‘Hope’ and ‘Saviour’ are not any random names chosen by the team of students for their charitable activities taken up ever since the lockdown of 2020, as they form the cornerstone of their voluntary outreach activities.
As the COVID-19 situation wreaked havoc on various professions, school teachers and non-teaching staff were the worst hit.
Rude shock
As news reports of degree college teachers selling bananas on the footpath in a remote location of Andhra Pradesh trickled in, a group of young employees huddled up to see if the situation was similar in their alma mater.
They were in for a rude shock as a near-similar fate had befallen their mentors.
With some teachers having lost their jobs and many more on the verge of it, the old students from various cities came onto a single platform to help their former teachers.
They formed teams named as ‘Abhimanyu The Hope’ and ‘Bheeshma The Saviour’ to reach out to their well-wishers in the school, right from the teachers to school attendants.
Ensure confidentiality
“The idea is to take up charity, even while ensuring their dignity by maintaining confidentiality, as many were reluctant to seek help,” explains Neelesh Kumar Kuppala, who heads the team of SRM Alumni of 2017 batch.
The team members – Prasanth Koyyalagunta, Nihar Kuppala, Deepthi Manasa, Dhanvanth Soora, Anoosha Dasari and Rohitha Tirumalasetty – decided to pool up money and transfer the amount to their teachers’ bank accounts through their linked mobile number, without anyone else coming to know of it.
Similarly, the amount was not sent from an individual account to ensure that the beneficiary did not know the (single) benefactor.
Swelling numbers
Initially, it was a batch of students pertaining to a single school, but when employees from various streams joined, the numbers swelled and the activities spread across several cities.
The number of beneficiaries also rose significantly. Starting from Tirupati, their activities spread to Vijayawada, Nellore, Visakhapatnam, Chandragiri, Hyderabad, and so on.
Apart from providing groceries to 335 families, they also distributed masks, sanitisers, vaporisers to the school managements, in tune with the precarious situation that warrants precaution.
“This is just an act of gratitude, as we are paying back to those who helped us become what we are today,” says Neelesh.
Inspired by the success story, which was shared by their peers in social media groups, several alumni of Hyderabad joined hands to replicate the same in Telangana.
