Since the beginning of this week, every day at 2 in the afternoon, Kiran Padma Ravi steps out of his house in Hyderabad to go to the grocer. The grocer knows him quite well. He hands Kiran two loaves of bread that he had saved for him. He then stops at the local vegetable store to pick up a few vegetables. The shopkeeper picks out the best vegetables and sells it to Kiran at a discounted rate. He then goes home and by around 5.30 in the evening, starts making sandwiches - enough to feed 60 people. With these sandwiches, he steps out of his house again, at 7 pm to a nearby slum. On the way, he stops by at a fruit stall, where the owner gives him bananas that are as fresh as can be.
These sandwiches and bananas then feed around 60 labourers, maids and slum dwellers in Hyderabad, who are unemployed since the beginning of the lockdown and have no means to afford proper meals every day. Would it surprise you if we tell you that Kiran is a 19-year-old BTech student who does all of it all by himself? "It takes me around two hours to cook these meals," says Kiran. "The initial plan was to use my pocket-money to fund these meals, but then, some of my friends also pitched in. Now, we have started an ImpactGuru crowdfunding campaign too," he says.
Kiran admits that he did not know any of the labourers that he feeds now before the lockdown began. "I had anticipated that this will occur during the lockdown. So, I went around asking the grocers and a few restaurant owners if they knew people who are in need of food. That is how I found these people," he says. "I was also inspired by Aswathy Senan, a researcher from Delhi, who took up a similar project. I got in touch with her to find out how things are done," he says.
Kiran tells us how a lot of the labourers lost their livelihood overnight, when the lockdown was announced. "Most of them are daily wage labourers. When the lockdown was announced, their employers had told them that they do not have to come to work from the next day. Now they had no way to go home or survive here in Hyderabad," says Kiran. "Some of them get breakfast and lunch from the panchayats. But that isn't the case with everyone. So, I make sure that the people who haven't had anything else throughout the day gets a few extra sandwiches," he says.
You can support his fundraiser here: http://impactgu.ru/
