During the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, several facets have come to the fore in India’s fight against the deadly virus. NGO ActionAid and its Executive Director Sandeep Chachra have been relentlessly pursuing the humanitarian cause and have set a precedent in serving people.
Q. Tell us about the work you have done during the pandemic?
A. Our extended network, which comprises ActionAid teams across 24 States and two Union Territories, co-ordinators placed in over 100 districts, grassroots-based civil society organisations, and community-based volunteers and activists, and our strong links with district administrations, enabled us to provide much-needed support to over 7.7 million people in the first Covid wave. This included ration kits, cooked food, and sanitation materials. In the second wave, the health aspects and medical support are high on the needs of people, besides economic support. People have faced double jeopardy, for which they have got little succour and support from the government.
We started awareness drives through tempos and autos in 20 states and UTs to inform communities about Covid-appropriate behaviour and to promote vaccinations. We have set up Covid helplines in 12 states and helpdesks through that we have been helping affected persons and their families with updated accurate information including the availability of medicines, hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, and in some cases telemedical consultation. By the third week of May 2021, we were running 71 helpdesks across 16 states and two UTs. We are working to strengthen medical services by providing volunteers to run Covid Care Centres and arrange supplies and equipment at these centres and public hospitals. With support from various corporates and others such as Give India, we will be strengthening efforts of Primary Health Care Centres and Community Health Care Centres in 100 districts in 15 states through the provision of several thousand oxygen concentrators. We are now setting up Covid Care Wards for children in two states, and plan to expand this to five. We have set up community kitchens and are also providing free cooked meals in several Indian cities. With regards to rations, we are focussing our first outreach to vulnerable communities such as refugees, transgenders, families of domestic workers, and all informal workers out of work, slum populations, children in difficult circumstances, tribals etc.
We have also been providing inputs to Union and state governments on the kind of policies they need to set up to help vulnerable communities cope with the crisis and respond to their needs. We make efforts to bring to the public discourse challenges being faced by vulnerable communities and programme policy solutions to mitigate their precarity through grounded participatory researches. The impact of the pandemic is not short term. Whenever this wave abates, apart from preparing for the third wave, a green recovery process is needed to address recovery from the perspective marginalise. This can be done by creating sustainable rural and urban livelihoods, green jobs, and social security for workers in villages and towns; by taking steps to ensure universal, responsive, free, and quality public services particularly in health and education; by ensuring support to children, who are out of education, don’t drop out; by ensuring protection to women so that their work participation rates don’t drop even lower and unpaid care work at home is shared equally and so on.
Q. What has kept the spark in you alive to continue working with ActionAid?
A. ActionAid has amazing people in its teams and the ones it works with. They are committed, driven, reflective, and passionate in their pursuit of equality and justice. It is endlessly inspiring to be leading this organisation, with the guidance of a wonderful governing board and assembly. We have been blessed to have friendships, associations, partnerships, and solidarity with individual change-makers, social formations and movements, philanthropists, and people in administration and governance who engage in social development to create an ecosystem of hope and belief.
The NGO gives space to all those who stand to undo structures and historical processes of oppression —patriarchy, caste, inequality, and injustice with a belief in welfare and social advancement, brings many, like me to embrace it.
In the years that I’ve worked here, I’m sharing few examples of the work we been involved in:
Homeless: starting 2001 putting it on the national agenda to build formations
Manual scavenging: starting late 90s and continuously work on it to support and contribute to developing national campaigns and formations.
Triple Talaq: to build grounded momentum for rights of Muslim women.
De-notified communities and extremely vulnerable workers. Such crucial contributions inspire several people and keep us moving.
Q. What are the future plans of ActionAid in terms of capacity build-up?
A. Building resilience in the communities we are working with has been our long-term aim for decades since we adopted the rights-based approach in the 1990s. In the latest strategy approach that we adopted in 2019, we had expanded our rights-based approach in two directions, we moved strongly towards collective and community-based rights not remaining limited to individual rights, and we expanded the realm of our engagements beyond rights to the question of social justice as well as understood the need to move towards engaging with issues of ecological justice. The pandemic has strengthened our effort to remain more closely rooted with vulnerable communities, and beyond the project mode. Thus, we have resolved to play a more active role in district-level engagements with vulnerable communities to make a real difference in questions of social and ecological justice in the lives of wider expanses of populations. We recognise that this calls for both rooted actions and campaign mode engagements with people to build and strengthen their collective agency for social progress, justice and equality.
The pandemic has taught us all the importance of gender-responsive, free, and universal public services particularly in areas of health, sanitation, and education. We look forward to engaging more effectively in securing universal, free, and quality health, water, and sanitation services for all as a step to seek and contribute to building a participatory democracy.