Covid Task Force:

Covid Task Force, Eco Club was initiated on 22nd April by Rajesh Kumar, student at Teri SAS and has been involved in Covid relief since then. During the first wave in March 2020, we had come up with “Feed the Animals Challenge” and so when the second wave approached, we were willing to do our bit in serving humanity. During this time, we provided personally verified leads to thousands of people and have volunteers working pan India, across different age, professions or regions. We expanded from a team of just 8 students to an enormous group of 400+ volunteers who are currently working in multiple cities of India including Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Punjab, Assam, Kolkata and Dehradun. When the second wave was at its peak, we worked 24*7 and fulfilled various requirements of oxygen cylinders, hospital beds, medicines, blood and plasma.

This became doable because we had strong collaborative support from the Krantii NGO as well as Dhara For Sustaining Life (with approx. 1200 members). Through our panel of legal counselors, clinical psychologists and medical practitioners, we were able to cater to the needs of hundreds of patients and their caretakers. We were not only providing them with the accurate information at those misleading times, but also counseled them while in distress and kept them updated with the latest covid precautions and recovery measures. We also collaborated with TISS for mutual sharing of the covid resources database. Former Ms. India, Srishti Rana and a trending instagram handle @the.master.facts have supported us as our outreach partners and helped in promoting our various awareness posts on social media platforms.

Some SOS cases highlights:

We were able to counsel and provide a bed to a patient in Hissar who had no facility available and at a time when no hospital was admitting him. We used our personal contacts to meet the requirement of a Delhi patient in Meerut. There was another case wherein we provided a confirmed ICU bed to a pregnant woman in Noida region.

Social media campaigns:

• Gyan Mat Do Plasma Do: We led this awareness campaign pan India under the All India Alliance group. It was later dropped as per the ICMR guidelines.
• Positive notes campaign: This is one of our most successful campaigns wherein our volunteers created short video and audio messages for the covid patients to cheer them up while they were surrounded by the morbidity of a covid ward. It reminded them of how much they mean to us and how impatiently we've been waiting for them to get back home. This campaign served a dual purpose of subconsciously supporting the caretakers that they are not alone and we're here for them.
• CTF raised awareness regarding the black marketing of covid medicines and resources and how to procure them when hospitals deny to do that for you.
• #DontWaitVaccinate is our most recent campaign wherein we share the stories and appreciate people who get vaccinated in order to motivate others to do the same. This campaign is followed by "Blood donation before Vaccination'' campaign which aims to make people aware about the sharply increasing demand for blood which would worsen in the future, considering that blood donation is not possible after vaccination.

Outcomes:

• We were invited by the Red FM team to share about our work and an interview with our representative head, Rajesh, was aired on their channel.
• Rajesh’s contact number went viral on Twitter for helping people find resources and leads on an immediate basis. We used to get a call every single minute for the 4 days and even when we missed some of those calls, we made sure that we reverted back.
• We were invited as a panelist in the Sensitization training seminar jointly organized by TERI SAS and National Institute of Disaster Management on the 12th of June where we got the chance to talk about our learnings and what things need to be considered if there arises a similar situation.
• CTF, with the support of TERI SAS and under the guidance of Prof. Manipadma Dutta has helped to initiate a student's welfare fund in the university to help the students who've faced financial crunch during the second wave or have lost their breadwinners to covid.