India is running out of oxygen and shortage of oxygen supply has caused deaths in many places. I’ll not get into WHY’s, why there’s a shortage, as we are already late to think about that. The question of the hour is WHAT, what can we do? What is the need of the hour, what role can we play to help? You and I, with our smartphones in our hands and along with scrolling social media: Facebook, Instagram, or news and can also do our bit in this situation.
The whole purpose of this writing is to motivate you and share some really easy/handy ways to be helpful in this crisis situation.
I’ll try to cover the following topics in this:
How can we easily make donations?
Along with social media, we use apps like Zomato, Paytm, Cred as well.
These apps have started different initiatives to get donations by very easy methods and they have partnered with various healthcare fundraising platforms like Milaap to procure and distribute oxygen concentrators in the country.
Here’s Deepinder Goyal (Founder of Zomato) announcing the Zomato initiative.
Zomato Feeding India, our not-for-profit has kickstarted the “Help Save My India” endeavour today in association with @delhivery to source oxygen concentrators and related supplies to help hospitals and families in need. pic.twitter.com/60kBYZMrrd
— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) April 25, 2021
Here’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma(Founder of Paytm) announcing the Paytm initiative.
We have sourced supplies for Oxygen concentrators of different sizes while we place the order using our own money. We want you to join hands in solving #OxygenShortage .
— Vijay Shekhar Sharma (@vijayshekhar) April 25, 2021
Donate here https://t.co/YlBF6S4c2p and we will match your contribution and use it to source OCs.
Also, do RT
Here’s Kunal Shah(Founder of Cred) announcing the Cred initiative.
Update: CRED members can now donate CRED coins towards buying oxygen concentrators for hospitals, healthcare orgs across India. With a goal of 1 billion litres, we’ve partnered with Milaap to ensure contributions reach hospitals in need.
— Kunal Shah (@kunalb11) April 26, 2021
Why do we need to make these donations?
Yesterday night I saw Kunal Shah’s tweet and thought it may be a good idea to donate my cred coins. However, I was curious to know how much money I’ve donated for this cause, I’ve done some maths. Let’s see.
So I’ll take my example, In Cred, I’ve burnt 2,00,000 Coins, So I have contributed 20,000 Liters of Oxygen towards the cause, i.e. purchase of concentrators and to be deployed across various facilities, and hospitals.
The underlying value of every coin is in rupee denomination (every point has a rupee value), which Cred and Milaap will use to purchase/organize concentrators that will service the target requirement of 1 Billion Liters of oxygen for patients across the country.
An oxygen supported hospitalized person needs 60 litres of Oxygen per minute, makes it 3600 litres per hour.
Oxygen would be given in the form of O² Concentrators.
Assuming O² concentrator cost = Rs. 60000
Production from 1 Concentrator = 5Litre per minute
Lifetime = 5 years (approx)
Total Lifetime production = 13,140,000Litre (Best Case Scenario)
Cost of 1 litre oxygen = Rs. 0.004566
So if I Donated 20,000 litre oxygen from my 2,00,000 Cred Points, In rupees= Rs. 91.32 ( i.e.~ Rs. 100)
This has purely been done to motivate people to improve their contribution through other mediums like Zomato, Paytm, and many more.
Since I realized that I've donated only Rs. 100 which is negligible, So I decided to do my bit and this time decided to do it properly.
So then I've used Paytm and Zomato for donation. Pretty easy to use and there're no gimmicks like Cred
Once you’ll donate on Paytm you’ll get this sweet receipt.
Once you’ll donate on Zomato you’ll get this sweet receipt.
How I think about these donations and helping people as if it's just a way of thanking God for keeping my family safe.❤️
And I'm willing to donate my time as well. If you're going though Emotional/Mental stress/problems and you think I can help you in that. Feel free to contact me.
P.S. Contributions made for the Oxygen for India are not exempted from income tax. (80G)
I am thankful for what Cred has delivered through this excellent initiative. It has definitely motivated people to come together and contribute to the cause.
Given we still don’t know the magnitude, with no exact numbers of the afflicted patients and families, what we grapple with is enormous. The numbers across slums, tier 3,4 cities, in villages is massively under-reported. The most effort by Govt functionaries is to salvage the perception of a “Good Governance” by the current leadership. A large part of leadership is in denial to address the gravity of the issues.
One can imagine the magnitude of the problem with the fact that we have over 6 lakh villages, most of these villages do not have basic amenities, and healthcare is just out of question. With some of the recent events, this epidemic has reached the smallest of hamlets.
The medical infrastructure across cities has collapsed, and the situation is grim. Just by contributing through one platform, and some coins is not enough. It is important we step up and contribute towards some of the other initiatives that are trying to make things easy for the ones suffering.
In order to help those in need, some good samaritans have launched portals and apps comprising details of all resources, including available beds, ventilators, oxygen cylinders, remdesivir medication, and other related information.
Sprinklr Covid Resources Dashboard
https://covidresources.netlify.app
http://instagram.com/covidaidresources
https://covid.quackerychronicle.com
City/State wise resources:
Free physiotherapy for COVID patients
Thanks for reading. Do share if you think this can be helpful to someone or can motivate someone to help in this situation. See you in next one. Stay safe.
