Kolkata students come together to serve Covid patients, pay bills for those in dire straits

KOLKATA: If you think all board students are traumatized these days and worried over their future, you may be wrong. Some of these students are working round the clock, in between tuitions and revising their Plus II syllabi, to help Covid patients.
Several students of various city schools are part of an initiative to resource oxygen, medicines, delivering food and essentials and organising blood and plasma donations for Covid patients.They are also raising money to pay hospital bills of those who are in dire straits. Teenagers Anumit Lahiri, Arth Agarwal, due to appear for their Plus II board exams this year, and 21-year-old Arjama Bakshi of Jadavpur University, have set up the Calcutta Anti-Covid Belt Initiative. “It’s a crucial year for us, but I find it difficult to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the catastrophe around us and it is my humble plea to all that they do the same,” said Lahiri, due to appear for Class 12 finals from DPS New Town. As coronavirus cases continue to rise in the city, these students have linked themselves to around 500 volunteers, who are housebound like them, to network and collaborate with like-minded NGOs. “The volunteers call up people and network to help Covid patients and their families,” said Bakshi. In their list of beneficiaries was an Ola driver, whose hospital bills have been taken care of.

Recently, they helped a student of Jogesh Chandra Chowdhury College, Arundhati Mukherjee, whose father was admitted to a nursing home with Covid and couldn’t pay his bills amounting to Rs 5 lakh. “We circulated a video message by Mukherjee and managed to raise Rs 2.1lakh,” said Bakshi. “The pandemic has been an eye-opener in more ways than one,” said technology professional, Amit Sahai, who contributed to this crowdfunding.
“Between online classes, preparing for our board exams and networking for our Covid help group, sometimes we barely sleep for more than five hours a day,” Agarwal said, adding, “Since school is off at the moment, we have been scheduling shifts around our tuition classes.”
They tried to split members into teams, based on the type of help there were entrusted with, for the Covid patients. “But this is such an unusual situation that it is not possible to be as organized as one would like to be,” said Bakshi.