New Delhi: At a time when CRPF personnel are deployed across the country to enforce the nation-wide curfew announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, wives of the paramilitary personnel have opened another front to battle the COVID-19 pandemic.
Across all the 46 battlion group centres of the CRPF, these women have been manufacturing sanitisers, PPE kits and face masks -- to supply the necessary equipment for medics and sanitation workers -- on a war footing. CRPF officers and people involved in this voluntary operation told News18.com that hundreds of such PPE kits and masks have been already supplied to hospitals and sanitation workers and hundreds more are being made.
They expressed their ordeal of making the kits despite the shortage of time. After having undergone the necessary training, they received the raw materials. They also described how they have been working tirelessly over the past fortnight to equip the frontline soldiers as they deal with the pandemic.
This volunteer force has also been using its mess facilities to provide food to people around their camps who are facing shortage due to the crisis.
On March 25, Dr Abha Saxena, head of Regional CRPF Family Welfare Association GC in Bengaluru, distributed food door-to-door to avoid the situation of people coming out of their homes.
"To fully implement the lockdown, we had to provide people with rations. The challenge was that we did not have enough bags to distribute the rations in," said Saxena.
Along with her colleagues, Saxena decided to manufacture the bags. In-house tailors and wives of CRPF personnel volunteered to provide the bags at break-neck speed and their goal to achieve social distancing within their camp was achieved.
This gave Saxena and her team enough confidence to take on bigger challenges. They got in touch with local NGOs to find out if there was any service they could volunteer for. "We got to know that the doctors at NIMHANS were in urgent need of PPE kits and face masks. They had the the necessary material to make them and wanted some people to put it all together," said Saxena.
Her team of tailors got trained by the staff at the hospitals. The team returned and passed on the skills to a group of 20 volunteers at the Bangaluru camp.
"Since then we have made 200 maks and 100 PPE kits. The PPE kits cannot be used more than a specified number of times and since there doctors and health staff have been working around the clock, we have been asked to produce as many kits and face masks as possible. This is what we are doing at the moment," added Saxena.
The hospital provides them with the raw materials which they collect while handing over the processed items, and then return to the hospital to take fresh orders.
"Over the past two days we have been providing food to six nearby villages. The moment we got to know that there is an acute food shortage in the area, our staff at the mess also volunteered with some of our colleagues and in a short time we were able to produce enough people to feed everyone in that village," Saxena added.
The camp also coordinates with the local farmers to procure their produce such as vegetables, fruits, and milk which they then distribute door-to-door to their staff personnel. The Family Welfare Association of CRPF in Bengaluru has also been providing food to children residing in a nearby orphanage.
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