Bengaluru: "It's easy to write a cheque," declares Sudha Murthy. Far more difficult to dive into the work itself, packing bags and working through the night to personally supervise loading the trucks, as the chairperson of the Infosys Foundation, the company's philanthropic wing and the city's conscience keeper found when she threw herself full time into helping the hundreds of the displaced in flood-affected Kodagu and neighbouring Kerala.
Only last week, Mrs Murty found herself lavished with praise from all quarters, after a video of relief kits being prepared at the Foundation went viral. In the video, Mrs Murty doesn't content herself with overseeing the job, she's seen actively lending a hand, helping pack 2,000 relief kits which contain everything from rice and dal to biscuits, packaged water, tea and coffee as well as dhotis and sarees, and clothes for children.
"It's been two weeks of non-stop The kits, which are worth over Rs one crore in total, were sent to Wayanad, Ernakulam and parts of Thiruvananthapuram in four trucks. Flood-hit Kodagu received 25,000 water bottles, steel utensils, buckets and mug, sent to families, slowly returning to normal life in their ravaged homes.
"It's been two weeks of non-stop work," an evidently weary Mrs Murty tells Deccan Chronicle on Thursday. "We worked through the night for four or five days, then we crashed for a while." Twenty of their most dependable staff have been entrusted with the job.
"Too many people will bring down the efficiency," she says. The 68-year-old author and philanthropist has always maintained a hands-on approach to her social work. The Foundation, which is 22 years old now, has dealt with 10 natural disasters, Mrs Murty recounts. "It needs a lot of experience, really," she says.
The Infosys Foundation tapped into a vast network of contacts, including the Akshaya Patra Foundation, to help with distribution, which is their biggest worry. The kits have been designed to ensure that they can be distributed to every family with a minimum of discomfort. "We have volunteers on the ground in Kerala as well, for which we looked to our network," she says. It's a network she has built, painstakingly, over the last two decades.
"There are three parts to this. Deciding what to send, how to send it there and the distribution process," Ms Murty said. In Bengaluru, all the action took place at the Bellaku campus. "We have chosen necessities like utensils, clothes, sanitary napkins, tea and coffee apart from food like rice and toor dal and also biscuits. All these are ready for delivery and have been chosen because they can be stored and can withstand the rain in the area. If I send 10 kilos of rice in bulk, who wil see to the distribution?" Work has been happening in full swing for the last two weeks and will come to an end on Saturday.
