Superheroes of the pandemic who are going beyond the call of duty to help fellow citizens battle Covid and state apathy

Meet Gurpreet Singh Rummy. For a living, he works as a contractor supplying fuel pumps to petrol stations in the National Capital Region. But not during these troubled times. He and his friends are busy running an ‘Oxygen Langar’ 24×7 in a gurudwara in Ghaziabad. They set it up in the last week of April to help Covid-positive patients who needed medical oxygen desperately but were unable to get it, either from the market or in hospitals. With the state machinery overwhelmed by the crisis and unable to meet the needs of Covid patients in the NCR, Rummy and his band of do-gooders—who call themselves Khalsa Help International—stepped in to make a difference. Patients can choose between being admitted to the 25-bed makeshift hospital at the gurudwara or refilling oxygen cylinders for home treatment. Thousands have received succour but Rummy’s philosophy remains simple—“Our first priority is to save lives. We don’t say no to anyone.”

Governments—both at the Centre and in the states—would do well to heed the principles Rummy is guided by. The hallmark of a good government is to put care for human life and the happiness of its people above all. Yet despite having the might, the mandate, the machinery and the money, the Indian State has repeatedly failed its citizens in the past two months in their hour of dire need. Thousands have died for want of oxygen or hospital beds, because the State failed to make adequate arrangements. While the black market flourishes, there is a criminal shortage of vital drugs to treat Covid. There is a long waiting line even to cremate or bury the dead. Of course, none of this takes away from the tremendous service India’s overstressed medical personnel are rendering to save millions of lives against daunting odds.

Not since Partition have we experienced such grief, despair and a lack of faith and trust in the government’s ability to save lives. Currently, 4,000 people a day, or three people every minute, are dying of the disease in this country. As on May 18, 283,248 people had died of Covid, with the second wave acc­ounting for more than half the number. The situation may be easing in cities like Mumbai and Delhi but is worsening in Bengaluru and Kolkata. Let’s not forget that at its peak the first wave had less than 100,000 new cases daily while in the second wave, despite talk of daily cases dipping, it still averages 250,000. Worse, there is a growing crisis in India’s rural interiors, where the virus has struck vast numbers down for the first time.

The government will find it difficult to explain away its apathy and follies by calling the pandemic a once-in-a-century calamity. Especially as the first wave had provided it ample opportunity to prepare for the worst. A government’s biggest failure is when it is of the people, by the people, but is not seen to be for the people. Even the higher judiciary has taken the government to task for its negligence. Hearing a slew of petitions on the subject on May 18, a bench of the Delhi High Court scathingly remarked, ‘Your officers are living in ivory towersdo they not see that so many deaths are taking place across the country it ( the pandemic) is raging like a fire but none of you are bothered. Every day you are castigated by each and every court in the land and you are still not awake.’

Thomas Hobbes, the founder of modern political philosophy, believed that a community needed to have a social contract for governance to prevent human life from becoming “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Yet the opposite has happened in India during the second wave. Despite the Indian State failing, committed citizens have stepped up and prevented the nation from descending into a Hobbesian nightmare. All across the country, thousands of individuals and non-governmental organisations have come together to help. Unlike the government, these ordinary individuals have used adversity as an opportunity to make extraordinary contributions that go far beyond the call of duty. In the nation’s darkest hour, these angels of change have come together in the mission that Mahatma Gandhi wanted the Indian State to accomplish—‘To wipe every tear from every eye.’ These, then, are the heroes of the new Republic of Self-Help.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, who united America, said, “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended on to meet any national crisis.” Truth may have been the first casualty in the pandemic, especially over the number of afflicted and dead, but that hasn’t dissuaded the self-help groups from discovering their inner strengths. What characterises their effort is not just their can-do spirit but also their innate humaneness. Many found the truth of what Saint Francis of Assisi once said, “Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” For instance, Sravasti Ghosh, an artist living in Kolkata, was troubled by the continuous wail of sirens and wanted to do something to help. “I felt there was no time to waste as people were dying every hour,” she says. So she put up a post on Facebook, offering a few meals a day to Covid patients in home isolation. The response was instant, her phone kept buzzing and from her meagre savings she started supplying 15 homes with food daily. Soon, well-wishers chipped in with funds and she now supplies 100 people with meals daily with the help of her parents. “Every small step counts,” Ghosh says, with quiet conviction.

In the following pages, we profile 31 individuals and non-governmental organisations that represent the much larger pool of self-help activists who are putting their shoulder to the wheel for the nation. They are helping in both small and big ways, by providing ambulances to transport the sick, answering requests by patients for oxygen and drugs, setting up makeshift hospitals, giving food to the needy and even helping cremate the dead, things that the State should have taken care of but has mostly failed to. These people have risen above religion, caste, politics and station to serve the needy in the ancient Indian spirit of ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’—the world is one family. What makes their work even nobler is that it comes at a grave risk to their lives and that of their families, given how virulent the virus is in the second wave. Their sources of inspiration and motivations are many. Jitendra Shinde, an autorickshaw driver in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, for instance, was inspired by a dialogue from the 2014 Salman Khan starrer Jai Ho: “If everybody helped three people and they in turn helped three more and the process continued, India could survive any calamity.” Shinde has used his auto to transport over 1,000 Covid patients in the past one month.

As the pandemic begins to ravage the Indian countryside, the Modi government seems to have finally acknowledged the magnitude of the challenge before it and the need to involve the community in a big way. Given the poor healthcare services in rural India, among the measures being advocated is community mobilisation by involving all stakeholders, including NGO activists and self-help groups. “Strength,” Gandhi once said, “does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” The government must show the will that these do-gooders have demonstrated to overcome arguably the worst crisis India has faced since Independence.