Gujarat: Hungry man’s plight moves this IPS officer

SURAT: On patrolling duty to ensure lockdown in Valsad district, probationary IPS officer Om Prakash Jat was extremely moved seeing a poor man eating cooked rice by dipping the morsels in water instead of dal.
Jat, who is posted as assistant superintendent of police (ASP) in Dungra police station near Vapi town, was so disturbed by this sight that he decided to launch a campaign for feeding the poor, mostly migrant labourers living in his jurisdiction.
The officer has launched a mass campaign to ensure food for 22,000
This resolve got stronger when the 2018 batch officer detained a truck carrying 43 labourers and booked the driver. On asking the labourers the reason for leaving, their reply shocked him even more. “Whatever little savings we had, around Rs 500 each, we gave it to the truck driver to ferry us to our native. We may survive coronavirus infection, but we will surely die of hunger,” Jat told TOI, quoting the migrants.
The same night at around 3am, Jat and his team prepared a list of poor people in his area and started delivering ration kits at their door steps at 11am.
Majority of the pockets in Dungra police station area have migrant workers from various states employed in factories of Vapi GIDC and Silvassa industrial estates. They don’t have ration cards and therefore cannot avail of subsidized food. Due to lockdown, these labourers lost their jobs which not only created food insecurity but reverse migration could defeat purpose of lockdown.
“We called upon well-to-do people in industrial areas to donate money, material and man hours and asked them to send their names and contact numbers to us,” he said.
In order to make the system transparent, donors were given account number of grocers and money was directly transferred to their accounts to prepare food kits. The grocers were asked to make kits containing rice, wheat floor, turmeric, chilly powder, salt, cooking oil, soap and dal. Every kit cost around Rs 450 to Rs 500. Every donor can buy any number of kits by directly transferring money into accounts of grocers.
The trail of all the transactions is being maintained. Every donor was assigned a particular locality for distribution so that no one is left behind and there is no overlapping of distribution in same locality.
"With the help of village sarpanchs and elected members, we identified beneficiaries which was cross verified by choosing random houses from list,” Jat explained.
Till Tuesday, 8,365 kits more than Rs 32 lakhs has been distributed to the needy.
Each kit can support a family for 15 days. Besides this, over 13,000 food packets have been distributed by Dungra Police station.