Only two years into their MBBS course, Adwaith Praveen and Chris Kevin have acquired a ‘specialisation’, unteachable in the classroom but indispensable in the clinic.
It is empathy, which these second-year students of ESIC Medical College are administering in large doses to people up against the challenges of these times.
Theirs is essentially a social intervention, made possible by a motley group of influencers, budding technocrats — in the age group of 17 to 23 — that uses Instagram and WhatsApp to support those hit by COVID-19 variously.
Called “C Help” ( C standing for Chennai), this group of younger-millennial volunteers consists of “32 people on Instagram and around 20 in WhatsApp.”
Essentially, they try to help those hard-hit by COVID-19, directly or indirectly, with timely information.
Their effort to ensure blood donations via a Glide app is particularly noteworthy.
With a dip in blood donation camps due to the pandemic, there is some concern over blood supplies.
C Help uses technology to address this concern.
“One of my teammates Adithya Muthukumar has created a Glide app, which works out of Google Forms. You basically fill out a Google Form, and it would add your name, number, blood group, location as well as your Instagram handle. The app has not been put out there in the open to ensure blood donors’ privacy. We use it as a directory. Every time we get a blood donation request in Chennai, we use that directory and coordinate for a donor. We have got around 200 people as volunteers ready for blood donation,” explains Adwaith, who is 19 years old.
“I have done things like this before, but nothing on this level,” states Adithya Muthukumar with a poise readily associated with a veteran app-developer, but comes across as odd and admirable at the same time, in someone who blew out only 18 candles on his most-recent birthday cake. A resident of Adyar, Adithya is a Class 12 student at Vidya Mandir, Mylapore.
On the why of it, Adithya says, “One of my friends was personally affected by the unavailability of blood on account of the pandemic, and I just decided to start out on a small level and it just grew and grew. I started off independently, and then I started reaching out to all these influencers online and Shraddha Srinath (actress and model) from Bengaluru helped out. She started amplifying the resources that I sent. Eventually, a lot of people were interested in it and we grew into a small group of people, and we started off with focussing on Chennai and Tamil Nadu, and have started to expand to Bengaluru as of today,” says Adithya.
A screenshot of a retweet by actress and model Shraddha Srinath, amplifying an initiative by C Help (which started out as a Chennai group) to find blood donors in Bengaluru. Photo: Special Arrangement
C Help wants to get the Glide-app-driven blood-donation initiative to snowball into a pan-India, multi-metro resource, and it banks on a network of influencers to make this possible.
“Keeping the application private, we are using it to connect donors to people who are requesting for blood. Influencers reach out to us. People send requests to influencers. Some send requests to us, and we get them connected to the donors by means of this application,” explains Adithya.
“After the crisis blows over, we are going to give the directory of donors to organisations like Lion’s and Rotary that organise blood donation drives regularly,” says Adwaith.
For those stranded in the novel Coronavirus’ direct path, C Help volunteers gather and share other critical information.
“We note down where normal beds and ICU beds are available. When requests come to our Instagram handles and WhatsApp group, we help patients and their families with this information. We similarly help COVID-19 patients who need Oxygen,” explains Adwaith.
On how C Help synergies various capabilities, Adwaith reveals that a majority of these people were essentially fellow travellers on Instagram, each on their parallel courses, before the pandemic brought them to a common meeting point.
“I was aware of their existence on Instagram. They were carrying out service initiatives separately and I was doing mine separately, and I suggested that we start a group. Each person in the group is taking care of something that they are good at. I brought Vasisht Balaji Srinivasan, one of my very close friends, who is in Indiana, into the group because he is very good at logistics. He put out a tweet about the initiative that went viral. @supermachans, the official twitter handle of Supermachans, the Chennayin FC fan club, also shared it and we got a lot of numbers because of that Tweet,” says Adwaith. “I have brought my classmates as well into C Help, because they have their connections.”
(C Help members can be contacted on Instagram at @covidsosindia and other accounts for contact include @kungfukeralite and @muthuwu and @shrxyz_)
Food delivery
Chris Kevin (21), who is Adwaith’s classmate at ESIC Medical College, is trying to meet the requests for food deliveries by families on home quarantine due to COVID-19 positivity.
A resident of KK Nagar, Chris makes these food deliveries “only in the night, because in the morning and afternoon, I have classes.”
He elaborates: “I am now making a one-time food delivery every day for a family in T. Nagar, for which I was earlier getting food from Abhinandan Surana from Perambur, another youngster who also does this pandemic-related service for some time now. It was through him I got introduced to this initiative. As it got difficult for me to go to Perambur to collect the food, I made sure extra portions of whatever food was being made at home by the cook. Requests can come from anywhere — I made one delivery for a family in Vadapalani, and then they went to hospital and did not require any deliveries.”
The youngster who inspired Chris to start this initiative, Abhinandan Surana (23) believes it can even help those rendered jobless on account of the pandemic. Abhinandan explains: “At present, I ensure food is supplied to around 10 to 12 persons every day, getting the food prepared by home-cooks in the society I live in. It brings in some earnings for these people. By charging a nominal ₹50 or ₹60 per meal for COVID-affected families that can afford to pay for the food, it is possible to support more people who cannot afford it and to whom the food has to be given absolutely free. Besides, I am faced with the problem of inadequate delivery volunteers. When the initiative is scaled up, one can even enlist people who would benefit by being paid for making the delivery. To ensure it benefits more people. I am looking for more people who would make the deliveries either as volunteers or for a small fee.”
