The online space is replete with efforts from various parts of the world to help the flood-affected residents of Chennai.
As connectivity issues continued to affect most parts of the city, a group of students from India, who are studying in the United States of America, are helping out Chennai-based applicants for grad schools. They are speaking to departments across universities there to extend deadlines for students applying from Chennai.
Niveditha Chandrasekar, from the University of Washington, Seattle, who started an initiative with a few of her friends, said that applying to a university abroad was something that many people had dreamt about through college.
“We realised that if we had been in a situation where we had to face such problems due to a natural calamity, we would have been terrified. We also remembered that our seniors had helped us a lot when we were applying to universities abroad and this is just our way of helping the students in Chennai,” she said.
Ms. Niveditha also said that they had spoken to a few universities that understood the situation.
The students who have signed up as a part of this and have requested for help from universities abroad have reasons ranging from not being able to contact their professors for recommendation letters to not being able to procure necessary documents from their colleges that were inundated.
Distress calls from persons who were stranded in waterlogged areas as well as from family members who were not able to get in touch with their dear ones continued to dominate online forums. Persons who had access to transport were seen offering to help them by visiting the areas.
A large number of tweets and Facebook posts on Sunday by volunteers were dedicated to distribution of relief materials and area-wise coordination among various groups working on the same.
Many volunteers also continued to visit areas that were reported to be inundated and posted on the status of those areas under the #AreaUpdates hashtag. Chennairains.org, an online portal started by a number of social media users on Twitter, who have been coordinating and collating information regarding shelters, aid, emergency contacts and links for donations, released an area-wise spreadsheet documenting areas in the city.
