‘Chalo Saurashtra’ campaign by NGO

Surat: Surat-based Seva group has started a new movement of ‘Chalo Saurashtra’ — an initiative to help Covid patients get treatment at their doorstep and forced to travel to Surat and other cities seeking help.
As many as 2,000 volunteers of the group from Surat have left for the region and will be camping in villages for a week, setting up isolation centres and facilitating the already existing centres.
“We had seen so many people paying Rs 45,000 to Rs 50,000 for ambulance and oxygen cylinders travelling to Surat with great difficulty. Therefore, we thought of providing isolation centres at a distance of every 50 kilometres,” Mahesh Savani of PP Savani Group, a member unit of Seva Group, told TOI.
Savani further said that most of the villages in Saurashtra are left with elderly people as the younger generation lives in the city.
“When they are affected by the virus, they do not know what treatment should be taken, how to avail medicines among other things,” said Savani, adding that every village there witnessed 30 deaths on an average in the second wave.
Earlier this week, the group had helped start a 100-bed isolation facility at temple town Palitana. “We have started from Vallabhipur, and will cover Botad, Bhavnagar, Amreli, Junagadh and Gir Somnath districts. We will start centres on our own or help other organizations start one. We will help them get everything that they need in places where such centre exists,” Savani said.
These volunteers hail from different villages of Saurashtra and are settled in Surat.
Around 2000 of them reached their villages in the past two days and will spread awareness among people about the treatment and clear doubts and misconceptions about vaccination or its side effects .
Around 40 senior doctors from Surat will also be visiting different districts to update the doctors and medical staff about the treatment to be given.