“The demand for oxygen cylinders has drastically shot up in the last three months ever since the second wave hit. This year, I had got a call where a person had asked for an oxygen concentrator for her sick husband. That’s when it struck me to provide oxygen cylinders with the help of the Doctors and Volunteers in my circle. Ever since we have been buying cylinders through donations and providing them to the hospitals. We are also running two oxygen concentrators (10 litres) to Home quarantine patients in Hyderabad with the kind donation of Mr Vikram.
I have also worked as a manager at Saksham Covid Care hospital for two months with the motive to serve the Covid 19 patients. Not only that, we have been providing Online counselling services to the home quarantined covid patients through the kind service of Dr Veena Ji.
I came to Hyderabad to pursue my Engineering. I started as a part-time worker for an outdoor catering company to make the ends meet. Working there as a catering boy and simultaneously managing my college made me realise a lot of things in life, especially the true meaning of Hunger. That’s when I decided to start a public action initiative called Don’t Waste Food where we bring the leftover to the poor and needy by collecting the leftover Hygienic food from Restaurants, Marriage Halls, etc.
Though we faced a lot of setbacks when we initially began, we stuck to it and gathered friends who are donors and volunteers and went to distribute it among the people on the streets.
Since the inception of our program, we have been able to feed nearly 1,500 – 2,000 people every day through our campaigns. Now because of the current Covid situation, we have been donating food, masks to the needy. The latest task I have undertaken is working in a Covid hospital and also trying to coordinate with the volunteers to spread our food initiative across all the states of the country.
As the things are slowly getting back to normal, it’s time for every one of us to not repeat the same mistake like we did last year so that we can avoid the intensity of the third wave.”