“Ekya Foundation”, founded in 2021 amidst the turmoil created by the covid 19 pandemic aims to provide free meals for those who face difficulty feeding themselves and their families and have decreased access to nutritious meals daily. Thanks to the help and support we have received from our team and donors, we have been able to raise resources from more than 9,50,000 donors through crowd funding, helping us aid more than 1,028,700 people. This led us to work in 7 other locations within India (Chandigarh, Jharkhand, Mumbai, Nagaon, New Delhi, Saharanpur and Tinsukia) excluding Kolkata where our NGO was founded.

The “Mega Drive” was completely organized and carried out entirely by our Ekya team, making the scale of the drive an even bigger accomplishment for us. Our usual drive locations are outside hospitals, where we hope to provide an extra layer of comfort for the patients and their other loved ones, to help those in need. We do this by distributing free meals and snacks to the families of the patients outside.

Our largest drive yet, the Mega Drive was organized in the Taratala slums in Kolkata on the 16th of July this year (2023). The Taratala slums from our knowledge consist of more than 5000 houses stretching over quite a vast distance. We could observe the conditions of the area, where at times up to 15 people were staying in a single hut with only 1-2 working members to provide for all of them. Even individuals who had relatively better living conditions seemed to have lost hope. This was found out through research, after talking with the community to help and comfort these individuals. We had resource and development interns on our team who spoke to the residents.

We chose to provide ration in Taratala for this drive since we recognized the dire need and found ourselves capable of providing them with these resources. This led to the idea of ration distribution of raw materials to prepare multiple meals for themselves and not just help them with one meal relief. The people were quite welcoming considering some of them already knew us from previous drives. Out of everybody who came, there was a mix of residents who were very vocal about the issues they faced and hesitant residents. The main issue they voiced was how they had difficulty accessing the facilities that were being offered to them by the government due to illiteracy and lack of understanding or awareness of the facilities. Another concern amongst them was the upcoming monsoon season and the flooding of houses that would take place due to this, causing stress and vulnerability to a lot of the community members.

Ration details: We managed to collect over 1000 kgs of ration and create more than 2000 packets of food in the span of a few days with the help of our amazing team and our volunteers, who distributed everything in 2 hours on the day of the drive. This drive helped us set a new record for our biggest drive. We provided them with soya, rice, dal, muri, and sharbat. These necessities were appreciated by all of the attending families as they would not finish them at once and would last them for multiple meals.

Quite a few of the families brought their children, also children who were outside with their friends also showed up either due to curiosity or to help secure rations for their respective families.

This drive was a step forward from what we were able to do up till now as the idea of providing rations instead of meals gave the involved community members not just a sense of relief but also control since they would decide what use they put the rations too. Beyond that, we also found that the process of preparing for the drive was a great way for the volunteers to bond with each other and help them feel more connected to our mission. Our team put in their time and effort not only on the day of the drive but also before to ensure everything was packaged into the right quantities under clean and hygienic conditions.

To conclude we feel very proud of all our accomplishments so far and we use every opportunity we get to learn how to better implement our ideas and contribute more to our mission. We want to thank everyone who contributed to making this drive possible.

~ By Riya Doshi and Roma Tilkam

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