reached up to 3500. Our immediate target is to provide food to 2,000 families of Sundarbans, West Bengal who do not have access to any other outside help.

To make this approach more sustainable we have MCS as a pilot project to mitigate these adverse effects in the following: -

1-     Delivering food and essential items door to door. Only those wearing masks are entertained- This step of ours will lead to awareness generation amongst people and thus creating a habit of cleanliness and hygiene for long run.

2-     Operating as a zero-margin model - selling and buying price are same. Price of items are pre-decided by members of the local village community to ensure fairness- Thus leading to maximum utilization and no wastage of resources.

3-     Allowing transaction in kind- This innovative feature facilitates exchange of surplus items which can be part of home yield (farm products or poultry) with something else.

4-      Employment generation for local people who have been rendered jobless because of the current scenario.