COVID RELIEF – Karuna Ministries

Pandemic Response

The deadly second wave of Covid-19 in India is causing horrendous suffering, deaths, and hunger. Please help Karuna provide basic needs of food and medicine. Thanks.

As you know well, the second wave of the Covid-19 virus is spreading like a wildfire in India. As the following article points out, besides the immediate death and suffering, the pandemic is producing a tsunami of unemployment, inflation, and hunger. The marginalized, the poorest of the poor in our society, have to bear the brunt of this disaster. At Karuna, our mission is to bring a ray of hope to the suffering by providing not only the Gospel of hope in words, but also offering them a kit of staple food such as rice, wheat flour, cooking oil, and basic items needed to survive. We are also supplying medicines to those who cannot afford it. The need is urgent. Your contribution will make a huge difference today.

For just $25 per week you could help feed a whole family.

For $30 you could supply an oximeter and a thermometer set to help monitor oxygen level and fever at home.

If you’ve any questions, please email us today: karuna.compassion@gmail.com.

Now hunger stalks India as country’s Covid crisis deepens - By Joe Wallen

Unable to keep up with the soaring number of deaths, mass cremations are taking place in parking lots and others are having to keep the bodies of their loved ones in their homes.

But beneath the headlines a wider hunger crisis is building, one that if left unchecked could start to engulf large parts of the country. Approximately 90 per cent of India’s 500 million-strong workforce are employed informally, living hand to mouth, day to to day.

A draconian two-month lockdown from March to June last year pushed an estimated 400 million Indians into further poverty and resulted in around 32 million Indians dropping out of the country’s burgeoning middle-class.

Thousands of them – like the woman in front of me last night – are now going hungry. The latest surge in the virus means India’s informal workforce is once again on the brink.

“A bulk of the livelihoods in urban India depend on working on the streets and in the informal sector, whether in vending or doing a small job, like transporting goods,” says Professor Amita Bhide, Dean of School of Habitat Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. “People have not recovered financially from last year’s losses and again things are becoming very difficult.”

The evidence is everywhere. In just a five-minute journey to my nearest supermarket, I pass dozens of people looking for food. Over the last two weeks, the pavements have suddenly filled with newly unemployed workers and their families, hands outstretched, begging for crumbs and money.

Naushad Ansari, 25, who lost his job as a food delivery driver when Mumbai went into lockdown two weeks ago approaches me at the traffic lights: “I am on the streets begging because we hope the vehicle drivers will spare us some money. No one is giving us work and we have no other option. There are six of us eating just one meal of rice each day”, he explains. Mr Ansari is not alone. Akshaya Patra, an NGO in Mumbai, said there has been a 50 per cent increase in people requesting food aid in the city since the latest lockdown began.

Taken from: Joe Wallen, India Correspondent in Mumbai for the Telegraph UK. Read the full article here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/indians-starve-as-covid-crisis-deepens/